Mimosa, Bloody Mary, nice flute of champagne — or maybe a favorite tipple in your coffee. Make yourself one and, as Dorothy Parker once said, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, come sit by me.”

Welcome, dears. I hope your Valentine’s Day was everything you wished.

I’ve had some champagne and cranberry juice poured for us today. I enjoy the color and the tartness and quite appropriate after a week where it was hard to choose which idiocies on parade to highlight for you. Let’s sally forth!

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Keith Olbermann’s Valentine to most of America

Dears, Olbermann has been as welcome (and relevant) to culture and political discussions as a rabid porcupine in a nudist colony. Yet when he picks Valentines Day to advocate the obliteration of “Red States” in a second Civil War …

"We are OWNED by guns. Only one thing will change that.

"We must have Economic Civil War. Blue States must financially starve the Red States, the Gun Lobby, the GOP, the Death Lobby, and the crooked judiciary into submission.

"NOW."

WEDNESDAY COUNTDOWN: https://t.co/OY1H1fwYj8 pic.twitter.com/fZLYlfKNbZ

— Keith Olbermann (@KeithOlbermann) February 15, 2023

… we need to pay attention just enough to see who is agreeing with this doughy old guy in his dead grandfather’s sweater. Because Slobbermann isn’t an actual threat to Red state citizens as he is putting citizens of his beloved deep-blue cities in danger. I mean, if this man doesn’t realize he is trying to declare war on the exact people who grow his food, process the gas he puts in his car, and transports all the luxury goods he feelz spontaneously appear on store shelves to his convenient consumption, others should and maybe do an intervention on him.

Possibly a nice San Franciscan can let Keith know the score

San Francisco Admits It Can’t Live Without Red States. Lawmakers admit 2016 red state boycott is ineffective and has raised costs for the city.

Oopsy!

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We’re spending taxpayers dollars in Ukraine on WHAT?

Biden announces that US tax dollars will go towards supporting Ukrainian social services, including paying for government pensions. pic.twitter.com/J7qyPiB0iU

— Catch Up (@CatchUpNetwork) February 18, 2023

Forgive me, friends, but whatever you think about our support of Ukraine’s war effort against Russia, can we all agree that handing out taxpayer dollars for Ukraine’s own government pensioners is, frankly, insane? We have senior citizens on fixed incomes who can’t pay their electric or gas utility bills this winter and Creepy Joe is determined to give walking-around money to Ukrainian refugees?

Something stinks here — more than busted septic tank on a hot August afternoon.

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Barbarians through the Gate

It was only a couple of years ago when I brought to your attention that the Smithsonian Museum was running a blatantly racist exhibition. Now it looks like The Met has taken up the challenge and is actively destroying its own art collection.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has mounted an exhibit whose curatorial philosophy, were it widely adopted, would spell the end of art and of art museums. The art press greeted the show ecstatically, as a sign of the Met’s new direction. This prognosis is undoubtedly correct.

Fictions of Emancipation (on view through March 5, 2023) is built around an 1873 sculpture by the brilliant French sculptor Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux. The marble bust, titled Why Born Enslaved!, portrays a black woman, bound by a rope, looking over her left shoulder with a piercing expression of defiance, incredulity, and contempt.

Why Born Enslaved! has been understood since its creation as an antislavery work. The Met, however, knows better, now that it has been reborn as an “antiracist” institution. Fictions of Emancipation argues that the Carpeaux bust furthers whites’ ongoing “domination over Black people’s bodies,” in the words of the exhibit’s curators. And Carpeaux was not the only artist to give an aesthetic gloss to racial oppression, while seeming to oppose it—Fictions of Emancipation portrays abolitionist art more widely as a fig leaf for Western colonialism and white supremacy.

How could any sane person accept the premise that abolitionist art is really racist and pro-slavery? This is The Met engaging in Newspeak – War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery – and now

if it can portray abolitionist art as a smoke screen for slavery, it can portray anything in Western history as a pretext for oppression

Will we even notice when WrongArt goes missing from our museums?

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Barbarians come for Willie Wonka

Do you have any old dead-tree books at home? Maybe some Roald Dahl’s children’s books like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or James and the Giant Peach? Hang on to them, dears. Because new editions have been rewritten for more :::cough::: modern sensibilities.

Roald Dahl’s famed children’s books are being scrubbed by so-called sensitivity experts to remove language they deem offensive, including “fat” or “ugly” characters — and making the beloved Oompa Loompas of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” gender neutral.

Publisher Puffin tapped sensitivity readers to rewrite hundreds of sections of the late author’s texts to ensure his work can continue to be enjoyed — and not offend — today’s more woke audience.

Writers may wish to rethink their ambitions. If their work should prove lastng, it may end up being tortured for all eternity

This is not mere "sensitivity" editing, by the way. This is blunt, agenda-driven rewriting. It is idea injection. And it will be continual once it starts pic.twitter.com/LX6ZSpPgui

— Walter Kirn (@walterkirn) February 19, 2023

via GIPHY

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Your Sunday smile

Too often when teenagers make the evening news it isn’t for good reasons. I’m always happy to spread the news about acts of good by extraordinary young people. Like this hero:

A high school student literally jumped into action and saved the life of an elderly man and his dog who were trapped in a car that had fallen into an icy lake.

Joseph Salmon, 17, was ice-fishing with his mom on East Okoboji Lake in Iowa when he saw a Jeep, driven by 83-year-old Thomas Lee, fall through the ice and into the water.

Bravo, Joseph. Our world needs more young men just like you.

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I don’t know how we find ourselves this Sunday more than halfway though the month! But dear friends, I can’t think of a better way to spend a Sunday morning than here with you. Until next week … CHEERS!

featured image, original graphic by Darleen Click