Hello Everyone! I recently told you about taking a small vacation – it’s really a working vacation as I’m going to be opening my parent’s “summer home” up for them as they make their snowbird way back from the Sunshine State. And, as of this writing, I’ve not left yet – but damn! It feels so good to exit the rat race!!
In America many of us, especially in Gen X and before, have been raised with the moral expectation of working everyday and being in early, staying late, working until we drop.
The end result is that we break down our body, our mind, our very soul, sacrifice our relationships and our time with loved ones — our very life! — to struggle up a ladder that seems to be attached to a moving goal with the hope that we are respected by our community, our family, and that God will smile down upon us that we have done so well with what He has given us.
Yet no sooner do I have a bit of money than everything costs more and I realize I now have to work harder and longer just to get where I thought I needed to be to enjoy life again. It isn’t fair, and it never was meant to be. It’s a manipulation, a lie, a tale told to fools and I wouldn’t need a vacation if I was truly doing that which brings me peace, joy, love.
So, I guess what I’m really trying to say here as I get ready to bounce my happy fat ass off to the great white and play in the forests for a while is that I so wish I could start life over understanding that idea that I have only so much time, and I should be spending it on that which brings me fulfillment and actualization rather than just making some millionaire millionairer. Hugs. Randy
Info Pete Hegseth shared with wife, brother came from top general’s secure messages
Hegseth has denied the information he shared was classified, but it was given to him on a system for sensitive and classified information, sources told NBC News.
April 22, 1963 The Mothers for Peace, a group made up of Catholic Workers, members of PAX (which became Pax Christi in 1972), Women Strike for Peace, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and others, met with Pope John XXIII to plead for a condemnation of nuclear war and the development of nonviolent resistance. About Women Strike for Peace
April 22, 1970 Banner at the first Earth Day On the first Earth Day observance, an estimated 20 million participated in peaceful demonstrations of concern for the environment across the U.S. including ten thousand grade schools and high schools, two thousand colleges across one thousand communities. 1st Earth Day, 1970 Beginnings of Earth Day from then Sen. Gaylord Nelson (D-Wisconsin) One on the 1st buttons
April 22, 1992 50,000 attended “Don’t Count On Us,” an anti-war rock concert in Belgrade, Serbia. It was to the nationalist regime of President Slobodan Milosevic an expression of the resistance within society to the military aggression he had been pursuing in the name of Serbian nationalism. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the various constituent republics of the former Yugoslavia—Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina—had declared their independence. Following a military draft call-up, fewer than 10% had reported for duty, and there was considerable dissension within what was then still called the Yugoslav People’s Army.
April 22, 1997 On Earth Day, Plowshares activists Donna and Tom Howard-Hastings used handsaws to cut down three poles in northern Wisconsin supporting the ELF (Extremely Low Frequency) transmitter for communication with submerged Trident nuclear submarines. After the poles were cut they were decorated with photos of children and posted with documents about international law and treaties outlawing nuclear weapons. They also placed stakes to mark tree seedlings under the transmission lines that they said were “doomed to the cutting bar.” They cut a section of one of the downed poles, carrying it to the nearby transmitter site where they turned themselves in to security personnel. They were then taken into custody by county sheriffs. An ABC-TV news affiliate, along with reporters from two public radio stations, were on hand to observe what happened. During the three-day jury trial on charges of sabotage and property destruction in Ashland County District Court, the defense was allowed to present several expert witnesses, including a retired Navy captain, Trident missile designer Bob Aldridge, and international law expert Francis Boyle. Both Howard-Hastings defendants were acquitted of the sabotage charge, which carried ten years and a $10,000 fine, but were convicted of destruction of property. At sentencing, they claimed the court had no jurisdiction over them, seeing that a jury had determined that their action was reasonable, and that they did not damage the national defense. They also made a passionate appeal to the judge to heed international law and the World Court decision to outlaw nuclear weapons. Donna was sentenced to 114 days she had already served, with a three-year period of probation and restitution. Tom was sentenced to one year in prison, with credit for time served and three years of intensive probation, including electronic home monitoring, and restitution. The name Laurentian Shield refers the granite geological formation at the ELF site. More Plowshares actions
So JD Vance meets the Pope less than 24 hours before he dies. Coincidence? I’m sure it is, but can you imagine all the conspiracy theories if a Democrat had met the Pope within 24 hours of him dying?
Take note of the kind of person JD is. The Pope is dying, but JD still wants his photo-op, which makes sure he’s one of the last people the Pope sees in his life. And forget about Joe Biden declaring Easter Sunday Trans Visibility Day (he didn’t), JD made this request on Easter Sunday.
