TUESDAY: Should Jimmy Kimmel have told that joke?

TUESDAY, APRIL 28, 2026

"Jokes are jokes," Clooney says: Should Jimmy Kimmel have told that joke? We refer to the joke he told last Thursday night—the joke which went like this:

On Thursday’s Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the host did a mock roast of President Donald Trump and officials in the administration. At one point, Kimmel got around to cracking about the first lady.

“Our First Lady Melania is here,” he said at the time. “Look at her, so beautiful. Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow.” 

So joked Jimmy Kimmel, whose judgment was notably imperfect back in the Man Show days. Whose judgment is sometimes less than perfect now.

In fairness, it wasn't exactly a joke! It was a presentation performed as part of a "mock roast"—one possible problem being that, as part of an actual roast, the person being roasted has agreed to be cast in that role.  

That's one possible part of the problem. The most obvious part of the problem is this:  

As a general matter, it's a bad idea to tell a joke in which you're asking people to laugh and applaud at the thought of some public figure's death. As a general matter, entangling the target's wife in the "some day soon he'll surely be dead" almost surely adds to the shakiness of the whole idea.  

So you'll know:  

Tasteless jokes envisioning Joe Biden's death have been an ugly, demonically stupid part of the Fox News Channel's nightly menu for several years at this point. The public nutcase known as Greg Gutfeld persistently offers jokes which place the former president inside hearses or deep down in the ground. 

His disordered mind can't quit this fun; disordered creeps sit around him on his show pretending it makes perfect sense. In total fairness, let us say this:

Some of these lackeys may be so dumb that they don't see that there's a type of ugliness connected with this manifest nut-ball's behavior.  

(Also in fairness, the cable star in question needs help, or so it seems to us.) 

Given the garbage this "cable news" channel spews—let's not forget the multiple "jokes" about whether Hunter Biden had started "banging" or [BLEEP]ing first lady Jill Biden yet—it's especially pathetic to see Fox News Channel types reciting the channel's manufactured agitprop about Kimmel's joke, in which the current first lady was pictured dreaming of her husband's death. 

Sad! Under current arrangements, there's nothing those Fox News types won't do in service to corporate agitprop. There's nothing they won't do to advance the messaging of the tribe. 

But that doesn't mean that our own Man Show grad was employing good taste, or was showing good political sense, when he went with his "mock roast" joke.

No one has perfect judgment; everyone makes mistakes. It might be better, on occasion, to simply say that a certain joke should perhaps have been left unsaid.

Sadly, though—disappointingly—George Clooney didn't do that:

‘Jokes Are Jokes’: George Clooney Defends Jimmy Kimmel After Trumps Demand He Be Fired

Hollywood star and Democratic activist George Clooney stepped up to defend late-night host Jimmy Kimmel after President Donald Trump called for the comedian to be fired by ABC over a White House Correspondents’ Dinner joke mocking First Lady Melania Trump.

[...]

Speaking to Variety at the Chaplin Award Gala in New York on Monday, Clooney dismissed the backlash and drew a direct comparison to remarks by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who told Fox News ahead of the Correspondents’ Dinner that “there will be some shots fired tonight in the room,” a line widely understood as a reference to the traditional roasting at the event.

“Jimmy’s a comedian, and I would argue that Karoline Leavitt didn’t mean shots should be fired, right?” Clooney said. “She was making a joke. Fair enough. You look at that side and go, ‘Well, jokes are jokes.’ But the rhetoric is a little dangerous. And we’ve seen it a lot lately."   

The comparison to what Leavitt said (on that occasion) is very. very dumb. We find it very hard to believe that Clooney isn't much smarter than that.  

At any rate:

"Jokes are jokes," the gentleman said. In a very basic way, it's hard to argue with that.

That said, jokes are also insinuations and suggestions. They put ideas in the air.

Jokes can frequently cover for insults. And unless you think there's no such thing, a joke can be in bad taste—or, at the very least, it may strike voters that way.   

The garbage can overflows on the Fox News Channel each night. Increasingly, the sewage from the noxious 10 p.m. show has been seeping down to The Five. 

