Fly Eagles Fly

 

Trump: I watched this great quarterback who has a phenomenal wife. She’s a MAGA fan.. when quarterback wins as much as he’s won, I’d have to go with Kansas City.. pic.twitter.com/RszJlOLSdF

— Acyn (@Acyn) February 9, 2025

Then you go losing, because the Eagles soared.  Philadelphia won. The birthplace of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. A minority-majority city Trump hates because we have no use for his ass. 

I don't especially care about sports, but I love my city, and I love it when Trump is wrong. I am wearing green tomorrow and being fucking insufferable. I want to point out Trump had some braindead shit to say about Patrick Mahomes and Tommy Tuberville, and I still consider Mahomes a great player.  This wasn't his night, and I don't blame him for what Trump says or does.

But I celebrate my city and this win because, because, because. 

Good things happen here, and we will celebrate them. 

Sometimes this city wins. Sometimes people Trump doesn't support wins. That's all I'm saying. 

This TrumpWorld Grab-Bag is Getting Personal

 

You can see the new regime paintjob in the picture above? I see them taking out "Diversity" and "Cooperativeness" and "Compassion"--but do you also see they are taking out "Leadership", "Integrity" and the "Constitution"?  This picture is well and truly worth a thousand words. This Trump Mis-Administration is a case of the baby and the bathwater getting chucked alike into a woodchipper. They are taking out things they don't like, and they don't give a fuck for what is structural or necessary. 

And it really shows. 

I predicted purges in the first Trump Administration--but they hadn't understood the infrastructure preventing them from fuxxoring everything up at the time. That was great--then. They figured it out, now. And now Elon the Crashing Boer the fuck Musk is sending this be-forked email, implying that government workers are "low productivity". And he's all up in the GSA base, nuking all our dudes. 

I'm a civil service person. We go through periods of feast or famine work-wise depending upon demand because of changes in legislation or natural deadlines in assorted procedures that might either produce down-time or overtime, but we do necessary shit. We serve the public. A lot of what we do is customer service--and if you are frustrated by not having prompt service from your government entities--one of the problems is probably not enough of us, not too many of us. 

Shit--Here's a Good TrumpWorld Final Pitch:

 

Difficult time. The US elections are in a few hours. Just want to wish you all peace, guys. But if things go bad, save your families. You know where to go. We do care of YOU.

God bless. pic.twitter.com/qZbol82lxU

— Maria Butina (@Maria_Butina) November 5, 2024

But I'm pretty sure Trump is actually headed for Venezuela because he keeps saying so. Also being back in Russia has done wonders for Butina's health you can tell. She's looking greeeaaaaaatt. 

Look, I could point to all the misogyny Trump dumped out just today, suggesting he might like to hit Michelle Obama, imagining Kamala Harris in a ring with Mike Tyson, his running mate calling Harris "trash", or his racism and the racism of his campaign, such that the campaign only just last week--the final week of the campaign, they fired a white supremacist and that the bizarrely hateful MSG rally still reverberates. 

But I'm going to point to the fact that there is something wrong with thinking after the investigation into the 2016 election, after the first impeachment, after 1/6, some people don't recognize what hundreds of national security professionals have: 

TWGB: Resorting to Crimes

 

Former President Donald Trump "resorted to crimes" to attempt to stay in office after losing the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, federal prosecutors allege in a newly unsealed court filing released Wednesday.

In the filing submitted by special counsel Jack Smith,… pic.twitter.com/lr2ut8tFn2

— PBS News (@NewsHour) October 2, 2024

You know, it seems like it was just yesterday that current Trump running mate JD Vance was trying to focus on the future instead of discussing whether Trump lost the 2020 election, and I love that for him. Corey Lewandowski was also stuck in the same groove when asked--unable to admit His Nibs lost in 2020. 

Judge Chutkan has done the world a favor by airing out Jack Smith's brief regarding how the Trump Team, with reckless disregard for the truth, democracy, the Constitution, public safety or any other damn thing, resorted to crimes in an attempt to defraud the American people regarding our presidential election. Trump and his people did everything they could to delay his reckoning regarding January 6th, but he can't actually delay people being forewarned and forearmed--he lied about one election, and he is just bound and determined to lie about this one. 