An archbishop read the Pope’s final Easter homily. Themessage decried “how much contempt is stirred up at times towards the vulnerable, the marginalized, and migrants.” The address also warned against elected officials who “yield to the logic of fear, which only leads to isolation from others.” I’m sure JD was too obtuse to notice it was about people like him, as the Trump regime continues a war on migrants.
Vance, who’s a new convert to Catholicism, disagreed with the Pope on the treatment of migrants and other teachings of the church, and wanted to lecture the Pope…on Catholicism.
Just a few days ago, Vance criticize the “smug, self-assured bullshit” coming from people like the Pope who were criticizing Trump’s deportation policies.
Vance told the Pope, who was barely able to speak, “I know you’ve not been feeling great, but it’s good to see you in better health,” just a few hours before Pope Francis died. I’m kinda surprised JD didn’t bring him balloons.
Last February, Vance cited a homily Pope Francis gave to an empty St. Peter’s Square in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic in March 2020. Vance’s wife, Usha, had just had their second baby weeks earlier, and the world was shut down. Vance had bought 900 rounds of ammunition from Dick’s Sporting Goods and two bags of rice from Walmart, Vance told those at the prayer breakfastthat the Pope’s words were so meaningful during that time of uncertainty, that he has repeatedly reread the sermon since, which I’m sure with repeated mentions of the rice and ammo.
Talk about not being able to read a room. How did Vance find a way to mention buying 900 rounds of ammo and praise the Pope at the same time?
Why, is it possible the vice president (sic) is a moron?
Creative note: I was awake when I got a news alert that the Pope died. I could have been the first with a Pope cartoon, but I had to get on a train. A few hours later, I was in the terminal at DCA, sitting across from a young lady who wanted to talk about politics and the Pope (she was on our side) when I suddenly got the idea for the cartoon. After the nice lady got on her flight, I started on the cartoon, but didn’t finish it until I was in my hotel in Chicago.
I did not sleep last night, and that’s partly why you’re getting a late and short blog. I’ll give you some Chicago notes tomorrow.
I’ve been wrestling with whether to post this, or not. I want to always advise of resources for marginalized people to find community. However, these are religious resources. They’re the sort that emphasize inclusion and welcome and community, though, so that wins out, for me. I’m going to post this, hoping that someone will be able to use the information or knows someone else who can. I don’t know if there is an audience here for such things, so this would be the time to comment as to Yea, post these when I see them, or no comments/Nay being there is no one who might use these, and I’ll save the space in future. Thanks for your time! There is no proselytization intended with this post. It’s only to try to reach any- and everyone who is looking for community. These came from my Sojourners magazine. They’re simple resources that one can check out with no obligation or identification.
April 21, 1856 Stonemasons and other construction workers on building sites around Melbourne, Australia, stopped work and marched from the University of Melbourne to Parliament House. They advocated eight hours for work, eight hours for recreation, and eight hours for rest. Their direct action protest was a success, becoming the first organized workers in the world to achieve an eight-hour workday, inspiring the celebration of Labor Day and May Day.
April 21, 1989 Six days after the death of Hu Yaobang, the deposed reform-minded leader of the Chinese Communist Party, some 100,000 students from more than 40 universities gathered at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to commemorate Hu prior to his funeral.They voiced their discontent with China’s authoritarian communist government, and called for greater democracy. Ignoring government warnings of violent suppression of any mass demonstration, the students were joined by workers, academics, and civil servants. Pro-democracy student protesters face-to-face with policemen outside the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square the day of Hu Yaobang’s funeral.
I love when the whole poem fits in the title box. I had a different poem I was trying to use but I couldn’t figure out an excerpt that made sense. Go read the whole poem, you’ll see what I mean. Plus, it’s a terrific poem!
(Having only just now (10 PM Sunday) opened the email with this comic, I’m quite late; I’d saved it for a possible post, and it got buried. No matter, though; the message is good for more than one day, IMO. Everyone should be welcome everywhere every day, as they are welcome here. So, enjoy a comic. -A)
It seems Stafford County has always been staunchly conservative, but Joe Biden won the county in 2020 and 2024, barely…but he won. Blue Northern Virginia stopped at Stafford, but maybe that’s changing.
Yet, the Board of Supervisors is majority Republican, but it wasn’t that long ago when they held all the seats. But despite the board being majority GOP, taxes are still going up.