The nightly toxic waste on Fox dwarfs what Kimmel said. That said, Kimmel has often had imperfect judgment—and bad judgment by Hollywood types has been hurting liberal and Democratic Party interests for at least three decades now.   

As a general matter, it might not be the greatest idea to invite people to laugh as the picture of a public figure's death. Inserting the public figure's wife won't likely improve the mix.

Dreams of Joe Biden's death are spewed by Gutfeld night after night. He runs a corporate sewage dump. It's best left over there.

WE THE PEOPLE: When we the people began to react...

TUESDAY, APRIL 28, 2026

...a certain problem emerged: We're so old that we can remember when Iran was still in the news.  

That takes us back to last Saturday morning. The war with Iran hadn't yet ended. The Strait of Hormuz was still blocked, upending the global economy.  

Vaguely, we can remember all that! But those news topics disappeared in the wake of Cole Allen's alleged attempt to storm the White House Correspondents Dinner last Saturday night.  

There we the people went again! Our news agenda was hijacked by the latest attempt at a mass shooting. Also, this mass shooting would have been political in nature—and so, we the people began to react.  

We the people began to react at 7 o'clock on Sunday morning with some rather peculiar calls to C-Span's Washington Journal. We'll offer examples of those calls in tomorrow morning's report—but first, we the people began to hear from our major journalists, and it got dumb very fast. 

It got dumb extremely fast—and this is who we are. 

For starters, consider this report from Mediaite. It concerns a comment which was made shortly after midnight on that very Saturday night 

‘Tone Down The Flipping Rhetoric!’ John Roberts Rips Hakeem Jeffries For Comments After WHCD

Fox News anchor John Roberts admonished House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) for comments he made after the shooting incident at Saturday night’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

Roberts was at the event at the Washington Hilton when a gunman ran through the magnetometer and fired shots before being tackled by security. One Secret Service agent was saved when his bulletproof vest caught the shooter’s round.

President Donald Trump, Melania Trump, and Trump officials were safely ushered out of the venue.   

Roberts told host Trace Gallagher that future correspondents’ dinners “need to have Trump-level security.” 

That's the way the report begins—and so far, so basically good! 

Many people have voiced concern with the level of security at the dinner. But Roberts didn't leave it at that. Speaking to Gallagher on the Fox News Channel, the Fox News anchor said this:  

[continuing directly]
“And then again, you know, we heard from Hakeem Jeffries just before you and I came on together. And he said, ‘Oh, we are so happy nobody was hurt.’ Well, you know, then to down the flipping rhetoric!

“You might not like the guy,” Roberts said of Trump. “You might not be able to stand him. But you call him Hitler, you call him a fascist, you call him all of these things. You call him a threat to democracy. Some lunatic out there is going to take that language to heart, that rhetoric to heart.”

“And feel emboldened!” Gallagher agreed.  

In our view, Gallagher tends to be a bit of an agitprop machine. Before we consider what Roberts said, let's consider his background, and his deep experience.  

John Roberts is Canadian by birth. Like Gallagher, he's a good and decent person—and he's highly experienced:   

John Roberts (journalist) 

John David Roberts (born November 15, 1956) is a Canadian-American television journalist. He has been working for the Fox News Channel, as the co-anchor of America Reports. Roberts joined Fox News in January 2011 as a national correspondent based in Atlanta. He was the Fox News Chief White House Correspondent from 2017 to 2021, covering the first Donald Trump presidency.   

...Roberts first moved to the States in 1989 to join the Miami CBS affiliate. In 1990, he returned to Canada to host the CTV Canada AM national morning show. Roberts then returned to the States, joining CBS News in 1992 and later moved to CNN in 2006. At CBS, Roberts was an anchor on various national news programs, an anchor at their New York affiliate WCBS-TV, and White House correspondent. At CNN, Roberts was an anchor and Senior National Correspondent. 

[...]  

He had been widely considered a potential replacement for CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather after Rather stepped down from the anchor desk in March 2005, but Bob Schieffer was chosen on an interim basis to be the next CBS Evening News anchor, and in subsequent months, it became clear that Roberts was not under consideration for the job. During his time at CBS, Roberts received three nationals Emmy awards as well as a Gracie award for his coverage of a groundbreaking surgery to repair neural tube defects.  

At CBS, Roberts had been a contender! That said, he has performed at the highest levels in American broadcast news—for CBS, CNN and the Fox News Channel—for more than thirty years. 

He's deeply experienced, and he's a good and decent person. Despite all that, Roberts now blurted this:  

“You might not like the guy. You might not be able to stand him. But you call him Hitler, you call him a fascist, you call him all of these things. You call him a threat to democracy. Some lunatic out there is going to take that language to heart, that rhetoric to heart."  

Speaking with Gallagher just after midnight, Roberts fashioned the assailant as "a lunatic." Presumably, that may mean he thinks the assailant is "mentally ill" in some way. 

We'd be inclined to think that some such mental health problem does obtain.  

Roberts seemed to be angry—upset. Stating the obvious, what happened last Saturday night was upsetting for many people—yes, that does include us. 

That said, Roberts almost seemed to be angry at Hakeem Jeffries for saying he was glad that no one got hurt. And then, the experienced newsman emitted a familiar type of rant, in the course of which he even offered this:  

If you think a president is a threat to democracy, you shouldn't actually say it!   

Roberts emitted a standard Fox News Channel presentation, in which he seemed to suggest—offering no examples—that Jeffries has been calling President Trump "Hitler" and "a fascist."  By now, everyone within the reach of the Fox News Channel has offered some version of that general rant, often accompanied by tightly edited video clips in which no such statement is made.   

We rarely (if ever) see the sitting president referred to as a "Hitler." That said, we hear constant allegations to that effect by stars on the Fox News Channel.

Imagine! According to Roberts, you can think that a president poses some such threat, but you must never say it! A lunatic may hear you say it and decide to show up with a gun!

To some extent, what Roberts said is of course perfectly accurate. In a nation of roughly 340 million people, including more than 200 million people ages 18-65, any criticism of a public figure may inspire some (one) unbalanced person to react in a violent way. 

There's no avoiding that possibility—and a resort to gun violence has become a national norm over the past 27 years, dating to the mass shooting at Colorado's Columbine High.

It's true! If you criticize a sitting president, a disordered person may react in a disordered way. But in that part of Roberts' statement—the part about the threat to democracy—Roberts was basically saying that we the people can't be allowed to criticize a president at all.

That struck us as an extremely strange remark, from a deeply experienced person. Roberts made the comment shortly after midnight. Seven hours later, the calls to C-Span began.

Roberts is a good, decent person. That said, he made a remark that evening which strikes us as very dumb.

As he made that odd remark, then as the calls to C-Span came in, a dirty little secret was put on display:

Even as we seek "a more perfect Union," we the people just aren't extremely sharp—and we never have been!  

Quite often, that's true of us the people in Blue America. It's also true of them the people who tend to align as Red.

Tomorrow: Washington Journal takes phone calls from us the people, Blue as well as Red

MONDAY: All of a sudden, it's Florida's turn!

MONDAY, APRIL 27, 2026

Ship of state rolls on its side: All of a sudden, it's Florida turn to make a joke of its House districts. Over at the Washington Post, Marley and Knowles report:

DeSantis floats Florida map that could give GOP up to four more House seats   

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis unveiled a plan Monday that could give Republicans as many as four more congressional seats as the GOP scrambles to preserve its thin House majority.

The Republican governor rolled out his new map in one of the last acts of a national redistricting fight that President Donald Trump kicked off last year. Republicans have drawn nine districts in their favor across four states, and the map in Florida could bring that total to 13.

In response to Trump’s efforts, Democrats have gained more favorable lines in 10 districts—nine through a pair of ballot measures and one through a court decision. Democrats notched their latest win last week, when Virginia voters approved a new map that could give Democrats all but one of the state’s congressional seats.  

Fox News first reported on DeSantis’s proposal. A spokesperson for the [Florida] governor released a rough version of the map, which showed Republicans having a majority in 24 of 28 districts in a state that just a decade ago was a toss-up between the two political parties. Now, Republicans hold 20 of those districts.   

In response to the Texas redistricting, crazy-quilt House district maps have leaped from state to state. If Virginia's (temporary) new map survives court challenge, Dems could win as many as ten out of eleven House seats in the somewhat narrowly divided state.

