Judge invokes Orwell in ruling on slavery exhibit

Posted on February 18, 2026 by oddmanout215

“Are they really gonna put that stuff back?” Swamp Rabbit said. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

He’s right, the battle isn’t over, but censorship foes will appreciate the literary allusion made by U.S. District Judge Cynthia M. Rufe this week when she ordered reinstallation of the slavery exhibit at the President’s House Site in Philadelphia:

“As if the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984 now existed, with its motto ‘Ignorance is Strength,’ this Court is now asked to determine whether the federal government has the power it claims — to dissemble and disassemble historical truths when it has some domain over historical facts… It does not.”

The exhibit features educational signage and video honoring nine enslaved people George Washington kept at his house at the site, which is in Independence National Historical Park, a few miles from my swampy home. Workers removed the exhibit last month in a move that’s part of the Trump administration’s campaign to erase “anti-American ideology” at National Park Service locations around the country.

“That’s funny,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Ain’t nothin’ more anti-American than Donald Trump.”

Footnote: The National Park Service, a bureau of the Department of the Interior, has appealed the judge’s ruling, which will remain in effect pending the outcome of a lawsuit filed by the City of Philadelphia that challenges the removal of the exhibit.

Update: It seems Swamp Rabbit’s question has been answered. Today, after noticing the Trump administration’s “failure to comply” with her Monday ruling, Rufe imposed a deadline. Her new order states that the Park Service must reinstall the slavery exhibit by 5 pm Friday. Let’s see if they follow through.

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So easy to love — for a while

Posted on February 15, 2026 by oddmanout215

My annoying neighbor Swamp Rabbit was addressing my tendency to be late with everything. “Yesterday was Valentine’s Day, Odd Man. Today is just another day.”

I told him I was working yesterday and didn’t have time to think about love, though I did wonder why so many women were wearing red.

“It takes time to make a playlist of good love songs,” I said. “Not that you would know. Last year all you could think of were regret songs. Love-gone-wrong songs. I rejected them.”

He scoffed at my list for this year. “The Zombies song is a valentine, and Van Morrison, but most of the others ain’t. Captain Beefheart, James Brown, that creepy Randy Newman number. That’s a lust song, not a love song.”

“What’s the difference?” I said.

“Ha. The fact that you’re askin’ that question helps explain your lousy track record with women.”

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‘Hilarious’ Pam Bondi shields Epstein’s pals

Posted on February 14, 2026 by oddmanout215

From an opinion article in the Los Angeles Times noting “the unwittingly hilarious performance” of Attn. Gen. Pam Bondi as she defended the DOJ’s mishandling of the Epstein files at a House hearing this week:

Viewers were left asking themselves if the over-the-top dramatics they witnessed were in fact a midweek “SNL” comedy sketch, with Amy Poehler playing Bondi. But on second thought, no one is better at playing The Entitled Mean Girl than Bondi herself…

…If “SNL” does decide to spin a sketch out of the most unprofessional testimony ever by a U.S. attorney general, how can it ever top the show we just saw?

“It can’t,” I told my dissolute neighbor Swamp Rabbit. “Bondi actually posted a photo of the Saturday Night Live crew lampooning her back in October, after her bratty performance at a Senate hearing. She was even brattier this time, at the House hearing. She’s corrupt and proud of it.”

Swamp Rabbit scowled. “You’re crazy. Lots of peeps will laugh if SNL re-enacts the House hearing.”

“They might chuckle for a second, but then it will sink in,” I replied. “This is the U.S. attorney general mocking the law! It’s not funny.”

At the House hearing, Bondi ignored the committee members’ questions — why hasn’t the DOJ indicted any of the big shots named in the Epstein files, etc. Instead, she voiced fanatical praise of Donald Trump and tossed insults at her interrogators. Jewish House member Becca Balint is antisemitic, Bondi implied. Jamie Raskin is “a washed-up loser lawyer.” And so on.

