This is a 'huge win' for the Trump team: Criminal defense attorney

While Donald Trump was dealt some bad news yesterday from a leftist Illinois judge, Tracie Porter, earlier in the day he received some better news as he battles witch hunts.

Leftist Cook County judge removes Trump from Illinois Primary ballot

I am so ashamed to live in Illinois. 

From Fox News:

Cook County Circuit Judge Tracie Porter barred Trump from the Illinois ballot one month after the anti-Trump challenge was dismissed by the Illinois State Board of Elections. Illinois goes to the polls March 19.

Not only has President Trump not been convicted of insurrection--which is why the leftist jurist booted him from the ballot--he hasn't been charged with it.

Mark Dice: Biden attempts to alleviate concerns about his age on late night talk show

Mark Dice touches a lot of bases in his latest video. He goes after Joe Biden and his gaffes, and he tells us that Google's woke images go beyond the Genesis fiasco.

Italian TV brutally mocks Joe Biden's 'cognitive decline' in comedy skit

America's woke comedians won't poke fun at Joe Biden's clear physical and cognitive decline.

Italians are not afraid to do so.

 

Four killed, including 14-year-old boy, and at least 18 shot over weekend in Chicago; there were two mass shootings

February's last weekend of the year saw four people shot to death and at least 18 others wounded.

Of the homicide victims, three of them were killed in a mass shooting on Sunday night in a Chatham home on the South Side. One of the slain was a 14-year-old boy. A fourth person was wounded.

The fourth deadly shooting occurred earlier on Sunday when four people were shot in Pottawattomie Park in Rogers Park on the Far North Side. One woman, a 19-year-old, was killed, one other woman and two men were killed.

It was a mild weekend and while spring hasn't graced Chicago for good yet, soon will see the disastrous effects of Illinois' SAFE-T Act, which abolished cash bail statewide. 

The SAFE-T Act went into effect last fall.

  

From Da Tech Guy: Chicago’s southern suburbs are the sewer of corrupt Illinois

At Da Tech Guy I swim into a cesspool: Chicago’s southern suburbs are the sewer of corrupt Illinois.

Fleetwood Mac ~ What Makes You Think You're the One ~ 1979 rehearsal

The underrated Tusk is my favorite Fleetwood Mac album. The driver of the break from the hugely successful Rumours was Lindsey Buckingham. 

Other than the title track, "What Makes You Think You're the One" is my favorite song from the double album.

Buckingham wrote this track--and sings lead on it too.

This performance is from a rehearsal from the world tour to promote Tusk.

Mark Dice on Vice News: They shut it down! 😂

Leftist propaganda site Vice News has laid off hundreds of employees. 

It looks like their website will go dark soon. 

Mark Dice has more.

Undecided voters support Trump after town hall: He had 'strength'

Laura Ingraham interviewed some previously undecided South Carolina voters who now back Donald J. Trump.

The Palmetto State's Republican primary is Saturday.

 

Review, two novels by Adam Jonathan Kaat: Life on the Grocery Line and The Patron Saints of Grocery

Most novels center around characters with glamorous or exciting lives--people like soldiers, athletes, business tycoons. Often, these characters are handsome or pretty--and enjoy love affairs that are described in detail in these books. 

Other novels, Mark Twain's fiction comes to mind, centers on the common man, such as Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. Or I should of course now say, the common person.

Adam Jonathan Kaat's first two novels, Life on the Grocery Lane and The Patron Saints of Grocery, are also such works. 

Kaat's lead character, an anti-hero of course, is Daniel, a corporate refugee and aspiring novelist from San Francisco who lands in Denver as a front-line employee at the fictional Dream Grocers, which to me appears to be a cross between Whole Foods and Costco.

Daniel, like all of the characters in this book--well, like all people who work in retail--finds himself at Dream Grocers because he needs the money and not because it's a career choice. Daniel starts his new job the same week the COVID-19 lockdowns begin. Suddenly he's an essential worker.

In spite of the pandemic, or maybe more so because of it, a few days into the lockdown the temperament of the upper middle class--and beyond--clientele of Dream Grocers becomes even more sour. 

