It’s been a busy news week. The only way I can keep up is with a potpourri post. I’ll break it down in discrete and insular segments, Odds & Sods style.

Let’s get on with it.

Cassidy’s Clown: The Guardian got its hands on an advance copy of  Enough by Cassidy Hutchinson. I checked to see if she had a ghost or co-writer. It appears she does not. That means she’s solely responsible for this purple prose about being groped by that clown about town Rudy Giuliani:

“I find Rudy in the back of the tent with, among others, John Eastman. The corners of his mouth split into a Cheshire cat smile. Waving a stack of documents, he moves towards me, like a wolf closing in on its prey.

“‘We have the evidence. It’s all here. We’re going to pull this off.’ Rudy wraps one arm around my body, closing the space that was separating us. I feel his stack of documents press into the small of my back. I lower my eyes and watch his free hand reach for the hem of my blazer.

“‘By the way,’ he says, fingering the fabric, ‘I’m loving this leather jacket on you.’ His hand slips under my blazer, then my skirt.”

The sound you hear is my flesh crawling. Ugh, just ugh.

Rudy was a pig on Dipshit Insurrection Day. Now he’s a broke pig being sued by his lawyer for over a million bucks. Bad karma is a bitch.

The post title paraphrases this venerable Everly Brothers song:

Now we can move on.

The Racist Apple Doesn’t Fall Far From The Racist Tree: Think Elon Musk is a racist? He’s a piker next to his grandfather, Joshua Haldeman. Haldeman migrated from Canada to South Africa in support of the apartheid regime. I am not making this up:

“An examination of Joshua Haldeman’s writings reveals a radical conspiracy theorist who expressed racist, antisemitic, and anti-democratic views repeatedly, and over the course of decades—a record I studied across hundreds of documents from the time, including newspaper clips, self-published manuscripts, university archives, and private correspondence. Haldeman believed that apartheid South Africa was destined to lead “White Christian Civilization” in its fight against the “International Conspiracy” of Jewish bankers and the “hordes of Coloured people” they controlled.”

Is bigotry in Elon’s blood or genes? One of his Twitter (never X) Nazis would say so ,but I say NO. Those are learned behaviors as are arrogance, ignorance, and rudeness.

An anti-apartheid song from 1985 written by giver of bandanas to Jamie Raskin, Little Steven Van Zandt:

Let’s rock on down to Florida where we still won’t play Sun City.

Carl Hiaasen On Ron DeSantis: Crime fiction novelist and retired Miami Herald columnist Carl Hiaasen may not have invented the Florida Man myth, but he certainly popularized it. Carl likes The Louse about as much as I do.

DeSantis represents the dark side of the Florida Man myth. Hiaasen as much as says so in the October issue of Vanity Fair:

“Here in guilt-free Florida we’re often asked if Ron DeSantis is really worse than Donald Trump. Not long ago the question would have seemed ludicrous because Trump had set the bar of execrable behavior so high. Who could outpander the most prolific panderer of all time? Who could be worse for democracy than the person who snuggled up to murderous dictators, spoke fondly of white supremacists, smeared Mexican immigrants as rapists and killers, tried to overturn an election, and incited a goon siege of the Capitol? The list goes on.

Technically, the ex-president isn’t a true Florida man; he’s just another rich tax refugee. DeSantis is a native, one of our own, and he has proven himself to be just as thin-skinned, soulless, and vengeful as Trump. Betraying his political godfather to seek the Republican presidential nomination demanded more of DeSantis than casual disloyalty; he needed a metaphorical crowbar to pry his perpetually pinched lips from Trump’s ass.”

Tel us what you really think, Carl.

This is a song that Carl Hiaasen wrote with Warren Zevon:

Basket Case is also the title of Carl’s 2002 novel. Warren Zevon died the next year. I still miss him. I’m skeptical that there’s an afterlife, but if there is I hope WZ and Ashley Morris are raising a ruckus tonight.

I was going to do the final segment as a stand-alone post. I changed my mind. This would have been the featured image:

Malakatude Update: Joe Hagan On Jann Wenner-  Joe Hagan wrote Sticky Fingers with the cooperation of this week’s main malaka, Jann Wenner. Hagan pitched it to Yawn as a warts and all project. Since Wenner is a douchebag who does not see himself as the rest of the world does, he agreed to Hagan’s terms and granted him access. When Wenner read the book, he was horrified. When Joe Hagan said warts and all, he meant it.

Hagan jumped into the latest Wenner controversy with both feet in an excellent piece at Vanity Fair.

If you read my book, you will see clearly the way in which Wenner’s magazine was for and about white men between the ages of 18 and 34, a demographic he astutely identified in 1967, with Black and female artists as afterthoughts or sidebars. Black artists on the Rolling Stone cover were an anomaly during the time he owned and operated it; highly sexualized images of female artists were not. As I write in Sticky Fingers, “It was a man’s magazine, though women read it; it was a white magazine, though African Americans were fetishized in it.” (In 2017, Wenner sold the company to Penske Media.)

Hagan’s bit about Joni Mitchell and Wenner is spot on:

“Joni Mitchell had the philosophical acuity to dislike how Rolling Stone treated her in the magazine and keep her distance (after Wenner literally charted her love affairs in 1972, she stopped talking to Rolling Stone for seven years). Mitchell saw clearly the sexism and misogyny of Rolling Stone…”

I cannot top that.

The last word nearly was Joni Mitchell’s Dancin’ Clown. It hasn’t aged well. Joni and Billy Idol? Whose idea was that? It’s almost Jann Wenner level bad. That’s no way to say goodbye.

The last word goes to a song written by Charles Mingus and Joni Mitchell: