What America needs now is a really nice guy. Fortunately, we’ve got one.

I almost did a Virtual Front Page, but that would have been the third in just eight days! I don’t want to spoil y’all, so we’re going for an Open Thread instead. They’re easier: I don’t have to come up with a lede and rank the items in importance, and I can pull in opinion, which is more in my wheelhouse anyway. (I was the front page editor at two papers in the ’80s, but that was a long time ago — or so everyone keeps telling me and Joe Biden.)

The hard thing about VFPs is, there are a lot of rules. Things are looser in an Open Thread:

1. A Dishonorable Senate — This is an NYT editorial, and my only beef with it is that “An.” What, like we have an array of Senates, like multiple universes, and there’s just this one bad one? No. Until we work out the quantum inter-universal travel thing, this is the only Senate we get. And it has shamelessly, blatantly, without any pretense of doing anything else, completely abandoned its constitutional duty. More than abandoned, spat upon it. Look, we knew they were going to acquit, but we did have a right to expect an actual trial first. Is this it, folks? Is the loss of our republic now inevitable? Has it happened already? I didn’t think I’d live to see this…
2. Why don’t we all just ignore Iowa and New Hampshire? — Not a bad idea, particularly given that Iowa is caucuses, not even a primary. Have you READ the rules of this insanity? People standing around in groups, and then if their group is less than 15 percent of the total in the room, they regroup and the losers gravitate to second choices? It’s like ice-breaker games at that team-building retreat the soulless corporation you work for made you go to. (See what I did there? Two dangling prepositions in one sentence! Can I write, or what?)
3. Joe Biden: A Really Nice Guy for President — This is a column by Frank Bruni, which means it’s the third opinion piece in a row from the NYT. But hey, they had some good pieces today. There’s only one cure for Trump, one thing to set this nation back on course: Replace him with a really nice guy. Last thing we need is to replace him with another one of those angry people out there — you know, the ones who can’t string two sentences together without saying “fight” at least once?
4. Senate hears closing arguments — Switching over to news now… and can you imagine that they’re still going through the motions as though this were still an actual trial being conducted by an actual credible deliberative body. I don’t see how the House managers made themselves get up this morning and do this. But at least they are doing their duty, so my hat’s off to them.
5. Super Bowl halftime show was ‘sexual exploitation,’ Franklin Graham says — Really? Ya think? I knew that and I didn’t watch it. Has Graham been doing a Rip Van Winkle for the last five or six decades? Has he been somehow walled off from popular culture? Why the news flash at this particular point?
6. Earth Fare grocery chain closing all stores, including in Columbia — This just in, and it kind of blew my mind. It suggests a lot of questions: Why now, instead of back when Whole Foods opens? Do we think Whole Foods will last since Amazon has taken it over and corporatized it? Couldn’t Earth Fare have hung on a little longer to see what happened there? How do small local shops like Rosewood Market and 14 Carrot hang on while Earth Fare can’t? Business and the way it works is just such a mystery to me…
7. Super Bowl Ads 2020: Strange, Serious, Smaaht, And So Very Expensive — Some of y’all probably watched this, so tell me: Were there any really good ones, ones I might want to go watch on YouTube?

Did anyone besides me find it kind of hard to read the Roman numeral, with that odd thing between the L and I?

So we can sell wine now? All RIGHTY then…

I started putting this Open Thread together on Saturday at a Barnes & Noble in Memphis where I had gone to do some work while my wife was otherwise engaged. (Actually, she was at a soup kitchen downtown where her brother and sister-in-law volunteer, helping them out. I felt bad about not being with them, but I did get some work done.)

Anyway, when I realized they were back at the house, I dropped the blog post (I had only started it because I’d run out of work things I could do without reaching clients on the phone) and went and joined them.

It was an eclectic Thread I had in mind, just based on stuff I’d found interesting in that day’s Washington Post. Here you go:

