Are my eyes really blue?

Assume the best. Assume that at the first time of asking, in 2029, we will swear in a Congress with 220 loyal Democrats in the House and 50 loyal Democrats in the Senate, accompanied by a Democratic President and Vice President. What needs to pass on day one, before the balls and the parties, what needs to be ready for the new President’s signature at 12:01 PM before he walks off the stage?

Pace Josh Marshall, I was there already:

1) End the filibuster for good in the Senate and establish rules that except as specified in the Constitution, no vote in Congress shall require a supermajority.

2) Expand the Supreme Court. Minimum of 19, but maybe as much as 27 – a chief justice and two for each circuit. Then randomize the selection of jurisdictions, outlaw venue shopping, do whatever can be done to limit the ability to leverage the courts for partisan advantage.

3) Lift the debt ceiling and establish automatic current-baseline budgeting so that government shutdowns are no longer possible.

4) Expand the House, ideally by around an order of magnitude, ensuring that no member has more than 100,000 constituents. This also diminishes the power of any one individual member, brings them closer to the voters, and makes it more difficult for lobbyists who now have ten times as many people to snow. It incidentally puts a boot in the ass of the Electoral College, effectively reducing the Senate advantage to .2 EV per state – if you really want to solve things, mandate independently-drawn districts for any and all state elections to federal office.

5) Term-limit committee chairs, to disincentivize clinging to office endlessly.

Not one of these proposals of these require a Constitutional amendment. None of them requires a 2/3 majority, and none of them are subject to Supreme Court review as they are all based around internal organization of Congress or matters that are decided by Congress. If they had all been implemented in 2010, as they should have been, we would probably have been spared the last decade of nightmares and gotten a real public-option health care solution.

The only issue going forward is the agenda above: to restore separation of powers, abolish the unitary executive and defang a Supreme Court that provides air cover to a lawless dictator. Nothing else – not the rights of our trans siblings, not saving the planet from the ravages of humankind, not breaking the billionaire oligarchy – not one a damn thing is possible until points one, two and three are accomplished. It has to be done if we are going to continue to have democratic government in this country.

And there is a thirst for it. The Democratic Party ran the table in every race of interest a week ago. All the way down, Republican offices for decades were turned over to Democrats by an electorate that had simply had enough. And not in Democratic strongholds, either – after all, there would be no Republican to upset if these were permanently safe seats. The fact that the Senate leadership was unwilling and unable to follow the election returns does not obviate the fact that if Democrats were to win every state in 2028 where Trump’s approval rating is a net negative-6 or worse, they would walk away with over 450 electoral votes and the kind of decisive victory that is required to break the back of MAGAism.

That is the big issue. That is the only issue. Everything that is going wrong – the economy battered with tariffs, our international standing in tatters everywhere but in public in Saudi Arabia (they’re laughing up their burnooses in private, bet), uniformed and unmarked thugs alike snatching citizens off the street for their skin color – every bit of it is happening because Republicans are in charge, and none of it would be happening with Democrats in charge. Because it didn’t. The only issue remaining in American politics is whether you want the dictatorship of the stupid, the senile, the racist and the rich, or whether you want to repair American democracy.

And the campaign has already begun.

I know that house rules dictate everyone gets safe passage across the Styx before the guns come out, but I just can’t. Dick Cheney’s legacy is on exhibit right now at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue: a Republican Party divorced from reality and in thrall to a unitary executive who commands lockstep obedience.

In every way that matters, George W Bush was just Donald Trump with a salad and a treadmill. Same fact-light grip on the world. Same loyal coterie of aides ready to wipe their asses with the Constitution. Same party willing to look aside because any notional Democrat would be “worse.” How exactly is left as an exercise for the reader, but in the Republican mind, imagination always trumps [sic] reality.

The truly ironic thing is that after spending a decade tarring Barack Obama as a Muslim socialist, Cheney’s death will almost certainly coincide with the election of an actual factual Muslim socialist as mayor of New York City. And when it happens, it will be because people who have been told for a decade that anything to the left of Ludwig Von Mises is socialism think “well if it means I can pay the rent and afford child care, then bring on socialism.”

Let us redouble our efforts this Election Day as we look to the next one, and the one after that, and remember that nothing will get better until we create a world with consequences for all.

I am distracting myself from the shit state of the world, in macro and micro, by thinking about stuff. Physical goods, of the sort of which I have accumulated too many, in the eternal quest to have Just The Right Thing – which usually results in having four or five things which are each a slightly different Eighty Percent Of The Right Thing.

Like the Yeti. These days, it’s mostly down to two: one stackable 20 oz which goes back and forth to work and one stackable 16 oz which is for home use. There are way too many more to speak of, but these are the anchors, and for good reason: the 20 is the right size for a full pint of beer, or a grande Starbucks drink in bring-your-own-cup mode, or enough ice for a can of soda or more. It’s a perfect all-purpose size. By contrast, the 16 is a little smaller – fine for filling from a can, but closer to 15 oz with the lid on which screws up other things. But if you’re refilling regularly out of a pitcher or a growler or whatever, it’s a much cozier size to have to hand. It’s the bedside cup, and the Moon Dust textured purple serves as a tactile reminder that I’m at home, not out in the world. Which is nothing to sneeze at.

It’s also finally dipped cool enough to get out the gray chore coat from American Giant which was a gift last year – it is the perfect “light layer” weight and pairs nicely with the Solovair Chelsea boots I picked up a couple of weeks ago and have mostly broken in. There is something about the jacket-and-boots combination that just feels right. I don’t know if that’s a callback to Star Wars, or to life in DC, or just the ongoing desire to spend my whole life in that four month window without daylight saving time, but at a moment when I need something to shift, being able to dress the part helps.

The wider world is bad right now. There is immense comfort in being at home in the back yard, with a nice marine layer keeping the glare off, either flipping burgers on the grill or relaxing in the Adirondack chair or (especially) reclined in the shed with the candle for aroma and the battery-powered string lights and faux-neon giving that purple glow while reading myself into another reality. Even just the feeling of walking out the front door to bring in the trash cans, or down to the school to plug in the car – there is a cozy little world here that I can almost reach out and touch, just beneath the surface of the real world, and any chance to immerse myself in it is a gift.

I guess I finally learned to live in the moment and appreciate it. If you poke your head over the parapet even a little, you realize it’s a long stretch into the darkness ahead with no telling how bad it could get or for how long. So the goal is to remain ever focused on here and now and find the joy – or at least the contentment – in whatever can be carved out of the present.

October always beings memories of 2004, or 2016 – when it felt like a bad time might be pushed back, only to fail. I suspect last year will be added to that cavalcade of misery, although it honestly didn’t feel that bad until November 1 when it couldn’t be kicked any further down the road. But October also feels like 2019, with Asheville and Ken Burns’ Country Music and the desire to stretch out and cuddle up and just watch hours and hours of informative history.

But I don’t know how long this will be enough.

He was GamerGate made flesh.

Anyone who graduated from high school and went straight into right-wing politics in 2012 is a pure product of the Obama/Call of Duty/4chan era of shouted slurs, Nazi trolling and nihilism for the lulz. That was his world and that’s exactly what he wanted for ours. There’s a reason all the effusive tributes from the worst people in America don’t actually include clips or quotes.

He was definitely useful, inasmuch as he was a divining rod for people who think debate is an objective rather than a tool. Some things are not up for debate, like the humanity of trans folk or the intellectual capability of women of color. The Republican Party which ran like Hell from David Duke in 1991 is washing the balls of his dead heir in 2025, and that’s pretty much all you need to know about the trajectory of this country in the 21st century.

Bad things happen to bad people and it doesn’t make them good people. Nobody deserves to be shot at a distance, nobody deserves to be orphaned before you’re too young for school, nobody deserves to die for their political opinions. But to act like this is somehow a loss for American political culture, for “free speech”, for anyone but his loved ones is not only risible in the extreme, but an insult to all those who gave their lives pushing back against his kind for decades in my native territory.

It’s one more lump of shit to throw onto the bonfire of America, as three-fifths of the country shrugs off the things that outraged them four or five years ago when they falsely claimed to see them coming from the other side. It wouldn’t do a lick of good if we reversed the outcome of the 2024 election tomorrow – there are too many people who are just fine with all this for me to have any hope of seeing it repaired before I die.

Because it’s gonna take a lot longer than 34 years to get back to when Republicans ran and hid from associating with Klansmen instead of worshipping them.

Hard to believe it was 19 years ago today I started this blog. I didn’t realize how good I had it. I had a job with an office, we were in pretty good health, the world hadn’t gone to Hell, neither had my family (really), social media as we know it didn’t exist…those were the days. Not that there haven’t been improvements along the way, I like having an EV. I like this neighborhood (even if a light rail would not be amiss). It’s nice making the money we make now, although the expenses have grown to match.

But the world has gone to shit. We saw it coming years ago, decades even. We allowed the old norms to go away. Equality, noblesse oblige, mind your own damn business – all shot to hell. Billionaires were allowed to accumulate and use unlimited wealth however they liked, shame ceased to be a reason to withdraw from public life, consequences ceased to exist. We are where we are because of a steady drumbeat of press in thrall to Murc’s Law and a 21st century in which we were taught to treat politics as a reality show rather than the decision making process for society. 

And the problem is, every time we started to pull back from the abyss, we didn’t hold anyone to account. Pointless war in the Middle East? Ehhh. Failure to meet the challenges of a pandemic? Whatever. Actual insurrection to attempt to overthrow the result of a democratic election followed by criminal misconduct after? It would be political to prosecute. Zero accountability. Zero contrition. And now, matters are worse.

I could almost deal with it, if I had the ability to keep working from home and the assurance we could stay in this house…or alternately, the ability to retire and call it a day. But neither is on the cards for the foreseeable future. When I hit this Powerball tonight, it’s over for you heaux. In the meantime, it’s just a question of win the day, make it to the weekend, live in the moment and cherish the simple and affordable things. The extent to which a pint in the shed has become more desirable than a trip to the pub is remarkable, but also welcome. If i can’t go back to pre-tirement full time, I’m going to be retired every second I can spare.

One more. May we have better things to blog about going forward.

Third time was the charm for Spider-Man: once to break the seal, once as an obvious cash grab for the rights holders, and finally into the MCU proper. As with Spidey, so with the Fantastic Four: a flagship property for Marvel, literally their First Family, and in desperate need of some way to get it right. And like Spidey, they figured it out by going back to the comics as they were in the beginning.

Fantastic Four: First Steps is the MCU’s first love letter to Jack Kirby, and long overdue, and perfectly executed. The whole New Frontier retro future, set in 1964 to match. A Ben Grimm that you can absolutely see growing up on Yancy Street and who never lost touch with his roots. The sci-fi conceit of “we can do anything and we will.” And all leveraged into modernity with a Reed Richards who is clearly on the spectrum, a Sue Storm with tremendous emotional intelligence, and a Johnny Storm who is young and goofy and loves the ladies without coming across as a skeeze.

In a way, it’s of a piece with James Gunn’s new Superman, which also eschewed retelling an oft-told origin story in favor of straight Silver Age madness – and also reminded us that it’s possible to have heroes who are unambiguous, no shades of gray, just good people trying to do good in the world as best they can, in the face of pure evil and implacable forces alike. Lex Luthor and Galactus are very different threats, but the approach is the same: square up, stick together, we rise and fall as a team. As a family. As all of us.

It’s a bit on the nose, given our present circumstances, but it’s true: we get nowhere by giving up. Which is a hard lesson to learn and live with, but sometimes there’s no alternative.

