Zorn: You'll never believe what Trump said!

(of course you will)

10-3-2024 (issue No. 161)

This week:

• Last week’s winning quip

• Who’s deranged again? The ranting fascist, or his alarmed detractors?

• News and Views — Hot takes, fully baked

• Land of Linkin’ — Where I tell readers where to go

• Squaring up the news — Where Charlie Meyerson tells readers where to go

• Tribune Editorial Board says presidential debate moderators were three-on-one unfairly tough on Trump — I beg to differ

• Cheer Chat — An update on the “Songs of Good” shows

• Mary Schmich — Measuring out life in coffee filters

• What’s on “The Mincing Rascals” podcast this week — Differences of opinion about the vice presidential debate

• Quotables — A collection of compelling, sometimes appalling passages I’ve encountered lately

• Quips — The winning visual joke and this week’s contest finalists

• Good Sports — Ta ta to the No No Sox; the argument against legalized sports gambling and a poll on Pete Rose

• Tune of the Week — Kris Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night”

Eric Zorn is a former opinion columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Find a longer bio and contact information here. This issue exceeds in size the maximum length for a standard email. To read the entire issue in your browser, click on the headline link above. Paid subscribers receive each Picayune Plus in their email inbox each Tuesday, are part of our civil and productive commenting community and enjoy the sublime satisfaction of supporting this enterprise.

Last week’s winning quip

“Do you have a good reason for calling your wedding off?” “I can’t say I do.”

All the entries last week were dad jokes, and voters chose this bit of wordplay as the least excruciating of the lot.

Here are this week’s nominees and the winner of the Tuesday visual-jokes poll. Here is the direct link to the new poll.

Who’s deranged again? The ranting fascist, or his alarmed detractors?

Besotted members of the MAGA cult simper when accusing Democrats and members of the left of “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” suggesting that those who express concern and fear at the increasingly dreadful, false and hateful things Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump says on the stump and in social media posts are unduly alarmist.

This accusation seems to have put many of my media siblings into something of a defensive crouch, downplaying or ignoring Trump’s pronouncements as though he were just the ignorant, blowhard drunk at the end of the bar he resembles, not a man who quite possibly will again be the leader of the free world next year.

Here he is proposing an explosion of unfettered police brutality he feels will bend crime “immediately.”

See, we have to let the police do their job. And if they have to be extraordinarily rough. … One real rough nasty day … one really violent day. … One rough hour, and I mean real rough, the word will get out, and it will end immediately. End immediately.

Here he is calling Vice President Kamala Harris “mentally disabled.”

Biden became mentally impaired. Kamala was born that way. She was born that way. And if you think about it, only a mentally disabled person could have allowed this to happen to our country. Anybody would know this.

Here he is spinning tales about an imaginary immigrant crime wave:

(We’re seeing a) mass migrant invasion of murderers, rapists, hoodlums, drug dealers, thugs and vicious gang members. … They will walk into your kitchen. They will cut your throat. . . . Hundreds of little cities and towns are being occupied by migrants with MK-47s.

Here he is promoting the idea that public schools are performing sex change operations:

Our opponents are using government schools to indoctrinate children, pushing radical transgender ideology on children and changing the child's gender without even parental consent. Can you imagine that? Your child leaves the school and comes home, and their gender has been changed? I don't want to get into the details, but it’s not even believable. Without parental consent. All of that's changing. It's changing immediately.

Here he is claiming that heads of drug cartels communicate with Vice President Kamala Harris via a special phone app telling them where to drop undocumented migrants in the U.S.:

I will shut down all entries through Kamala’s migrant phone app. She’s got a phone app. And you know what it’s meant for? The cartel heads! The heads — so the cartel heads call the app, and they tell them where to drop the illegal migrants. This is the administration. It’s not even believable.

Here he is raging on Truth Social that Harris “should be IMPEACHED, PROSECUTED, or BOTH!” for crimes committed by undocumented immigrants (based on claims deemed false by a CNN fact check).

Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer explains why we shouldn’t laugh off such rhetorical explosions:

The most dangerous myth is that Trump’s bizarre rants are nothing to worry about because they won’t lead to actual policies. Nothing could be more wrong. A potential Trump 47 might never impose a National Day of Violence, but he has pledged to expand legal protections for cops accused of brutality on the job, and threatened other Orwellian actions such as sending troops into Democrat-run cities to fight crime. On immigration, Trump’s Hitlerian language is the precursor to his stated policy of mass deportation, which would turn America upside down with military call-ups, dead-of-night raids in immigrant communities, and mass detention camps. That’s why America — and especially the media — should take Trump’s rants seriously and literally.

If you’re not alarmed, you’re not paying attention.

News & Views

News: U.S. District Judge John Blakey asked the defense attorney for notorious imprisoned Chicago street gang leader Larry Hoover how many murders he was responsible for.

View: Seems like a reasonable question given that the 73-year-old Hoover, who has been behind bars since 1973, is asking for a new sentencing hearing under the First Step Act. The Sun-Times reported:

(Hoover’s defense attorney Jennifer Bonjean) said she wasn’t sure how to answer (Blakey’s question). She wasn’t sure how to properly count. She sarcastically suggested that Hoover is responsible for every murder ever committed by a member of the Gangster Disciples. And she said she wanted a chance to speak with her client, who was only made available Thursday by a remote video link.

Ultimately, Bonjean told the judge, “I would like to answer that question.”

Blakey gave her until Oct. 7 to do it. But later, Bonjean reflected on what she described as a “strange moment” and called the judge’s question “inappropriate.”

Seems like a first step toward mercy is full accountability. I guess we’ll find out next week what Hoover says his body count is.

News: Mayor Brandon Johnson denied on Monday that he’d asked Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez to resign, and then …

View: The reason this denial rang false is that it came 10 days after local media outlets began publishing reports that Johnson had asked for Martinez’s resignation over his refusal to OK a massive high-interest loan that would allow Johnson to placate his benefactors at the Chicago Teachers Union, where he once worked. The denial also came nearly a week after Martinez himself stated plainly in a Tribune op-ed that “Mayor Brandon Johnson asked for my resignation” on Sept. 18.

“I didn’t ask anyone to do anything,” Johnson told the Tribune’s Jake Sheridan. Had he issued this denial in a timely fashion, it might have been persuasive.

Reporters pressed him on this again Wednesday, and he said, “I don’t ever discuss personnel issues. I find it to be highly offensive, irresponsible and raggedy. And I don’t do raggedy.”

He added, “I was elected to fight for the people of this city. And whoever’s in the way of that, get out of it.”

My sense is that “the people of this city” are sick of pols spending tomorrow’s money today and find all this borrowing quite raggedy indeed.

Meanwhile, it would not surprise me if the rumors are true and members of the volunteer Board of Education are considering resigning. They took the gig thinking it was just going to be to rubber stamp whatever the mayor who appointed them wanted them to rubber stamp, not to find themselves in the middle of a hairy political fight.

News: “Louisiana Reclassifies Abortion Pills as Controlled Dangerous Substances — Anyone caught with the abortion pill without a prescription in Louisiana can now face five years in prison.”

View: Don’t be fooled by JD Vance’s seeming moderate tone on abortion. The Republican Party is going all out to take away reproductive freedom.

Land of Linkin’

• Axios Chicago’s bracket tournament to select the most annoying intersection in Chicago is down to two Northwest Side intersections of three streets: Armitage Avenue /Ashland Avenue /Elston Avenue vs. North Avenue /Damen Avenue/Milwaukee Avenue. The panel discussed the choices and others at some length on “The Mincing Rascals” podcast this week, and I argued for Armitage/Ashland/Elston. I mean, look at this mess, which is not even a proper six corners:

  

• “How the Harlem Globetrotters Were Born in Chicago” in Chicago Magazine offers a preview of “Globetrotter: How Abe Saperstein Shook Up the World of Sports,” a book published this week by brothers Mark and Matthew Jacob. “The Harlem Globetrotters weren’t from Harlem, and they didn’t start out as globetrotters. They were five Black basketball players from Chicago’s South Side, managed by a 5-foot-3 North Side Jewish guy named Abe Saperstein.”

• Heidi Stevens: “Why voters — even women, like, past 50 — care about abortion rights.” She writes that abortion is an issue “for anyone who desires a world for themselves and their children where medical decisions are trusted to individuals and their medical providers.”

