2025, Day 2

Here in North Carolina yesterday, Josh Stein assumed office as our 76^th Governor. He immediately promised to sue the legislature to force them to reveal where they had hidden all his boards, commissions, staff, and warm gloves. Stein promised to search every abandoned tobacco shed and church basement until he located the unfortunate kidnap victims. Former Lt. Governor Mark Robinson is said to be mounting a militia of black nazi “minisoldrs” to thwart Stein’s efforts.

As part of the Helene catastrophe’s namesake legislation (The Disaster Recovery Act of 2024—Part III”) that moved all those folks and severely limited Stein’s ability to name replacements, the State Assembly yesterday followed through on their promise to not give any money to people suffering from the Helene flooding until they beg for it. The exact nature of the begging is to be determined in future legislative sessions.

In the meantime, the effort to end public education in North Carolina proceeds apace. Senior Senator “Ham” Burger is delighted to announce that more white people than ever can receive state money to send their children to segregated religious schools. The whippersnappers will be treated to a curriculum of evangelism, elementary boot-licking, advanced ass-kissing, and Russian, taught by native-speaking H-2B visa recipients.

Elsewhere in the U.S., this:

And so we did, with 10 dead and more than 30 injured in a attack by a veteran from Texas driving his pickup truck into a crowd of revelers in New Orleans. In Queens, a mass shooting left 10 teenagers wounded. The shooters were in a car with out-of-state plates, which means not fuck-all, as far as I can figure. And in LAS VEGAS, a badly-folded cardboard box provided the pièce de resistance:

To which Elon Musk responded:

To which, anti-immigration MAGAs all over the country responded, “hold my beer.”

Sigh. Here at home things are tightening up. We’ve run out of champagne and the cassoulet supplies are running low. We are reduced to eating Hoppin’ John with cornbread, washed down with gin and red wine. The horror. Soon, we will be sober, and will have to bear the reality of Day 3.