What Trump tried to do in 2020 was election interference. This right here right now, is letting you know what he does and plans to try again. Disenfranchising people in swing states, by fraudulently messing with our votes, is something I take very personally. He says bad things happen in Philadelphia, and I may be a bad thing happening in Philadelphia myself, but I am a very legitimate voter and you DON'T try to throw out my vote without me taking it very personally.  

My feminist foremamas didn't hit picket lines and get forcefed in prison for me to not get pissed when someone tried to first of all steal my vote and then use it to support anti-woman policies like banning abortion, birth control, or any other thing that liberates me and my sisters. And I fucking mean as a White lady to correct the past by supporting the right to vote and the right of having the votes counted of the Black and Brown people Trump (and the Republican party) want to exclude.

They Mean She Sounds Black

 

Maria Bartiromo claims Kamala Harris is faking a southern accent. Rep. Michael Rulli responds by saying "she must've gotten the blueprint from Hillary Clinton" pic.twitter.com/CmySD9KyvJ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 3, 2024

OK, in the spirit of "same old tired playbook" I could refrain from addressing this stupidity, but I won't because just let me do this white privilege thing for a minute. I strained to hear a hint of a southern accent. It isn't that. I feel like the people who are saying this aren't sure what a southern accent sounds like (and there are multiple southern accents--Texas doesn't sound like Georgia, and neither sounds exactly like Florida). I have a Philadelphia accent. I distinctly don't sound southern, but there are traces of the south in the mouths of some of the people where I live--Black people. 

This is because of the great migration. Racist whites with memories of the 1950s and 1960s can tell you they think Black people were literally invited up here. Practically trucked in. That's not exactly how it went. But it does explain in part White Flight to the Philadelphia suburbs. And how some Whites feel about the integrated public schools I attended where I noticed the difference in how some of my peers spoke versus how I did. 

But not that much. Your working-class White is just as likely to drop a double negative, say "ain't" out loud where people can hear, or employ "wrong" verb tenses for emphasis--as in "She don't know what she's doing" has a different mouth feel and intentionality from "She doesn't know, etc."  

Now, my folks set me down in front of PBS as a kid and I can speak the Queen's English if I mean to with a credible Mid-Atlantic accent, even.   I speak customer service for my job--proper nearly accent-free and grammatically correct.  It is not how I speak at home. This is called code-switching. And I am not bothered about what that says about my authenticity--so how could I be fucked up about what it says about Kamala Harris' authenticity if she sounds a little different to different audiences--I do it myself. If you read my blog, you know Yiddish and Italian slang creeps in. It would! I have dimensions and have sat at different tables.

So I understand what they mean by this particular "trifling", and I think I want to call it racist-adjacent. It isn't said totally out loud, and they do want to compare it to Hillary Clinton--but I get what they are trying to say about who she is. And it's bullshit. She is being herself with the people she's being with. This is what diversity looks like. People swim in many waters. They use different strokes. 

His Wounds!

 

Trump: If I took this shirt off, you would see a beautiful beautiful person. But you would see wounds all over. I’ve taken a lot of wounds I can tell you. More than I suspect any president ever pic.twitter.com/ETzIt9jJI0

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 22, 2024

My goodness! The hand Trump has been dealt in life. First, foot spurs, then, low water pressure, and now, a body full of scars! He's a bigger pincushion than St. Sebastian! No one has suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune like this poor sod. Bleed a little money for him, will you? No American president ever suff....

Here I must interject.  Surely, James Garfield gets honorable mention, right? He was shot up so bad his doctors resorted to rectal feeding. And if Trump wants that kind of special treatment, I can stop by the produce discount (pineapple, artichoke, prickly pears....) 

He's not comparing himself to Garfield or Lincoln though--he's on his sufferin' Savior routine for the benefit of the God-Botherer Faith and Freedom convention. How actual people of faith stomach this sort of thing, I just can't fathom. It's both maudlin and a bit blasphemous. 

But he also gave us a funny moment--his refuttal! 

A Landscape Service for All the Right Reasons?

Meanwhile Rudy’s presser is going just great... pic.twitter.com/4vy1Ih3vQh

— Rex Chapman🏇🏼 (@RexChapman) November 7, 2020

I'm not, by any stretch of the imagination, a "Suzy Silverlinings", so in the wide-branched tree of my heart, a heavy little bird still sits, cooing over the ways the evil clowns are going to steal my joy. In the meanwhile, they are evil, but they are still clowns, so I might as well laugh at them. And Rudybot throwing a cog at the idea that the networks are calling the election (over the vote totals for Biden being more favorable) before the courts get involved (because so far, they've been throwing out the weaksauce arguments from Team Trump left and right) is pretty on target.

He's in front of the Four Seasons Total Landscape building because, depending on who you ask, it was either in a NE Philly neighborhood where the singing and dancing of happy Democratic voters were unlikely to intrude (situated between the Fantasy Island sex shop, where the patrons are quiet out of habit, and the crematorium, where the patrons are quiet by nature) or Trump wanted the upscale Four Seasons hotel, but couldn't book it. Either reason is hilarious. 

That the campaign still has Giuliani front and center, after peddling dodgy laptops and tucking in his pants on an international moviefilm also resounds with the plop! plop! of massive clown shoes. 

But those clown shoes are still beating the bushes to find better legal counsel and retire the massive campaign debts amongst the faithful, and while I don't see a lot of sense in the legal part of this endeavor, I still see among some of the GOP stalwarts a lot of faith and a willingness to go on tv and do a career-defying high wire act asserting nonexistent fraud and so on--for these clowns. 

It's either because they cannot grasp that all these people, in Atlanta, Detroit, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C., dancing in the streets, quite legitimately voted against their viciously dumb Trump ticket, or, the part that chills me, they just don't care.

(Because some people do not have voting rights that the GOP feels bound to respect, one hardly needs to add., but I will, for emphasis.)

I'm not ready to dance, exactly. But when Trump is gone, you better believe I'm going to sing.

TGIF, Everybody.

 

Gritty Fire GIF from Gritty GIFs

Good things happen in Philadelphia.

Things Do Happen in Philadelphia

 

Protesters took to the streets for a second night after officers in Philadelphia shot and killed a Black man who was holding a knife in an encounter city officials say raises questions https://t.co/lHvUfovmkE

— CNN (@CNN) October 28, 2020

I see right wing media focusing on the looters rather than the fact that a mentally ill man armed with only a knife was shot multiple times when, having guns, the police officers on the scene could have taken a bit more time, called for back-up, or found some non-lethal means to subdue the young man. 

If he had to be shot--why not once? Why multiple times? He was killed in front of his mom and people on his block who knew him. No one is congratulating anybody for the looting and vandalism or considering that activity to be great activism--but you can't look at one incident and think you get what the whole dynamic of an area is. 

You can't look at the aftermath and decide that the incident itself was suddenly redeemed because of the response. The entire city isn't being "destroyed". We'll still be here. Riots and looting look bad, there's broken glass and strewn merchandise and things look ugly. There are injuries and conflicts. But it's remediable. Sure. It looks bad. 

 Having a police department that scares the shit out of its citizens is also bad though. The looters and rioters don't represent all of the people here, but I watched several city blocks burn on my tv when I was a kid and realized why some people didn't love cops. Many families here have at least some personal knowledge of brutality or police misconduct. Without respect or a good community relationship, though, how are things supposed to be? When law and order means law for some and order (violently imposed if need be, or even if it doesn't need to be) for others? I don't think it does police any good for things to continue as they are either. 

Beautiful things also happen in Philadelphia, and our problems are not about what party our mayor or our governor belong to--they go deeper and have a lot of history. Viewing this incident solely through a partisan lens, like calling looters "Biden's base" or whatever, dismisses the reality that this isn't what any of us want, it's just what is happening right now. In an America where Trump, who is pro-police brutality, happens to be president. 

Trump's original comment that "bad things happen in Philadelphia" was about, in all honestly, lying about voting here, in order to (further) suppress voting. But I feel like he might seize an unfortunate opportunity to lie about us some more. 

There is a bad dynamic in here also that I think is being encouraged--but Philadelphia is bigger than this mess. We are (despite what Boston thinks) the cradle of liberty. 

This city is not here to be disrespected. 