• The Sun-Times reports that, in Chicago, bicycle “thefts are up — 13% so far this year — and approaching pre-pandemic levels.”

• Here’s one way the bizarre Electoral College system could be more fair.

• Hollywood Reporter: “CNN Launches Digital Paywall in Major Strategic Shift.”

  The cost will be $3.99 per month or $29.99 per year, and the paywall will kick in only after you’ve read an unspecified number of free articles. The move coincides with Thomson Reuters announcing a subscription price of $1 a month.

• My three bad experiences with SpotHero were followed by three excellent examples of good customer service and have made me a loyal customer for life.

Squaring up the news

This is a bonus supplement to the Land of Linkin’ from veteran radio, internet and newspaper journalist Charlie Meyerson. Each week, he offers a selection of intriguing links from his daily email news briefing Chicago Public Square:

■ Went to bed early Tuesday? LateNighter has you covered with the 50 best jokes from the post-debate comedy shows.

■ “Twitter banned me”: Journalist Ken Klippenstein was ousted from the social media site after publishing the JD Vance dossier.

■ The Bulwark: “The most notable thing about the leaked dossier is what was left out.”

■ Public Notice: “The ‘vetting’ … was a spectacular failure.”

■ Jimmy Kimmel’s found his Tim Walz: Columbia College graduate Andy Richter.

■ “Trump’s dark threats:” CNN’s Brian Stelter says Donald Trump spent the weekend displaying his “autocratic impulses.”

■ USA Today’s Rex Huppke: “There’s no bottom anymore.”

■ Ex-New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan surveys mainstream media’s “sanewashing” of Trump: “If you watched the speech … you saw … an absolutely ugly and brutal attack on Kamala Harris, full of lies and racist misogyny.”

■ “What the actual f#@k?” Jon Stewart took a hatchet graph to pundits’ lame claims that Vice President Harris’ policy statements have been less specific than Trump’s word salads.

■ Trump confusedly and wrongly accused Harris of “murder.”

■ “What if Kamala Harris is leaving Trump in the dust?” Press Watch columnist Dan Froomkin posits the possibility that “the national media has been too busy doing stenography to notice.”

■ “Pod Save America” co-host Dan Pfeiffer offers tips for convincing friends to vote for Harris.

■ “Our self-imposed mandate here … is to talk about what’s going on in the news. … I don’t really like to insert myself into it. But sometimes the news inserts itself into me”: Stephen Colbert shot back at an attack from Trump.

■ The feds are ready to take your order for four free individual rapid antigen COVID-19 tests. When you do test, help track COVID and flu by reporting your results—positive or negative—here.

You can (and should) subscribe to Chicago Public Square free here.

Too tough on Trump? Please!

From me to Chris Jones, editorial page editor of the Chicago Tribune:

I was surprised by the contention in Tuesday’s editorial that the presidential debate last month featured “tougher questions for Trump than for Harris,” thus making the debate “unfair.”

The editorial didn’t make that case, and, because I’m nerdy in this way, I went back and read the transcript of the debate, and I don’t find evidence that the questions were “tougher.” The candidates were asked about their plans and how they reconcile past statements with current positions.

Questions asked of Harris

• When it comes to the economy, do you believe Americans are better off than they were four years ago?

• If tariffs are so bad, why did the Biden administration keep a number of the Trump tariffs in place? (paraphrased)

• Would you support any restrictions on a woman's right to an abortion?

• Why did the administration wait until six months before the election to act (on immigration), and would you have done anything differently from President Biden on this?

• How do you respond to claims that the Justice Department has been weaponized against political opponents? (paraphrased)

• In your last run for president, you said you wanted to ban fracking. Now you don't. You wanted mandatory government buyback programs for assault weapons. Now your campaign says you don't. You supported decriminalizing border crossings. Now you're taking a harder line. I know you say that your values have not changed. So then why have so many of your policy positions changed?

• Do you believe Donald Trump is trying to suppress the vote? (paraphrased)

• How would you break the stalemate in the Middle East? (paraphrased)

• How would you deal with Vladimir Putin, and would it be any different from what we're seeing from President Biden?

• Have you ever met Vladimir Putin?

• Do you believe you bear any responsibility in the way that withdrawal (from Afghanistan) played out?

• In 2017, you supported Bernie Sanders' proposal to do away with private insurance and create a government-run health care system. Two years later, you proposed a plan that included a private insurance option. What is your plan today?

Questions asked of Trump

• Do you believe Americans can afford higher prices because of tariffs?

• You've changed your position on abortion so many times, why should voters trust you? (paraphrased)

• Would you veto a national abortion ban?

• Why did you try to kill that (bipartisan immigration) bill, and successfully so?

• What does (“mass deportation”) look like? Will authorities be going door to door in this country?

• Is there anything you regret about what you did on (Jan. 6, 2021) ?

• How would you negotiate with Netanyahu and also Hamas, in order to get the hostages out and prevent the killing of more innocent civilians in Gaza?

• Do you believe it's in the U.S.’ best interests for Ukraine to win this war?

• Why do you believe it's appropriate to weigh in on the racial identity of your opponent?

• Do you have a (health care) plan, and can you tell us what it is?

If it’s not too tough a question, how do you argue for the contention that the questions for Trump were unfair, especially since Trump took the last word in just about every exchange?

Chris Jones responds:

Sure.

So here is one example. Harris was asked, "Do you believe Donald Trump is trying to suppress the vote?" an easy cue to rail on Trump (not that he did not deserve it, but that was not our point). Trump got no such attack prompt. 

Here is another: "If tariffs are so bad, why did the Biden administration keep a number of the Trump tariffs in place?” On the one hand, that seems like a challenge to Harris, but look at the first conditional part of the sentence. No equivalence for Trump.

Or compare this very reasonable and respectful question, "Would you support any restrictions on a woman's right to an abortion?” (Harris) to this one, "You've changed your position on abortion so many times, why should voters trust you?" (Trump). Completely different tone. Dripping with condescension for Trump. 

Or compare: "In 2017 you supported Bernie Sanders' proposal to do away with private insurance and create a government-run health care system. Two years later, you proposed a plan that included a private insurance option. What is your plan today?" (Not that hard to parlay), to this one for Trump: "Why do you believe it's appropriate to weigh in on the racial identity of your opponent?" which socks in right in the gut and was near impossible for him to wriggle out of. No Harris equivalent, especially on immigration. 

I could go on, especially if you include how the questions were asked, but that is what we were talking about. Our point was not about who deserved what, and I'm sure Harris supporters would say he deserved every one of those challenges (as would we), but those simply are not questions on the same level of challenge. If you remove partisan blinkers. Which is not easy to do, of course, thanks to Trump's destruction of norms. 

My response to Jones:

Please. This bill of particulars is weak. "If tariffs are so bad …” is not conditional, it is simply paraphrasing Harris’ criticism of Trump’s tariffs, not assuming the truth of the matter. The question essentially accuses her of hypocrisy.

"Would you support any restrictions on a woman's right to an abortion?” is amplifying Trump’s contention that Democrats want no restrictions on the right to an abortion including post-birth “abortions.” It was a phony MAGA talking point dressed up as a question.

The question about her shifting positions on health insurance (and fracking) is in essence accusing her of opportunistic flipping, very similar to the question Trump got on abortion.

Harris got asked about immigration. Trump did not, despite his toxic rhetoric on the subject (though he did manage to amplify the lies about Haitian immigrants eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio).

Asking presidential candidates about their past statements and how they plan to keep their promises is not just fair, but necessary and very in bounds. Yet you chose to amplify Trump’s bleating grievances that he’s being treated unfairly — the debate was “three against one”? C’mon man! — when both candidates got sharp questions and Trump sucked up more air time and took the last word in virtually every exchange.

If anything, the questions Trump got were too general, too soft and too easy for him to parlay with his meandering bluster.

Cheer Chat

Rehearsal sessions are underway for the 26th annual Songs of Good Cheer winter holiday sing-along programs at the Old Town School of Folk Music. SOGC is hosted by Mary Schmich and me and features an all-star band of local musicians and a full auditorium of vocalists with their songbooks open.

As is our custom, the first meeting — Monday afternoon — was a discussion session in which just a few of us got together in an Old Town School classroom to audition a few songs and begin sketching out possible set lists on the chalkboard.