Hell, taxes aren’t just going up in Stafford. Donald Trump is raising our taxes while trying to cute them for billionaire assholes, such as himself. Trump is raising taxes while denying they’re taxes. They’re called tariffs, and Trump claims other nations pay them, not US taxpayers. If you’re not an idiot, you know that’s true.
The Board of Supervisors voted to advertise a one percent increase to the meals tax and a two percent increase to the transient occupancy tax. The three percent tax increase isn’t a bad thing, though, as it’s going to public schools. At least Republicans in Stafford are trying to help public schools, while Trump is trying to destroy them. Well, most of them. Not every member voted for the tax increase.
This three percent increase is a lower hike than the recent hikes to my Cox WiFi service, Netflix, Disney Plus, Peacock, Prime, and the giant increase in YouTube TV.
The County Administrator requested a five percent increase, but he only got three. To keep the increase low, the Board is cutting other things like new cars for the sheriffs department, delaying raises, and cutting $5,000 from the Christmas lights budget. Governments shouldn’t have Christmas budgets. We need more separation of church and state.
Creative note: I usually draw my cartoons for the Advance on Friday evenings or Saturday afternoons. I drew this one Thursday night.
Drawn in 30 seconds (turn up your volume): (Go see and listen!)
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Bluto by Clay Jones
The regime wants to make Harvard more like Trump University Read on Substack
Trump has been pushing everyone around, from the courts to law offices to corporations to governors to media outlets to fellow Republicans to world leaders to universities. Many of those, like The Washington Post, CBS, and Facebook, obeyed before he even started pushing. But two that pushed back are Janet Mills, the Governor of Maine, and Harvard.
During a meeting with governors in the White House, Trump asked, “Is Maine here?” He probably forgot her name.
Trump’s memory for grievances was calling back to a moment during the pandemic in 2020 when he referred to Mills as a “dictator,” and she replied, “I have spent the better part of my career listening to loud men talk tough to disguise their weakness.” She’s got his number.
Back to the White House (sic) meeting, Trump bullied Mills to ignore an anti-discrimination law in her state that allows transgender athletes to participate in girls’ and women’s sports. Trump threatened to cut off funding for Maine at the White House event with governors if the law persisted. Mills replied, “See you in court.”
When you listen to Republicans, you would believe that men are intentionally cutting their nuts off to play women’s volleyball.
Later, Trump claimed her talking back to him was…wait for it…”illegal.” This is probably the “nastiest” a woman has talked to him since that time a woman wouldn’t sell him Greenland, or that other time a woman in Puerto Rico told him, “No, you’re doing a shitty job with hurricane recovery, you bloviating fartknocker,” or that time a female Speaker out-negotiated him, or that time a woman said his penis looked like a cartoon mushroom, or that time a woman dared to run against him, or that other time a woman dared to run against him.
Since then, the federal government has barraged the state with investigations, declared its education system to be in violation of federal law, and frozen some of its funding. Maine sued the Trump administration on April 7, doubling down on its defiance as it began the legal fight that Governor Mills promised at the White House.
Governor Janet Mills has bigger balls than every male governor in this nation combined, and she cracked Trump’s little nuts like it was a Maine Lobster.
Trump is also waging war with universities, especially Ivy League schools. He’s demanding that schools ban “woke,” and the regime is revoking student visas and has sent goons to kidnap foreign students without pressing criminal charges, and holding them in detention facilities in the Deep South.
The Trump regime is accusing Harvard of violating students’ civil rights (which is ironic, coming from the regime that violates students’ civil and constitutional rights). The regime is also accusing its leaders of breaching Title VI, the federal law that bars federal funding to any school found to violate civil rights.
The regime claims that Harvard was failing to keep Jewish and pro-Israel students safe by allowing antisemitism on campus.
Most of the claims of antisemitism during the protests from last year are not true. I’m sure hatred and harassment happened here and there, and from both sides, but it wasn’t widespread or condoned by any university. I don’t believe Muslim students were beating up Jewish students outside a dean’s window at any university, and he said, “Eh, kids will be kids.”
The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, an independent non-profit that tracks political violence and political protests around the world, found that 97 percent of campus demonstrations over the war in Gaza have been peaceful. It analyzed 553 US campus demonstrations nationwide and found that fewer than 20 resulted in any serious interpersonal violence or property damage.
Republicans lie about the Gaza protests like they lie about Black Lives Matter protests (who was that who brought a gun to a BLM protest and shot people? Oh, yeah. Kyle Fucking Rittenhouse).
The non-profit also documented at least 70 instances of forceful police intervention against students, including the arrest of demonstrators and the use of physical dispersal tactics, including the deployment of chemical agents, batons, and other kinds of physical force.