I told Swamp Rabbit that Bondi didn’t sound like an AG as she testified, but rather like the unswervingly loyal female devotees of Charles Manson who were tried and convicted of the Tate-LaBianca murders more than fifty years ago.

“Now you’ve jumped the shark,” Swamp Rabbit said. “You can’t compare Bondi to them Manson girls.”

“You’re right,” I conceded. “Charlie’s girls were a lot younger than Bondi when they were cult members.”

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Jeff Bezos as Charles Foster Kane

Posted on February 9, 2026 by oddmanout215

Kudos to Bernie Sanders for stating the obvious about the billionaire weasel responsible for the ongoing decline of a top-tier newspaper:

Jeff Bezos could afford to spend $75 million on the Melania movie and $500 million for a yacht to sail off to his $55 million wedding and give his wife a $5 million ring, please don’t tell me he needed to fire one-third of the Washington Post staff.

My neighbor Swamp Rabbit and I discussed events leading up to the firings while watching some of the most boring Super Bowl ever. (Not even Bad Bunny could save it.)

Bezos bought the Post in 2013 and seemed serious about positioning the newspaper for future success, but his support slacked off in a big way, especially after Donald Trump started threatening media institutions during his re-election campaign.

A yes man was hired to be the Post‘s new publisher and another yes man for opinions editor. More than 250,000 readers canceled their subscriptions soon after the newspaper withdrew its endorsement of Kamala Harris for president. Bezos cozied up to Trump and contributed big money to his inauguration. The Post‘s editorials and news stories began tilting to the right. Many talented reporters and editors and columnists jumped ship. The suspicion grew that Bezos had become Trump’s lapdog in order to ensure his other business interests wouldn’t be sabotaged by our criminal-in-chief.

The biggest blow to Bezos’s credibility came just last week when 300 Post employees were laid off as part of a so-called restructuring effort. (The sports department and books coverage were axed, the Metro staff downsized, etc.)

I told Swamp Rabbit a tiny sliver of the Amazon founder’s wealth could have saved those jobs. He replied, “Bezos is a businessman. Maybe he decided it was time to stop backing a loser.”

I noted that Bezos is the guy who chose the motto “Democracy dies in darkness” to assure readers that the Post would never allow outside forces to undermine its independence and integrity. I thought of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, in which Charles Foster Kane (a fictionalized William Randolph Hearst) buys an ailing newspaper and issues a grandiose “declaration of principles” that he betrays when his power corrupts him.

“You ain’t got time for that lofty shit,” Swamp Rabbit said. “F&%# Bezos. You should just take care of what you got and count your blessings.”

He was right. I have a shack in Bog Water Homes, reliable running shoes, a cabinet full of Triscuits, and Thoughts and Prayers, my highly civilized cats. But that’s no excuse. What if everybody decided to simply ignore the fact that a coterie of smug billionaires was working with the MAGA crowd to weaken our democracy from within?

“You sound like one of them conspiracy kooks,” Swamp Rabbit said. And then, after a pause, “But I ain’t saying you’re wrong.”

Footnote: Kane ran a media empire. Bezos has only one newspaper, but he runs a retail empire bigger than anything Kane could have imagined.

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It’s Groundhog Day. Six more weeks of deep freeze?

Posted on February 2, 2026 by oddmanout215

I was deep into my writing routine when someone knocked on my door, derailing my train of thought. It was my neighbor Swamp Rabbit, seeking a ride to the liquor store so he wouldn’t have to brave the icy streets on foot. But my ancient Honda, parked out front, was still stuck in the snow despite my recent attempts to dig it out.

Swamp Rabbit told me it was an emergency, he had drained his last bottle, it would be my fault if he got the shakes and heard the chains of hell rattling. And when was the weather going to change? This cold snap was worse than the winter of ’96. Today was Groundhog Day — was he doomed to wake up and endure this same nasty day over and over, like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, the movie?