I was pleased to get the green light — or maybe it’s a yellow light— for “Besançon Carol,” a jaunty Christmas song of French origin from the 1800s that’s also known as “Shepherd's Shake Off Your Drowsy Sleep.” I’m angling for it to be our opening number — unfamiliar, yes, but very easy and fun to sing along with when we make it more like a pub song and less like a hymn.

My castmates were not enthusiastic about my other nomination, “Sound, Sound Your Instruments of Joy,” a somewhat complicated fugue but very stirring. Maybe next year?

Weekly rehearsals start in earnest this Sunday — a bit later than usual — and it looks as though we have the same band as the last several years. Join us! Tickets are now on sale now at the Old Town School of Folk Music.

Mary Schmich: I have measured out my life in coffee filters

My former colleague Mary Schmich posts occasional column-like entries on Facebook. Here, reprinted with permission, is a recent offering:

I had that thought this morning when I put the last of my coffee filters into the cone and wondered where they’d all gone. Wasn’t it just last week that I bought a big new box of filters?

No, it must have been at least 100 mornings ago, since that’s how many filters are in a box. It would have been early summer. And now it’s early fall. In that time I've drunk 100 cups of coffee.

A life measured in coffee filters. Why had this deep thought never occurred to me before?

I pretty quickly realized that my deep thought was at least partially stolen from that T.S. Eliot poem people my age once had to learn in school, though Eliot said, “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”

Wherever it came from in my brain, the measurement felt apt, and the rest of the morning I found myself thinking of the other routine ways I measure out my life.

By the angle of the sun. Reading up on the roof as the sun came up, I noticed that the sun had shifted a couple of buildings to the right. It felt like a sudden shift but it must have happened over some days, without my noticing. The earth spinning, time moving.

And I measure out my life in the pages of the book I’ve been reading. I’m 400 pages in. How many days was that? Twenty? However many, those days are gone. Two hundred pages and some days still to go.

I have no thought deeper than that to share here, but would be glad to know the little ways you measure out your days.

Now I have to go buy some coffee filters. And start the count all over.

Minced Words

Austin Berg, Cate Plys, Marj Halperin and I joined host John Williams for this week’s episode of the award-winning “The Mincing Rascals” podcast. We reviewed Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate between Republican JD Vance and Democrat Tim Walz, and I pushed back on the idea that Walz did a lousy job. Yes, Vance came off looking better for those who didn’t recognize his deceptions and who buy into the idea that a vice president is in charge of policy — Walz fouled off some fat pitches and was not as polished or prepared as Vance. But are there really voters out there who are thinking, “Well, I wasn’t going to vote for Trump, but Vance is less obnoxious than I thought so …”? I doubt it.

The panel also discussed the situation at Gompers Park on the Northwest Side, where The Restore Gompers Park Coalition is demanding the removal of an encampment of approximately 25 tents occupied by unhoused people, and city officials are saying they don’t have the money.

We also discussed Axios Chicago’s “Most Annoying Intersection” poll and the latest in the Chicago Public Schools tiff.

Subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts. Or bookmark this page. If you’re not a podcast listener, you can hear an edited version of the show at 8 p.m. most Saturday evenings on WGN-AM 720.

Read the background bios of some regular panelists here.

Quotables

A collection of compelling, sometimes appalling passages I’ve encountered lately

If you don't like sports, you are missing a whole world of easygoing conversations with complete strangers. — @Punished_Stu

They say there are no atheists in foxholes. I bet there aren't many libertarians in a flood waiting for the free market to rescue them. — Bruce Bartlett

Women are not some piece of collectively owned community property the disposition of which is decided by majority vote. Forcing a woman to carry an unwanted, not-yet-viable fetus to term violates her constitutional rights to liberty and privacy, even taking into consideration whatever bundle of rights the not-yet-viable fetus may have. For these women, the liberty of privacy means that they alone should choose whether they serve as human incubators for the five months leading up to viability. It is not for a legislator, a judge, or a Commander from “The Handmaid’s Tale” to tell these women what to do with their bodies during this period when the fetus cannot survive outside the womb any more so than society could — or should — force them to serve as a human tissue bank or to give up a kidney for the benefit of another. — Superior Court of Fulton County (Georgia) Judge Robert McBurney, ruling Monday that the state’s Living Infants Fairness and Equality Act, or LIFE Act, infringes on a woman’s state constitutional rights

JD Vance gave an astonishingly impressive (debate) performance that was all wrapped up in the aura of a winner. With those piercing eyes and that perfectly coiffed hair, his FM-DJ-meets-Fox-News voice, and his absolute refusal to get riled about anything, even if it was one of his pet ideologies (like the evils of immigration), he worked the debate stage with remarkable panache. He had confidence; he had calm; he had a Mona Lisa smile that allowed him to stay above the fray. And, to my surprise, he had a touch of what Ronald Reagan did — the ability to make all his statements sound like a form of assurance. That was true even when he was selling pure malarkey.   He argued that Donald Trump … was the savior of the Affordable Care Act! That the scuttling of the Iran nuclear deal was somehow not Trump’s doing, and that the Republican policy on women’s reproductive rights is all about generous, open-minded ideas of helping people find progressive ways to create families. He dodged questions he didn’t like by going off on tangents he never returned from. And he kept dipping into two grand canards that he inflated to the level of mythology. The first was that Kamala Harris is to blame for everything under the sun you don’t like. … But his other epic lie, and this was the insidious one, was to simply wipe away reality and treat Donald Trump’s presidency as if it were a lost utopia of rising wages and world peace and low inflation and — what about those corporate tax cuts? Oh yes! — trickle-down prosperity. — Owen Gleiberman, Variety

JD Vance’s absurd answer to how he and Trump would deal with insurers refusing to cover preexisting conditions? “We already have a law that bans that.” Yeah, we do. It’s called Obamacare! — Laurence Tribe

I didn't realize how many things were migrants’ fault! Like, we all know they're coming up here stealing all the jobs, criming all the crime — obviously. But before tonight, I didn't realize that the outrageous price I paid for my home was in fact because of migrants. I didn't realize that my momma’s and JD's momma's pill addictions, that wasn't Big Pharma, that was migrants! I didn't realize that me and JD's kids, they're taking active shooter drills every other semester in school because of migrants. Who knew? — Trae Crowder

Trump, by any normal standard, has lost it, mentally and emotionally. His speech — at rallies, and most noticeably at the debate — consists of rambling, apocalyptic, nonsensical, hate-filled rhetoric and lies. He’s saying crazier and crazier things in order to get attention – which the media is giving him – but it’s hard to see that any of it is winning over more voters. Harris has effectively undermined the image of Trump as some sort of inevitable strongman, and instead has cast him as a failed rich-kid with no plan beyond turning Americans against each other. — Dan Froomkin

Trump does not merely break norms. He has broken the norm, the indispensable norm for the continuation of the republic, the norm first set by George Washington when he retired from office, the norm that changed the entire world for the better: accepting the results of an election. This is the meaning of America, and Trump despises it. I do not think this is even within his personal control. He is so genuinely psychologically warped that he has never and will never agree to the most basic requirement of public office: that you quit when you lose; and that the system is more important than any individual in it. … Creepy admiration for foreign tyrants has profoundly discredited a sane and responsible retrenchment of American power. His demonization of legal and illegal immigrants delegitimizes serious arguments for stronger control of immigration. … So I will vote for Harris, despite my profound reservations about her. Because I have no profound reservations about (Trump). I know who he is and what he is. I know what forces he is conjuring and the extremes to which he will gladly take his own personal crusade. To abstain, though temptingly pure, is a cop-out. — Andrew Sullivan

As president, Trump worked in a partisan way with Republicans to try to destroy ACA, endorsing legislation that would have rescinded the law's insurance subsidies and prohibitions on charging higher prices to people with pre-existing conditions; the push fell one vote short in the Senate. He used executive actions to cut funding for programs to sign people up for coverage on the law's marketplaces. He also asked the Supreme Court to wipe out the ACA in its entirety in 2020 — the case failed. — Sahil Kapur of NBC News

Maybe I’m just a partisan hack, but I think sending a murderous horde to the U.S. Capitol was a bigger threat to democracy than not being allowed to suggest horse paste to treat COVID on Facebook. — Andrew Lawrence

Quips

In Tuesday’s paid-subscriber editions, I present my favorite social media posts that rely on visual humor. Subscribers vote for their favorite, and I post the winner here every Thursday:

The new nominees for Quip of the Week:

• When I say “I hate drama,” I mean I hate being involved in drama. Other people’s drama? Big fan. — @chabcharu

• Satan's greatest trick is convincing you he's not real, but there's a quality drop-off after that. No. 2 is pretending his thumb is your nose. — @ItsAndyRyan

• I’m sorry, but you can’t always be experiencing a higher volume of calls than average. That’s not how averages work. — @Kit_Yates_Maths

• Tupperware is filing for bankruptcy. They would have kept a lid on the news but they couldn't find one. — @RodLacroix

• When I was a little girl, I always dreamed of growing up to satisfy user needs in a way that meets business goals for transformative outcomes. — @ChappellTracker

• Wait. We're now turning plants into burgers? Haven't cows been doing that, like, forever? — @UncleBob56

• I always respond to any news of minor inconveniences with "I feared this day would come." "We're out of paper towels." "I feared this day would come." "The litter box needs cleaning." "I feared this day would come." — @RunwayDan

• I've been accused of being a plagiarist. Their words, not mine. — @BobGolen

• Brown chicken brown cow. Brown chicken brown cow. Brown chicken brown cow. Brown chicken brown cow … ‘80’s porn music. You’re saying this out loud in your head right now, aren’t you? — @GrillinChillin9

• Nobody ever talks about how Sodom and Gomorrah were walkable cities. — @doubtpointv2

Vote here and check the current results in the poll.

For instructions and guidelines regarding the poll, click here.

Why the new name for this feature? See “I’m rebranding ‘Tweet of the Week’ in a gesture of contempt for Elon Musk.” For a bit of schadenfreude, see CNN’s story, “Elon Musk’s X is worth nearly 80% less than when he bought it, Fidelity estimates.”

Good Sports

Guaranteed adequate

Johanna and I spent a lovely but unfulfilling afternoon last Thursday at Guaranteed Rate Field hoping in vain that the White Sox would lose their 121st game of the season and we would be witnesses to history.

Instead they won — in fact, just like the nearly as dreadful 2003 Detroit Tigers, the Sox won five of their last six games. But they were unable to stave off their 121st loss of the season and finish 41-121 for a winning percentage of .253, better than the 1962 Mets, who finished 40-120 (.250) because of a rained-out doubleheader that was never made up.

So, somehow, the Sox set the record for most losses in a season but avoided the title of worst team in the last 100 years. In fact, as was outlined in Tuesday’s Picayune Plus, they are only the fifth worst team in baseball’s modern era (post-1900) because of their improbable run of victories at the end of the season.

Anyway, we had a lovely time at Guaranteed Rate Field, and I came away even more vehemently opposed to taxpayer funding of a new stadium for the White Sox.

It’s fine. Clean. Modern enough. A nice variety of food offerings. Sure, it has drawbacks — it’s surrounded by parking lots, not dining and other entertainment venues; the upper deck is a long way from the action. But these drawbacks were well known in the early 1990s when the stadium was built, and as a taxpayer, I’ll be switched if I’m going to help pay for a new stadium because of mistakes made by private business interests three decades ago.

‘Legalizing Sports Gambling Was a Huge Mistake’

Charles Fain Lehman in the Atlantic writes:

The rise of sports gambling has caused a wave of financial and familial misery, one that falls disproportionately on the most economically precarious households. Six years into the experiment, the evidence is convincing: Legalizing sports gambling was a huge mistake. …

Two recent working papers look at the economic impacts of legalization. One, by Northwestern University’s Scott Baker and colleagues, finds that legal sports gambling depletes households’ savings. Specifically, for every $1 spent on betting, households put $2 less into investment accounts. …

A second paper, from the economists Brett Hollenbeck of UCLA and Poet Larsen and Davide Proserpio of the University of Southern California, tells a similar story. Looking specifically at online sports gambling, they find that legalization increases the risk that a household goes bankrupt by 25 to 30 percent, and increases debt delinquency. …

The industry may claim to want to prevent problem gambling, but its profits largely come from the compulsions of people with a problem. … (This) is damage worth undoing. If the states are “laboratories of democracy,” then the results of their experiment with sports gambling are in, and they are uniformly negative. Better to end the study now than prolong the suffering.