Honestly, it ended in 2000, when the Supreme Court chose the President along partisan lines and handed victory to the candidate with fewer votes – and we did nothing. That’s when the Electoral College should have been burned to the ground.

Or it ended in 2009-2014, when the Democrats didn’t burn the filibuster to the ground to make the American Health Care Act pass in something other than the ratchet half-assed form that already had passed in the Senate. Or in 2016, when the Senate held a Supreme Court seat open for a year to prevent the President from filling it.

Or in 2021, when an attempt to overthrow the results of an election with actual violence wasn’t met with a sea of human gazpacho on the Capitol steps, and another “lost with the most votes” incident in 2017 was met with a shrug instead of doing away with the Electoral College as should have been done twenty years earlier. And in typical form, the American press, weak and feckless, acted as if losing office was sufficient punishment for all sins and regarded consequences of crime as somehow “partisan”. And since it would be “political” to prosecute a criminal running for office, he completely got away with it.

And now matters are worse.

I don’t know how to fix this, but it doesn’t get any easier from here.

It’s interesting to look at the media we have between Episodes III and IV and see what the Rebellion was up to. For a long time, it seemed to be about hiding and protecting what Jedi still lived after the Order 66 purge. Then you had the various stories of pushback by the likes of the Specter cell or Saw Gerrera’s partisans. And clearly, Luther Rael and Kleya Marki’s organization – aka Axis – was working to build the framework for something larger to fight back against the Empire.

The question was…what was the endgame? How did they think they were going to vanquish the Empire even before the ability to destroy a planet appeared? For all the drilling in the jungles of Yavin, boots on the ground were never going to be enough to hold off the Empire. And it was going to be very difficult to outgun the Imperial Fleet at any point. It forces the question: was the Death Star the Empire’s biggest mistake? Without that – with all those resources turned toward more Star Destroyers, more TIE fighters, more stormtroopers – would it not have become nearly impossible for the Rebellion to ever have enough resources to carve out even a piece of the Outer Rim outside Imperial influence?

Most of the activity in Rebels is about either rallying what Jedi exist, building the Rebel fleet, or sabotaging the Empire at a high level. All of which is viable and good work, but by comparison to, say, the IRA in Northern Ireland – the idea that you can make it so untenable that the Empire will withdraw and give up becomes problematic when you have a single authoritarian Emperor and the resources of a galaxy backing him. So at some level, it feels in retrospect as if the Rebellion’s ultimate goal was just to prevent the Empire’s grip getting any tighter while waiting for some sort of opportunity to come along.

And it’s clear the leadership of the Rebellion was divided on where and how to fight. It certainly felt as if some elements were willing to keep their powder dry in perpetuity, which makes me wonder whether there would have ever been a counterattack in the absence of the Death Star. What’s evident from all of this is that the Emperor himself was the author of his own destruction, both by betting the house on the Death Star (twice) and betting that he could lure the Rebels into one place to be wiped out.

But you have to wonder what the original victory conditions were, and if they acknowledged just how hard it was going to be to return to how things were – or build something new.

One sympathizes.

One of the things that has come out of the Disney+ explosion of Star Wars content has been a new layer of nuance in the good guys. It’s pretty obvious that after the fall of the Empire, the New Republic was fairly feckless – both in terms of hunting down and finishing off the Imperial Remnant and in countering the rise of the First Order. But what we’re seeing in a lot of ways, thanks mainly to Andor but also elsewhere, is that prior to the Clone Wars, the Republic was not exactly in good health – and neither was the Jedi Order.

In fact, the takeaway from The Acolyte is that 100 years prior to the Clone Wars, the Jedi were high on their own supply and convinced of their own right and righteousness, and in the ensuing century the Republic and the Senate were corrupt and strangled by their own bureaucracy. It all suggests that the Old Republic was closer to the Articles of Confederation than anything else, and the Senate much closer to the General Assembly of the UN (or worse, the League of Nations) than an actual galactic government. It’s not hard to see how the Separatists rose up and formed a united faction, because the Republic was ill-equipped to stop them with anything other than a handful of Jedi supporting individual worlds.