“Quit whining,” I said. “Just be glad you’re not in Ukraine, where it’s 20 below zero and everyone is dodging Russian drones.”

But I felt bad for my mangy friend, even though he hadn’t helped me try to free my car last week. Good neighbor that I am, I ventured outside and hacked away at the ice around the Honda’s tires until my shovel broke. “That’s what you get for buying a plastic shovel,” he said. “Now what do we do?”

I dragged him up Swamp Road to where two husky young guys with metal shovels were struggling to free a two-ton SUV that was stuck in a drift. The woman behind the wheel was good-looking and probably accustomed to the kindness of strangers. I got behind the SUV with the other guys and we pushed until she was able to coax her shiny gas guzzler onto the asphalt. Swamp Rabbit shuffled up to the driver’s-side window and talked her into giving him a ride to the liquor store.

One of the young guys lives on the other side of Swamp Road. As he was leaving I borrowed his shovel and then dug out my car, only to discover the battery was dead. I thought about crossing the road to ask the guy for a jump, but I was too tired to bother.

Swamp Rabbit returned and I told him I’d decided to let my car sit where it is until the weather breaks. “This is South Philly,” I said. “If I drive somewhere there won’t be any parking spaces when I get back.”

“Quit whining,” he said as he broke the seal on his new bottle. “Just be glad you ain’t in Ukraine.”

Update: Almost forgot — Punxsutawney Phil, the famed groundhog prognosticator, saw his own shadow yesterday. Bundle up.

Posted in climate change, environmentalism, humor, mainstream media, movies, Philadelphia, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Where have all the protest songs gone?

Posted on January 31, 2026 by oddmanout215

I was telling my neighbor Swamp Rabbit that Bruce Springsteen’s new song about the DHS murders in Minneapolis is heartfelt and timely. Too bad the melody is dreary, the vocal overwrought and the likelihood of the song changing the beliefs of MAGA morons almost nil. Is this the best protest song we can expect to hear?

Swamp Rabbit, trying to be cute, started singing “Where have all the protest songs gone?” to the melody of Pete Seeger’s old chestnut, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”

This was his way of mocking my question, I figured. More accurately, his way of dismissing the idea that protest songs can motivate great numbers of people to play an active role in advancing worthy causes.

“The Boss is preaching to the choir,” he said. “You said it yourself — that song ain’t gonna change them yahoos who think it’s OK to kidnap peeps and send ’em to torture camps.”

I told him we should at least give Springsteen credit for struggling against the tide in a time when so few artists seem to have a social conscience. “Streets of Minneapolis” won’t move the MAGA crowd, but it might compel apathetic liberals to march in rallies, call Congress and vote in the midterms. Maybe it will spark widespread feelings of community and common purpose, like “Blowin’ in the Wind” or “What’s Goin’ On” or “Ohio” in the old days.

“Them days are gone,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Now there’s Spotify and TikTok and so on. The music biz is cranking out more songs than ever, but they’re like candy corn. Pop tart songs. The peeps eat them for the sugar rush, quick as a blink. Even the hits don’t last. They ain’t made to last. This ain’t 1968.”

I told him there was a lot of candy corn in 1968, too, but also a lot of good songs, even good protest songs. Songs you could sink your teeth into.

He laughed his grisly laugh and said, “If there are good protest songs now, most peeps ain’t hearin’ ’em. They been conditioned to go for the candy corn, it’s cheaper and easy to swallow. Serious songs give ’em indigestion.”

I shook my head and said, “Man, I thought I was the cynical one. You’re a real mess.”

“You ain’t foolin’ me, Odd Man,” he replied. “You use Spotify all the time so you can play all them old boomer songs. But you know we can’t stop what’s coming.”

“Especially when it’s already here,” he added.