Last Monday, Harvard refused to submit to extensive government oversight while overhauling its governance, admissions, and hiring practices, calling the orders illegal and unconstitutional.
According to Harvard’s President, Alan Garber, those demands include requirements to ‘audit’ the viewpoints of the student body, faculty, staff, and to “reduce the power” of certain students, faculty, and administrators targeted because of their ideological views.”
The Trump regime retaliated by freezing $2.2 billion in federal funding to the university and threatened to revoke its tax-exempt status.
This is bullshit. The Trump regime doesn’t care about antisemitism on college campuses any more than they care about it coming from within the Trump regime. When Trump was elected in 2016 (sic), hate crimes increased substantially. We never heard Trump express outrage about that. Instead, he defended it. When tiki-torch Nazis chanted “Jews will not replace us” and “Blood and soil” shortly before they murdered Heather Heyer, an anti-racism protester in Charlottesville, Trump defended the Nazis (they had a permit!) Maybe he got a free tiki torch out of it. Who knows?
Trump doesn’t hate antisemites. Instead of condemning them, he invites them to lunch at MAGA-Lardo. Trump dined with racists and antisemites Ye and Nick Fuentas at one of his shitty golf resorts. That kinda sets a bad example for Harvard to follow, doesn’t it?
Republicans have always pushed the narrative that education is bad somehow, and people who went to college should be spited, condemned, spit on, and treated like polo-loving foie gras eaters. They push the narrative that people with higher education look down on the rest of America. They often talk about the “East Coast Elite,” or “elitists.”
Some people do act like that.
I was recently kinda seeing a woman who is as liberal as I am, and during a conversation about how members of both of our families are Trumpers, she mentioned that some of her family members, who live in the Midwest, considered her to be among the “East Coast Elite.” You know, a snob who looks down on people. When I told her I kinda get the same thing, she became quickly annoyed, and said I couldn’t be considered a member of the “East Coast Elite” because I didn’t have a PhD, which she has. I was just some bum who dropped out of college to go surfing and draw cartoons, and it wasn’t even a snooty college I dropped out of. She started off criticizing the notion that there is an “East Coast Elite,” and then started acting as if she were a bona fide member of it. Later, she took me to a party and was “called out,” as she put it, that it was only for “serious people,” and I haven’t seen her since. As you can tell, I still have a little attitude about that.
Maybe it is all my fault. Someone at the party told me they had season tickets to the orchestra, and I told them that was awesome and to let me know if they make the playoffs. See? I’m not a serious person.
While I don’t like stuck-up obnoxious boring assholes who look down on people as if they’re better than them, I also don’t like hypocrites. Who am I talking about?
The vice president (sic), JD CouchFucker Vance, is all in on this attack on Ivy League schools, but it should be noted that he’s a graduate of Yale, an Ivy League school. Another Yale man is Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth went to Princeton and Harvard. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum didn’t go to an Ivy League school, but he did go to Stanford, which is private and snooty enough. Howard Lutnick, Commerce Secretary, also went to a private school, Haverford College. RFK Jr, secretary of health and weird conspiracy theories, also went to Harvard and three other universities. The Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright, went to MIT and Berkeley, which is a hippy school. Right? John Ratcliffe, head of the CIA, went to Notre Dame. Jamieson Greer, Trump’s trade rep, went to Brigham Young, which is another private school (and founded by a guy with 56 wives and 52 more kids than Donald Trump has).
Where did Donald Trump matriculate? Trump went to the Wharton School, which is not a daycare but the business school of the University of Pennsylvania, and the last time I checked, it is an Ivy League school.
Trump is like one of those people who travels the world and somehow fails to take any of it in, and returns home still a knuckle-dragging moron with an inability to comprehend simple thoughts. Donald Trump went to an Ivy League school and came out still behaving like Donald Trump. That gives me the impression he only “went” there. It’s like that guy who visits France and complains that the croissants aren’t croissandwiches.
Turning a croissant into a croissandwich would be like turning Harvard into Trump University.
Creative note: This cartoon is dedicated to John Belushi. I believe his work is an influence on my cartoons.
This was interesting: Last night, I ran into an ex (of sorts) who is involved in the local theater scene. She invited me to audition for a part in an upcoming play, saying she thinks I would be a good fit for it. I haven’t acted since the sixth grade, but I was the lead (there hasn’t been a better Pecos Bill since). I was intrigued and wanted to audition this morning, but not to get the part, but just to see if I could do it. I didn’t go because I had to draw this cartoon.
I just want you readers to know that I gave up being the next Brad Pitt for you.