The Only Orange Muppet I Fully Stan

Of all the absurd 2018 things to happen, one of the best Philadelphia-flavored ones has been Gritty, the mascot of your (my) Philadelphia Flyers. I haven't actually actively followed the team since the Legion of Doom days, but have stayed an admirer in absolute principle, as I have for the Iggles and the Phils, because it is my duty as a homer and because "No one likes us."  Indeed, Gritty became my red-headed brother despite what I thought at first was a corny, googly-eyed misfire--people outside the city called him out. 

Bitch, that's our corny, googly-eyed mascot. You get back in line. 

And then he got co-opted as an Antifa icon. 

Better yet, something about Gritty being Antifa in the local political culture (Philadelphia is demographically brown, resolutely Democratic, fiercely working class and eccentrically progressive--with dashes of old-school racism and class war getting their ass regularly kicked) pisses off the people who by all means, need something to piss them off and entertains the people who need to add humor to their activism. 

Twitter has embraced the orange-bearded hero we all deserve:

Gritty will not fight your wars of empire pic.twitter.com/JSXgcTIMms

— Fellow Worker Gritty (@FellowGritty) October 7, 2018

Gritty is one of us. Late for Occupy, but not too late for the assizes to come. I don't expect a stadium of orange-jerseyed sports fans to switch in their preference from "God Bless America" to "Bella Ciao" anytime soon. 

But we have a mascot. And as we are the City of Brotherly Love, he is also with you. Join us, you have nothing to lose but your chains. 

Discrimination Hits my Hometown

Monday morning, apparently, some jerk in a red pick-up truck bowled a pig's head onto the steps of the Al-Aqsa Academy mosque in my very own hometown. It's pretty clearly symbolic--pork is not halal but haram. So this act was using a little bit of knowledge about Islamic tradition to try to defile a mosque. It was pretty disgusting, but it is only mildly intimidating--still, I think this is a bad sign regarding what utter irresponsible bullshit is going around in the presidential race.

Mayor Nutter, who is about as mild-mannered and cool a cat as you can find, referred to Donald Trump just recently as an asshole. He isn't wrong--in fact I admire his restraint in not referring to him with Charles Pierce's winning sobriquet of "ambulatory pilonidal cyst". (I think one of them kept Rush Limbaugh out of 'Nam. Thus, good for exactly nothing, ever.) My man for the PA Senate race, John Fetterman, called Trump a jagoff. Yup. This, too, sounds about right.

See, leadership is a funny old thing. You can lead bigoted asshats to support your mouthy hide by yapping it up, but at the end of the day, you are responsible for the permission slips you went and wrote to all the delinquent-ass SOB's who took the perfectly generic insinuations you made and then decided to hit up actual people and threaten them, personally. And if you do not understand or accept that responsibility--you are not any kind of real leader, because in the real world, words mean things and policies have consequences.

I'm from Philadelphia--We Break Stuff

I think it helps to know that I was born in Philadelphia and my accent is like an insect trapped in amber and my outlook is always hooded by a feeling that expectations should be responsibly lowered to get to the nut of why nothing is actually sacred to me--

I'm from Philadelphia. We break stuff. Or at least, that's our reputation.  We have booed Santa and destroyed whole city blocks in anger. We're the home city of Bill Cosby and Gary Heidnik. The Fresh Prince of Bel Air was better off from seeing the back of us. W. C. Fields, a Darby kid, wrote his and our epitaph--"On the whole, I'd rather be in Philadelphia"--basically saying this city is marginally better than Hell, which is "praise by faint damned" if I ever heard it.

For some reason, our signature sandwich is supposedly a political barometer: I'm not sure why John Kerry was supposed to have failed a sandwich test by ordering swiss on a cheesesteak (his wife, a quasi-Pennsylvanian, probably could have warned him) but seriously, this cheese thing, is not a thing. I like provolone and mushrooms on mine. American is perfectly cromulent, although cutting in line and wasting food are looked down on. (Frankly, I think Cheez Wiz tastes like cat piss smells. So "Wiz wit" proponents can, well, eat that stuff if that's how they like it, but for me, no.)

But our most recent "being Philly" outrage is what we did to a poor little Canadian robot (no not Drake, and Meek, you just live with yourself, because unless you drop brilliance and quickly you aren't right on time, you need a time machine). Yes, we manhandled an experiment in human kindness, because no, we aren't a kind people in Philadelphia.