You've heard of "Karens," the catchall term for snooty and pesty white females, which ironically became cemented into American slang in the pandemic year of 2020. Daniel is told by his co-workers that Dream Grocers have three groups of clientele: Lindas, Daves--who are usually married to each other--and Normans. The former parade their superiority over the rabble who make up the supermarket's workforce as their perceived right.

As Kaat tells us thru Daniel:

When I think of a Linda, I imagine her wearing a fur coat as she walks around a Walmart with her tiny dog. That mutt has a serious viral infection that's contagious, but Linda doesn't care. In her mind, she exemplifies excellence, but in actuality she doesn't possess a single nice or meaningful thing, because everything she claims as her own is painted ugly by her abuse of others. She knows people, and she is known. Respect is expected but not earned, because she tried for a while and stepped on whomever to get where she is now. Continued effort to improve is not in her wheelhouse.

Linda is an idea. She is a caricature of unearned exceptionalism with the demand of a grizzled veteran. She is very American. Wild tastes with a narrow mind. Elite. Unsettling in the truth she reveals about the way we treat others in service positions. Linda is an unexamined life.

I worked many years in retail, and I encountered many Lindas. 

As for the Normans, they're a senior version of the Lindas and Daves. Daniel's first manager, Alejandro, comforts Dave after run-in with one. "He hates his life even as he swims in luxury you could never understand," Alejandro explains, "and at our store, he's the norm."

Daniel's social life is meager---it's centered on his neighbors and other Dream Grocers workers. The lockdowns limit his choices as do the extra hours assigned because of the COVID restrictions. Yet he enjoys a bit of romance, or rather, sex, and a lot of abuse of alcohol and recreational drugs. 

In the second novel, Daniel continues his journey in the aisles as he moves up a wrung on the retail later. During lockdowns, just as in war, promotion comes quickly.

Kaat touches on this sentiment in the introduction of the second edition of Life on the Grocery Line: his two Dream Grocers novels decades from now will probably be viewed by historians as an accurate look of how people endured during the COVID year of 2020. We are approaching the fourth anniversary of the first shelter-in-place orders--and that unhappy time seems so long ago. 

Two thumbs up for two books by Adam Jonathan Kaat from me. And if you've suffered or are still suffering as a retail employee, then you'll give Life on the Grocery Line and The Patron Saints of Grocery four thumbs up.

Life on the Grocery Line and The Patron Saints of Grocery are available at Amazon. 

Texas constructing military base camp at southern border

Ex-US Border Patrol head and deputy commissioner Ronald Vitiello discusses Tesxa constructing a military camp at the southern border.

From Da Tech Guy: Norovirus and my cruise ship trip

Or I went on an ocean voyage and all I got was a sickness. 

From my post at Da Tech Guy:

Norovirus and my cruise ship trip.

Rhonda Vincent - The City of New Orleans

Rhonda Vincent, a Grammy Award winning bluegrass artist, gives us a killer version of Steve Goodman's "City of New Orleans" here.

The Clash: Jail Guitar Doors

Last week, one of the first punk rockers, Wayne Kramer of the MC5, passed away. 

Wayne gets a mention in the first lyric of the Clash's "Jail Guitar Doors," a pounding rock tune about the legal struggles of several rockers. 

Rest in peace, Wayne.

From Da Tech Guy: Journalism’s “extinction event” will lead to new and better choices for news

Bring it on! 

From my post at Da Tech Guy:

Journalism’s “extinction event” will lead to new and better choices for news | Da Techguy's (no longer backup) Blog (datechguyblog.blog)

Van Morrison: March Winds in February

Van Morrison has written so many songs for so many occasions. 

 Such as mild February weather, which I'm enjoying now. 

Here is his "March Winds in February."

These boys ripped down a tampon dispenser in their high school bathroom

Twenty minutes after--per Connecticut law--a tampon dispenser was installed inside a boys bathroom, some males ripped it off the wall. Heroes come in unlikely scenarios in the 21st century.

 

Mark Dice on cities and migrants: They can't ignore it anymore!

The blame for the migrant crisis belongs with Joe Biden.

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