But even more than that – in the Mandalorian, Kuil says he was enslaved by the Empire for 300 years. Clem and Marva Andor were looting a Republic vessel on a planet devastated by extractive mining. It really seems as if the Empire just did in public what the Republic was allowing to happen unnoticed. And it makes it a lot easier to understand how people were willing to shrug off the coming of the Empire if it just made the shooting stop. Life in the galaxy can’t get any better anyway, so what does it matter what the powers that be call themselves? And then the Empire era was just a 20-year slow boil, to the point that I suspect the majority of the galaxy didn’t realize how bad things had gotten until Alderaan was vaporized.

And then the Emperor was gone, problem solved, why you bringing up old shit. Little bit on the nose, no?

It’s become apparent that in terms of their acquired intellectual properties, Disney had decided that Star Wars goes in Disneyland and Marvel goes in Disney California Adventure. And now that both have their own “land” it’s possible to compare and contrast now that we’ve had a couple of years for things to settle in.

It’s pretty clear that one of the real stars of Star Wars is the aesthetic. If you never had a single character walking around, if you didn’t ride the two rides, the Aurebesh signs and the X-Wing and A-Wing parked in the woods and the architecture and the ambient music would be an attraction all by itself. There are things to buy: blue milk, lightsabers, robes, droids. It’s an immersive space.

Avengers Campus has to some extent been ill-served both by the Covid delays and by the strike-induced lag in the MCU. But Marvel’s world is sprawling and diverse. There’s not an obvious thing like a lightsaber or an X-wing — Thor has a hammer, Cap has a shield (and wings sometimes), there’s a quinjet on top of a building, but there’s so many different things across thirty movies that it’s impossible to have a unified look or a common point of reference.

And that’s why despite only one ride, Avengers Campus has (and needs) characters. Lots of them. I have a pic of me and the wife with the Wasp holding the shrunken version of A Bug’s Land. I have a pic with America Chavez from a gray morning where no one seemed to recognize that she was an actual superhero and not just a kid at the park (the problem of not having a flashy costume). At different points on Monday I saw Spider-Man, T’Challa, Steve Rogers, Loki and Red Guardian just hanging around.

Star Wars is about creating a world. There are characters that fill that world, some amazingly compelling (Andor might well be the defining piece of Star Wars media at this point). But Marvel’s world is all about the characters, because it’s too big and sprawling for anything else. They still need a proper E-ticket ride at the park, and the real problem is the same as Rise of the Resistance: how do you commit to a single moment and put a billion dollars on it? Especially when Star Tours has a ridiculous number of possible combinations and even Smuggler’s Run is ticketed for new mission types in 2026?

And that’s another thing: Galaxy’s Edge, to me, is proof that Disney always planned for the story of the Resistance and the First Order to go past episode 9. The only way you allow Rian Johnson to deconstruct everything is if you know you’re going to carry on from that point, not immediately go to a finale that undoes half of what you did. Rey, Finn, Poe and Chewie were meant to fight the First Order for a whole new trilogy of their own once the Han/Luke/Leia triumvirate had their sendoff, but that’s not how it went down in the end. No one planned for Carrie to die, or for the Mouse to quail in the face of basement chuds reacting poorly to challenging storytelling.

But Star Wars still provides a fully immersive world, especially now that we’ve demonstrated how much more storytelling is possible there once you pry yourself away from Skywalkers. And it’s made it possible and necessary to reevaluate what we thought we know. Of which more later, certainly. But all I know is that owing to a quirk of hardware breakdown, I was able to walk the length of Black Spire Outpost on a cool gray morning with absolutely no one in sight and only the ambient sounds around, and it was worth the entire price of admission just for those few moments.