Ouch. That’s gotta hurt.

OCTOBER: MY FOREST OWLS

It's on its own, the black wind of autumn,
The start of autumn, after long summer. 
I know it's started, because the night world 
Is suddenly cold, unapproachable, 
A planetary blank that fronts my face
When I slide back the door to the owl's cry.

Two owls, in fact, working on their marriage
Against a black backdrop, against darkness.
Anxious call, anxious response.  On their own.

Trump, Giuliani, and Dershowitz, our purple-faced mountain majesties… Let’s first check in on Dersh, chatting not long ago with a reporter.

Alan Dershowitz won’t hang up the phone. He’s breathing heavily into the receiver. It’s August 10, the morning Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in his jail cell. At first Dershowitz wants to go off the record, and I agree. He doesn’t say anything interesting, just the same protestations that he’s made on Twitter and television for years. But when I start asking questions, he begins to berate me. “We’re on the record now,” I tell him. “You don’t get to insult me off the record.” 

So he begins breathing into the phone. He will not hang up. He does not know what to say. 

“If you don’t want to talk, you can hang up,” I say. “But I am not going off the record if you are just going to call me ‘fifth rate.’”

Silence. Breathing. “I won’t have it written that I hung up on a reporter!” He’s shouting. We do this a couple more times. I take notes. He’s livid that I won’t go off the record. He threatens to sue me. Tells me I am a nobody... Dershowitz later [again] threatens to sue me …

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Giuliani… Oh, just read this. UD‘s favorite mention is Soros. Soros is behind it all. He is always behind it all.

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Purplest of them all? George Soros in league with the Queen of England made him turn over his tax returns.

Yes, he’ll appeal. But we’re getting there.

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One more thing. Because he’s handling so many incoming… challenges, Trubu is behind on his personal insults. In particular, he has not yet caught up to Susan Collins. A week after she said something not nice, he is still working on his obscene alliteration for her. Scathing Online Schoolmarm proposes Cunty Collins.

Even Argentina’s beginning to worry about it, but American football pays through the nose to do the on-field tango with Richie Incognito, Antonio Brown, and Vontaze Burfict. Audiences love their moves; at a time when NASCAR carnage is at an all-time low, there’s nothing like football to keep the crushed-skull statistics steady. Crowds went wild, most recently, for beaten-comatose Mason Rudolph, dragged upright off the field because no one could manage to scare up a stretcher (each NFL team is only worth around three billion dollars so there are budgetary issues).

Vontaze has been suspended and Brown dropped. Looks as though it’ll take a few more Incognito attacks for the Raiders to do something about Richie. But even if the team has to give up Richie, Americans also love watching the legal and recruiting moves that ensue after the insane giants that bestride our game fields are removed from play. How will their appeal or lawsuit go? Which lucky team will now welcome the big bad head case?

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Above all, American football needs to do something about Juju Smith-Schuster and players like him.

[Ruldolph’s agony] was so upsetting that teammate JuJu Smith-Schuster was in tears on the field.

We don’t need crybabies out there making the audience think there’s something wrong with kicking the shit out of people’s brains.

[Indonesia’s] apparently progressive President had been compelled to install one of the nation’s most famous conservative figures, Maruf Amin, as his vice-presidential candidate. [They subsequently won the election.] As chair of Indonesia’s most powerful Islamic council, Maruf oversaw fatwas against religious minorities, calls for the death penalty for gay sex and the support of female genital mutilation as “a form of honour for women”.

Even compare them to ghosts! Inhuman. And yet how difficult, even for the most enlightened and sympathetic, to police their burqa/niqab language, to rein in their honest belief about the garments. Take Azadeh Moaveni, eager to understand the Isettes as victims of “repressive and patriarchal governments.” (She means England, dummy.) These women, Moaveni writes, “joined the morality police and became the spectres in the niqab.”

Hey you’re a regular Boris Johnson, comparing pious empowered women to ghosts! Bad, bad, Azadeh Moaveni!

Don’t try this at home.

Ooh look. They found another Vontaze hit. Shocker!

On a spectacular autumn day.

Put aside the question whether the academic joke, financial catastrophe (UD thanks John for the link), and criminal bacchanalia university football represents makes it a terrific fit with American higher education. Put aside the fact that multiple high schools are unable to field a team because so few guys (thanks for the link, Charlie) are stupid enough to take part. Put aside the ritual militarization of high school games, with fights and gunshots becoming a structural part of the fun. (As Ravi, one of my readers, puts it, we’re heading toward “open carry on the gridiron.”)

Look merely at one professional team, the Raiders, which recently boasted the Three Violent and Insane Stooges (all were rapidly suspended or dumped or whatever).

UD doesn’t get it. If you really want to watch an insane obese male lumber about destroying everything in his path, you’ve already got the President.

[Vontaze] Burfict’s troubling pattern of behavior stretches back to high school. He was the top high-school recruit at his position in the country. Recruiting site 247 Sports listed Burfict as the 11th best prospect in the country and one of the 250 best prospects in the history of high school football; he still ranks as the 39^th best player to ever come out of the talent-rich state of California. But Burfict received few elite-level college scholarship offers, and he ended up at Arizona State, a third-rate program. The best of the best had heard all about Burfict’s reputation: he had serious anger issues, the story went. One by one they chose to pass.

Our hero!

Luckily for Elizabeth Warren supporters (UD is one of them), no one around here is conscious.

The charge is that the old gal is still so hot she attracted a strapping twelve year old (no – double that – a 24 year old) Marine to her bed – news that UD welcomes (I mean, would welcome… It’s … to use Trubu’s favorite word, bullshit), since old gals like UD love to hear about smokin hot old gals. Unfortunately, in this particular case, Warren will turn out not to share Trubu’s predilection for extremely young flesh.

This is good.

Between calling Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) a panoply of Trumpish insults (and for the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee to be held for treason), engaging in his usual hatred of the press, talking about Mike Pompeo’s intimate undergarments, and quite obviously scaring the shit out of Finnish President Sauli Niinisto—who looked like he was the very unwilling star of an ISIS hostage video—Trump spent the day rapidly decompensating, and it was a hideous spectacle. All the Maximum Leader pronunciamentos won’t change the reality that Donald John Trump, 45th president of the United States, has lost his shit.

In private, Republicans are in the deepest despair of the Trump era. They’ve got that hang-dog, dick-in-the-dirt fatalism of men destined to die in a meaningless battle in a pointless war.

Americans by a 45%-38% plurality now support a vote by the House of Representatives to impeach President Trump, a USA TODAY/Ipsos Poll finds, as allegations continue to swirl around an embattled White House.

By a similar margin, 44%-35%, those surveyed say the Senate, which would then be charged with holding a trial of the president, should convict Trump and remove him from office.

Only in America.