As one who does not gamble on sports, I’m uncomfortable to a bit sickened by the relentless advertising from DraftKings, FanDuel and other online sportsbooks, but it does make we wonder if Major League Baseball — now in bed with the bookies — should relent and allow the just-deceased Pete Rose into the Hall of Fame. Yes, he gambled on baseball including games in which he was involved as a player and manager. This violated a very important rule, but there’s no evidence his wagering ever impacted events on the field, and he was without a doubt one of the most valuable, skilled players in the history of the game.

Some very unpleasant men and some brazen violators of other rules are in the hall. Your view?

Tune of the Week

I’ve been opening up Tune of the Week nominations in an effort to bring some newer sounds to the mix. I’m asking readers to use the comments area for paid subscribers or to email me to leave nominations (post-2000 releases, please!) along with YouTube links and at least a few sentences explaining why the nominated song is meaningful or delightful to you.

In May 2023, I noted the recent deaths of two of my longtime musical favorites, Harry Belafonte and Gordon Lightfoot, and asked, “Can someone please do a wellness check on Kris Kristofferson?” Well, Kristofferson’s death Saturday at 88 inspires me to link to an early Tune of the Week entry, “Loving Her Was Easier Than Anything I’ll Ever Do Again,” my favorite song of his, and to add another.

I thought long and hard about what my second favorite Kristofferson song might be — I nearly wore out the grooves on his early albums even though I was too young to understand the themes of heartache, depression, frustration and addiction to which his lyrics so often returned — and eventually settled on “Help Me Make It Through the Night” from his debut album in 1970.

I don't care who's right or wrong
I don't try to understand
Let the devil take tomorrow
Lord tonight I need a friend 
 
Yesterday is dead and gone
And tomorrow's out of sight
And it's sad to be alone
Help me make it through the night

The Guardian’s Michael Hann describes the song:

The story goes that an Esquire interviewer asked Frank Sinatra what he believed in. “Booze, broads or a Bible – whatever helps me make it through the night,” he replied. And from that line Kristofferson conjured his most enduring hit. It’s a love song that isn’t a love song – the singer doesn’t want to give, only take (even if they say “All I’m taking is your time”). They do not care about right or wrong, they do not want to understand. They want only to be held. It’s surprisingly complex, about dependency more than commitment.

Tammy Wynette, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley covered “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” as did Joan Baez, Gladys Knight & the Pips and many others.

Those who knew Kristofferson primarily as an actor may have been unaware of his genius as a songwriter. His New York Times obituary noted his “distinctive mix of vernacular and sophisticated idioms” and his “keen melodic sensibility.”

On Facebook, Mary Schmich wrote:

One of the most exciting things about going to Pomona College in the 1970s was that Kris Kristofferson had gone there in the '50s. Even more exciting was that he was a star of the English department--back when being the star of an English department was considered really cool.

Mistakes were made

When I become aware of errors in the Picayune Sentinel, I quickly correct them in the online version, but since many of you read just the email version, which I can’t correct after the fact, I will use this space periodically to alert you to meaningful mistakes I’ve made. (Not typos, in other words.)

Well, last week’s issue had a typo so bad that I need to make sure to correct it. My lengthy item about the high drama involving Mayor Brandon Johnson, the Chicago Public Schools board and the Chicago Teachers Union, I quoted a statement from 24 alders, three former CPS CEOs, City Clerk Anna Valencia and Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza that concluded “Chicago needs more physical discipline, not less.”

It should have been “fiscal” discipline, though many readers did delight in my mistake and wondered if there might be some truth in it.

When I was at the Tribune, writers who erred needed to fill out a mea culpa form that asked us to answer the introspective question that went something like, “How did this error occur?”

“Brain fart” was usually the honest answer. “I assumed I knew something that wasn’t accurate” was another.

Here, I relied on a voice-to-text transcription made because I had only an image of the memo, not a text version of it, and so I read the text aloud for Microsoft Word to transcribe. I skimmed the result, as did several other people who read the text in advance, and didn’t notice that the program had heard “physical discipline” and not “fiscal discipline.”

I regret that oversight and have corrected it in the online version.

In keeping with the theme, I posted a note about this error twice in Tuesday’s Picayune Plus!

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