And that’s what freedom looks like in Kentucky, baby!

We’re seeing a young red fox almost every morning, around 8 AM, in and around our pollinator garden. Looks like this (photo, Colleen Bruso):

It walks calmly through the bee balm, unaware of us, doing a last-minute rabbit check before returning for the day to its den. It is a beautiful, elegant animal.

The fantastic evening firefly show, followed by the morning fox, makes these summer days and nights mesmerizing and surreal.

Not that many. But the Clarence Clearance initiative is moving at an insane pace. We’re already on our way to 650,000, and new people are signing the petition every second.

Huh yeah but every one of them applied for a job at Mar A Lago last month and I turned all the losers down…

… on UD’s deck has put out tons of buds, which, dedicated readers recall, soon unfold into massive red blooms. (Images are from last summer.) UD tried getting a picture of the pale green crab spider on one of its leaves, but as she approached, it jumped away. Praying mantises, you may also recall, loved last year’s hibiscus, and I found a baby mantis on this one the other day, but there aren’t any on it at the moment. (There are probably ten on it, but, you know, camouflage…)

As UD took pictures of her hibiscus, two chipmunks on the grass near her did that frantic little dance where they take turns hopping into the air and then race off.

Yesterday, early evening, Les UDs were startled by a large dark snake on the garden pavers. I’m thinking water snake. (We live near Rock Creek.)

Donald Trump is not a rational player. I mean, he just isn’t. You can’t have a conversation with him in the same way that you can have a conversation with most other people. He is somebody that lives in a different reality. He had started the lie about the election back in 2016. What I saw after the first interview with him in the White House was that he now became someone who believed in his own lie, and that is a person who is delusional. That is a person who is incredibly dangerous, because you can’t debate with that person.

There is no way that anybody can persuade Donald Trump that he’s wrong. And this is something that’s characteristic of him all the way through his life, and the series goes into this in the sense that he will never accept that he had done anything wrong. He will always double back. He’s always right, and it’s always somebody else’s fault. I mean, he lives in cloud cuckoo land.

He’s sitting in an interview in Mar-a-Lago saying that in front of a portrait, an actual oil painting of himself painted 25 to 30 years ago in a golf outfit. I mean, I actually asked about that at the end of the interview. I was like, “You’ve got to tell me about this painting.” I mean, this is a guy who literally has paintings of himself in his house. I mean, he’s just not a normal guy. I mean, you know?

Nice writing from Dorothy Byrne on Maxwell’s long sentence.

And that’s the right.

Frenetic engineering on the part of the Dems pays off.

Sing… it.

*****************

Danb’ry, not a sound from the inmates
I am living in Danb’ry
I am feeling alone
In the weak light my manuscript appears at my feet:

How the Libtards Stole My Throne

*****************************

Memory, all alone in my jail cell
I can dream of the old days
Life was beautiful then
I remember the time I knew what tyranny was
Let the memory live again

White House staffers seemed to beat
A fatalistic warning:
No protection! Insurrection!
And I, The King, all scorning…

Daylight, I must wait for the sunrise
I must think of a new scheme
And I mustn’t give in
When the dawn comes, tonight will be a memory too
And a new day will begin

***************************

Ketchup walls and shattered plates
The stale, cold smell of failure
A hall light dies, another night is over
Another day is dawning

Come back! It’s so easy to leave me
All alone with the memory
Of my days as the prez.
Re-elect me! You’ll understand what tyranny is
Look, a new day has begun

… in a staggeringly short period of time. Every second someone signs.

From an email UD just received from the dean of GW’s law school.

We … have received requests from some members of the university and external communities that the university terminate its employment of Adjunct Professor and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and cancel the Constitutional Law Seminar that he teaches at the Law School. Many of the requests cite Justice Thomas’ concurring opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, in which he called the substantive due process doctrine a “legal fiction.” Justice Thomas has been a consistent critic of the Court’s legal philosophy on substantive due process for many years. Because we steadfastly support the robust exchange of ideas and deliberation, and because debate is an essential part of our university’s academic and educational mission to train future leaders who are prepared to address the world’s most urgent problems, the university will neither terminate Justice Thomas’ employment nor cancel his class in response to his legal opinions.

We really know how to pick ’em. Our next-best appointment after this one was plagiarist/madman Rand Paul. Why not ask Jim Jordan and Louie Gohmert to team-teach a course at GW on a subject of their choosing?

I agree that we shouldn’t fire the doodoo; the way to go here is boycott. Recall that both of John Eastman’s classes during a visiting gig at the University of Colorado were cancelled due to virtually no enrollment. Think of the movement at Harvard Law to make the school offer two sections of way-icky theocrat Adrian Vermeule’s course on administrative law. (Apparently the guy’s got a monopoly.) Ignore them, and they’ll go away.

Which is in itself nothing to be ashamed of. Cassidy Hutchinson told of her shock when she appeared again and again in his office begging him to do something about the carnage, and he did nothing – nothing – except scroll obsessively on his phone. He barely met her eyes, she reports; he just sat on his office couch staring down and scrolling, scrolling, scrolling.

Meadows was lost in a masturbatory, self-comforting trance. Events had truly spiraled out of control and there was – horrifyingly – nothing he could do, as mobs at the Capitol killed and threatened to kill people. Becoming hysterical at this point made sense – plenty of normal people become hysterical when their world suddenly implodes and there is nothing they can do about it – and this is the form his hysteria took. An all-but catatonic regression to masturbatory self-comforting. Hutchinson no doubt noticed his obsessive rubbing with his free hand, but chose not to mention it.

What was he watching on his phone? This.