Footnote: Swamp Rabbit is mostly right but the current protest music scene is not completely bleak. The folksinger/guitar strummer Jesse Welles, a talented agitator who writes with Dylanesque humor, makes videos that have generated huge followings on TikTok and Instagram. Check out “Join ICE.” If you’re an old dude like me, you may not have heard Joseph Torrell, Jensen McRae or Mon Rovîa either.

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Fun in the sun at five above

Posted on January 27, 2026 by oddmanout215

It was 14 degrees above zero in Philly today and five above when the wind blew.

“At least the sun is shining,” my neighbor Swamp Rabbit said as he watched me shovel the snow that had buried my ancient Honda.

I asked him to help me dig out instead of standing around with a beer in his hand. He sang a verse from “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere.”

“I’ll help out when you stop writing about that hog monster in the White House,” he said. “You’re gonna drop dead you keep obsessin’ about his ICE gestapo. Ain’t nothin’ you can do about it.”

Swamp Rabbit is like my late grandmother’s boyfriend, a chain-smoking freeloader named Enzo who used to bum cigarette money from my mother, whose name was Josephine. They would yap about world problems and Enzo would shrug and say, “It’s a mess but what are you gonna do, Jo?”

I reminded my decrepit neighbor that the ICE gestapo had murdered two upstanding citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, while conducting their war on dark-skinned immigrants in Minneapolis. I told him to phone our Republican senator, the Trump lapdog and former hedge fund operator Dave McCormick, and demand that he oppose additional funding for ICE and Customs and Border Protection.

“That won’t work,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Besides, things might change.”

He told me that Border Patrol boss Gregory Bovino had just been replaced in Minneapolis by “border czar” Tom Homan, the bullethead who allegedly accepted a $50,000 bribe two years ago during an undercover FBI operation.

I referred him to a column by humorist Andy Borowitz headlined “Trump Replaces Asshole with Alternate Asshole.”

“It’s no good getting rid of a rotten apple if every apple in the barrel is rotten,” I said.

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Slavery in the cradle of liberty? Say it ain’t so!

Posted on January 25, 2026 by oddmanout215

Here we go again. Last week I wrote about the goons at the Smithsonian who took steps to erase the history of Donald Trump’s impeachments. This week the goons were in Philadelphia, at the President’s House site in Independence National Historical Park, a few miles from where I live, erasing information about slavery in America.

My neighbor Swamp Rabbit shook his head. “Trump erasing history is old news. Why don’t you fixate on some other story?”

“There is no other story, you dummy.”

I told him that Trump’s removal of the informational plaques at the site — crowbars and jumbo pliers were used to take them down — is in keeping with his efforts to erase much of his own shameful history. He would have us forget his impeachments, his attempts to invalidate the 2020 election results, his leading role in the Jan. 6 insurrection, his felony convictions, his involvement with the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, his embrace of the tyrant Putin, his —

“Enough,” Swamp Rabbit shouted. “What’s the point of restating the obvious? His MAGA fans ain’t listening.”

“My point is he’s getting worse,” I said. “The removal of the memorial to the nine enslaved people that George Washington kept at that site is another test of how much longer sane people will allow Trump and his goons to falsify the past and the present. To remain in control, that is.”

“If you say so, Odd Man. What about the 25th Amendment?”

“Sure, Trump could be pushed out with a letter from his cabinet, or a Congress-appointed group, stating that he’s not a capable president. The problem is he chose his horrible cabinet members, and they’re not likely to turn on him. Neither will the Republican suck-ups who control Congress.”

“What about the midterms?” Swamp Rabbit said, sipping whisky from his broken cup. “The Democrats could go for impeachment again if they get a majority in Congress.”

“You’re assuming a dictator will allow free and fair elections. Dream on, dude, and drink up.”

Footnote: Documents drawn up in colonial Philly — the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution — were milestones in human progress, but that’s no reason to pretend there’s no nasty side to American history… For what it’s worth, Philly has filed suit against the Trump administration and the National Park Service regarding removal of the slavery exhibit.