1. We need a major redesign of life — This is a provocative piece about how our expectations of life are built around the assumption that people wouldn’t live much past 65, if that. “Long lives are not the problem. The problem is living in cultures designed for lives half as long as the ones we have.” What sense does it make, for instance, for people to retire in their 60s or even 50s if they’re going to live to 100? It’s interesting even though I look askance at some of the findings such as: “To thrive in an age of rapid knowledge transfer, children not only need reading, math and computer literacy, but they also need to learn to think creatively and not hold on to ‘facts’ too tightly.” Really? I think one of the problems we have today is that too many have abandoned belief in facts altogether. But maybe that was just awkwardly worded. Of course, if you mean people need to be flexible and learn new facts as they arise, I’m with you…
2. Whaddya mean, I’m funny? — This was a nice little profile on Joe Pesci, whom I’ve enjoyed in so many movies in the past. Remember John Travolta’s line in “Get Shorty” about wanting to get into movies, and someone says, but you’re a loan shark, and he replies that “I was never that into it…”? Well, it turns out Joe Pesci was never that into acting — which is why Martin Scorsese had such a hard time talking him into coming out of retirement. Ironic, given how good at it he is. Anyway, I haven’t had the time to watch “The Irishman” yet, but this further whetted my appetite.
3. Ice preserved a tiny puppy in near-perfect condition for 18,000 years. Scientists are fascinated. So am I. Even if you don’t read the piece, you have to look at the pictures. It’s from the time when domesticated dogs were starting to evolve from their wolf ancestors. And this puppy looks like its alive, and only sleeping…
4. Facing impeachment, the president strives to look hard at work — This was mildly interesting, although not as much so as the other pieces. Basically, it answers the question (which frankly had not occurred to me), Why is this man popping up in Afghanistan and going to see the Queen? Basically, it says Trump is taking a page from Bill Clinton’s playbook: “Then-President Bill Clinton survived his 1998 impeachment in part because the economy was roaring and because he appeared to many voters to be relentlessly focused on doing the business of the American people.”
5. So which is it, Charlie or Charley? — This rather stupid topic does not come from The Washington Post, so don’t blame them. Being a lifelong editor, things like this really bother me, whereas probably no one else cares. While I was at that Barnes & Noble, I was listening to some Spotify to drown out the noises of the cafe. And I happened to look at that screen as this number came on (see picture below), and I immediately wondered, “So which is it? Charley Musselwhite or Charlie Musselwhite?” I decided the album cover, which says “Charley,” was more likely to be right than the Spotify text — but then, Wikipedia has “Charlie!” Does Musselwhite himself even care? Probably less than I do. I need to relax; after all, it’s not his official given name, right? It’s not like they spelled his surname “Musclewhite” or something. Oh, and don’t even get me started on “Charly,” which should have been called “Flowers for Algernon,” which by the way was an awesome book.

As a postscript… I went looking for a photo for this post among what I shot in Memphis over the last few days, and settled on the above shot of an aisle in a Kroger. All the years I lived in Tennessee, it was illegal to sell wine in grocery stores. Since that changed (and this is the first time I’ve been back since that happened), the grocers have been making up for lost time. The picture doesn’t even show the whole aisle. There’s about six feet more of wine shelves behind me…

We’re overdue for one of these:

1. Trump now thinks he’s God. Or at least the Chosen One — There are news stories about his embracing the idea of being the Second Coming, but you might enjoy reading Alexandra Petri on the subject instead. Or Gail Collins… Actually, I feel sorry for these satirists. How can you exaggerate this guy for comic effect? They try, but it’s not easy. He’s always determined to outdo any joke anyone can make about him.
2. … and he is wroth, very sore, at his Chosen People — The way our first Transactional President thinks, he has done things to pander to supporters of Israel, so Jews should be slavishly loyal to him. You know, like the evangelicals. Every day, we learn more about the depths of this man’s ignorance. As one pro-Israel Jew put it, “In reality, what matters most to us are the exact values that the president is spending his term trashing. We care about equality and justice, and we embrace the notion that this is a nation of immigrants and opportunity for all.”
3. Ransomware Attacks Are Testing Resolve of Cities Across America — I thought I’d throw in a piece about something real happening in the world, since Doug will dismiss my first two items as “just words.” But wait. This is happening in cyberspace, right? So it’s only happening virtually…
4. What Rep. Abigail Spanberger learned after clashing with progressives — She learned they were a bunch of vindictive loonies, basically. Remember my piece about Mikie Sherrill the other day? Well, Rep. Spanberger is a fellow moderate Democrat who also served her country before running for office (in her case, in the CIA). The two women have D.C. apartments on the same floor, and walk to work together. Anyway, I urge you to read about her and the other Democrats who matter, and stop doing Donald Trump’s bidding by focusing on the Squad, who are not representative of the Democratic Party. (If they were, the Dems would not now hold the House.)
5. Sanders to unveil $16tn climate plan, far more aggressive than rivals’ proposals — Translated from The Guardian‘s own special dialect of headlinese, “$16tn” means 16 trillion dollars. (It took me a moment to suss that out.) But Bernie’s not worried a bit, because he has an economist advising him who tells him we can just keep printing more money.
6. The road to ignominy is paved by John Hardee — Does this guy get up in the morning thinking, I’m not in enough trouble yet. I should do something else? Meanwhile, Katrina Shealy wants to end the practice of naming roads after living people. Good luck. I’ve been advocating that for almost three decades.