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These days, it’s the goons who wear masks

Posted on January 22, 2026 by oddmanout215

My neighbor Swamp Rabbit was complaining about recent history. An odious fraud comes to power and proceeds to make a mockery of existing laws. Fools and bigots rally around him. The elected officials who could rein him in encourage him and his lackeys to create chaos on a daily basis. How could these things be happening in 2026?

“The more things change, the more they stay the same,” I said, trotting out the hoariest of cliches.

“That ain’t true,” Swamp Rabbit replied. “Not when it comes to masking.”

I realized he was talking about facemasks. A few years ago, sane people wore masks to help limit the spread of the Covid-19 virus. Rightwing goons and nincompoops ridiculed them and called them “woke.” They accused mask wearers of trying to abolish their God-given right to do as they pleased, even as hundreds of thousands of Americans became infected with the virus and died.

“Everything has flipped,” my crusty neighbor explained. “Most of them woke peeps put away their masks when the pandemic cooled down. It’s the goons who are masking now.”

He meant members of the huge, militarized gang called Immigration and Customs Enforcement, usually referred to as ICE. The heavily armed and armored ICE agents get media coverage every day. They wear masks not for health reasons but rather to hide their identities as they stalk, chase, beat, abduct, jail, deport and sometimes shoot people who seem alien to them, all for the purpose of discouraging immigration to the United States. They get paid to eliminate undesirables and scare everyone else.

“They’re a private army, Odd Man, just like the Gestapo.”

“You’re wrong,” I reply. “The Gestapo wore fedoras, not masks.”

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Insurrection? I don’t remember that.

Posted on January 19, 2026 by oddmanout215

From The New York Times, another reminder that being a dictator means having the power to replace the historical record with self-serving propaganda:

The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery removed wall text that referred to President Trump’s two impeachments — language that had upset the White House — when the museum recently replaced a portrait of him in its “America’s Presidents” exhibition.

The wall text described some of Mr. Trump’s political accomplishments… [but] it also included: ‘Impeached twice, on charges of abuse of power and incitement of insurrection after supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, he was acquitted by the Senate in both trials.’

That sentence had long bothered the Trump administration.

The Smithsonian Institution used to be “regarded as independent from the executive branch,” the Times reporter wrote. But now Trump is threatening to cut the Smithsonian’s funding unless it presents him with a list of its current and planned exhibitions, presumably because he intends to block or alter any exhibitions that don’t please him.

My neighbor Swamp Rabbit backed off when I tried to show him the whole article. “Gimme a break. I don’t want to think about that hog monster no more.”

“Dictators think they can erase history,” I said, referencing a conversation he and I had recently. “They count on chumps like you to forget what really happened.”

I was worked up because I’d just reread Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1978), which opens with an anecdote about a 1948 photograph of Klement Gottwald, Czechoslovakia’s Communist leader, standing on an outdoor balcony next to another Communist official, Vladimir Clementis, who had just placed his cap on Gottwald’s head to protect him against the cold while he spoke to a large crowd.

The anecdote ends like this:

Four years later Clementis was charged with treason and hanged. The propaganda section immediately airbrushed him out of history and, obviously, out of all the photographs as well. Ever since, Gottwald has stood on the balcony alone. Where Clementis once stood, there is only bare palace wall. All that remains of Clementis is the cap on Gottwald’s head.

“Come on now, Trump ain’t that bad,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Even if he was, the media in this country wouldn’t let a story like that be forgot.”

I rolled my eyes. “What about Fox News? What about the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post? They’re trying to make us forget the real story of what happened on January 6, 2021.”

“Maybe,” he said, smiling. “But that was a long time ago, Odd Man.”

Update: The Post ran no stories — that’s right, zero — about the fifth anniversary of the attack on the Capitol. Yet another glaring indication of how thoroughly Bezos was cowed by the re-elected Trump.

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