Yes, I’m back from vacation.

While I was gone, there was of course the Democratic debates, which were tiresome and off-putting. I can’t wait to see this nomination process come to an (successful, I hope) end.

Talk of that was swept away over the weekend by violence in Texas and Ohio, and threatened violence here at home.

To plunge in:

1. Mass murder in Texas and Ohio — Again, the horror sweeps the nation. And again, our political system will prove itself completely incapable of reducing the risk of such incidents in the future. The utter futility is reflective of the soul-sickness in our country. It’s related to why Trump is president. It’s related to why I can hardly bear to watch these debates. There’s so much foolishness, and so little rational action. American government, and American politics, is stricken with an impotence, accompanied by pointless sound and fury. It didn’t used to be like this — and I know that sets off some of you, who simply don’t recall when the nation actually used to rise up and deal with problems when they confronted us. You’re wrong, but I’ve learned I won’t convince you of that. Anyway… will we ever snap out of this, and what will it take?
2. Threatened violence, and real racial hatred, here at home — There’s the public conversation, which talks about what this former Cardinal Newman student did and threatened to do, and what the school and law enforcement did and didn’t do about it — a circumscribed conversation, limited in the MSM by the longstanding prohibition against identifying minors. Then there’s the sort of sub rosa conversation, in which everyone knows who he is and who his family is, and lots of talk reflects the reverberations of all that. Setting the gossip aside, let me raise a question that addresses the heart of this: I’ve seen a suggestion that what this boy was doing was simply trying to win a competition among his peers to see who could be the most outrageous. Which is more shocking: The threatened violence, or the fact that our society is so sick that children could conceive of such a competition?

You know what? That’s all I’m going to post for now. Somehow I find myself not as interested in utterly unnecessary, manufactured trade wars with China or whatever. But y’all can bring up whatever you like.

Where I was last week. It was crowded this day, but mostly pleasant the rest of the time.

“I’ve called you all hear today to announce…” Oops! wrong photo…

Some things I’ve been meaning to post about the last few days, but have been too busy:

1. Mark Sanford considers presidential run against Trump — Yikes. Beyond that, this one actually has me speechless. Of all the people out there in the GOP who probably SHOULD run — John Kasich, anyone? — this is what we get. He may run against him, and he may even do it for the right reasons (and not just, you know, for revenge). But he’s still, well, Mark Sanford….
2. What’s up with ‘Prime Day,’ anyway? — Did any of y’all participate in this attempt to have a Black Friday in July? Did you get a good deal, or do you just feel manipulated and maybe even duped?
3. Trump’s racist Tweets — Were they racist, or just nativist… or xenophobic? Or is that a distinction without a difference? In any case, they were stupid, crude and beyond the bounds of decent society — in other words, par for the Trump course. What bugs me is that, by attacking AOC et al., he’s distracted from the previous story I really wanted to talk about, which is…
4. What Is Nancy Pelosi Thinking? — I thought this was a pretty stupid headline on a usually smart podcast — “The Argument” at the NYT. It refers to her coming down on the young folks who call themselves “the Squad.” Well, I’ll tell you what she’s thinking: Shes thinking she likes having a Democratic majority. You know what gave her a Democratic majority? Moderate Democrats beating Republican incumbents in purple districts. AOC didn’t do squat to help in this goal — she beat a Democratic incumbent — and daily she does all she can to endanger those essential moderates in the next election. At any other time, I would say freshmen should be seen and not heard, and not even seen much for that matter. At this moment, it goes double. Anyway, that’s what the speaker’s thinking…
5. How Nikki went to the UN, and Henry got to be governor — You already pretty much know the story: Trump owed McMaster something fierce, for being the first statewide elected official in the country to endorse his presidential bid. And Henry wanted to be governor. So Trump made Nikki Haley, a person with no known qualifications for the job, the nation’s ambassador to the U.N. Anyway, it’s spelled out in narrative form in that book you keep hearing about.
6. ‘I don’t care if they have to stay in these facilities for 400 days’ — Jaime Harrison, who’s running against him, brought my attention to this quote from Lindsey Graham about not caring if detainees at the border have to stay locked up. It’s a bit more nuanced than that — he was talking about a subset of men he claims are criminals. But that’s usually Trump’s excuse, too. We know for whom the dog whistle blows. It’s not for people who do nuance.