(In 2024, Candidate Harris beat Candidate Trump in Virginia, 51.8% to 46.1%.) 

In Florida, Republicans would stand to win 24 out of 28 seats. That would be 86% of Florida's House seats, in a state which Donald Trump won in 2024 with 56% of the vote.  

In Virginia as in Florida, the numbers don't exactly seem to make sense. That said, the crazy-looking House districts sometimes remove all doubt—the Texas turnaround has triggered the latest race to the bottom as the basic concept of the search for "a more perfect union" disappears beneath the waves. 

For our money, Virginia Dems might have shown better political judgment if they'd engineered a (more manageable) 8-3 district split, rather than seeking a (possible) 10-1 Democratic advantage. But the notion that we the people are a real people, in constant search of a more perfect union, disappeared a long time ago for those who have eyes to see. 

This redistricting is just one aspect of the larger societal descent which has been underway for decades now. This latest meltdown started with President Trump's commands to Texas. In all honesty, some of our nation's assortment of meltdowns trace right back to us Blues!

(It's hard for us to see that.)

To see the proposed Florida map: You can see the proposed Florisa map as part of the original Fox News Digital report. 

For what it's worth, Virginia's proposed (though temporary) new districts look substantially weirder! These are the wages of the grasping, clawing modern Babel into which we've all been thrown.

UNION: Do "we the people" still exist?

MONDAY, APRIL 27, 2026

How about that "more perfect Union?" Within the American context, "Union" is a mystical concept as well as an historical term.   

The historical term is present at the time of the nation's founding. As the leading authority on this topic reports, it's connected to a second mystical concept—the concept of "us the people:" 

Union (American Civil War)  

The Union is a term used to refer to the central government and loyal states of the United States during the American Civil War. Its military forces and civilian population resisted the purported secession of the slave states that formed the Confederate States of America following the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln as president of the United States.

[...]

The term "Union" occurs in the first governing document of the United States, the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union. The subsequent Constitution of 1787 was issued and ratified in the name not of the states, but of "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union ..." 

Union, for the United States of America, is then repeated in such clauses as the Admission to the Union clause in Article IV, Section 3. Even before the Civil War began the phrase "preserve the Union" was commonplace, and a "union of states" had been used to refer to the entire United States of America.

So says the leading authority on this multi-faceted bit of American language. 

At the very founding of this nation—such as this nation has been—we see the yoking of two mystical concepts:

"We the People" were adopting the new nation's Constitution for the purpose of forming "a more perfect Union." 

That said, the language of "Union" had already been present in the full name of the Articles of Confederation, the forerunner to the Constitution.

Back in 1787, a mystical entity, "we the people," were seeking to form "a more perfect union." Several generations later, President Lincoln came to be hailed in the manner described below:

Presidency of Abraham Lincoln

[...]

Following his death, Lincoln was portrayed as the liberator of the slaves, the savior of the Union, and a martyr for the cause of freedom. Political historians have long held Lincoln in high regard for his accomplishments and personal characteristics. Alongside George Washington and Franklin D. Roosevelt, he has been consistently ranked both by scholars and the public as one of the top three greatest American presidents, often as the greatest president in American history.

The martyred sixteenth president was hailed as "the savior of the Union." A bit later in that report, the leading authority quotes the words with which the incoming President Lincoln ended his first inaugural address:

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Mystical chords of memory, he predicted, would swell the chorus of the Union. In the incoming president's view, passions must not be allowed to break the bonds of affection which remind us that "we are not enemies, but friends."

Over the course of the next four years, the Union was saved as a legal jurisdiction. That said, have we Americans ever been a mystical "us the people," grouped together by "bonds of affection," forming a mystical Union extending beyond the legalisms which kept us one nation, not two?

Putting it a bit more directly:

Are we a mystical "people" today, bound together in a mystical "Union?"

Are we some such "American people" today? It seems to us that it isn't clear that any such mystical entity still exists. It seems to us that some such mystical entity is unlikely to survive the sociological changes which have brought us to the point we saw enacted again, on cable TV, this past Saturday night.

Briefly, let's be clear:

As a technical / legal nation, the United States isn't going anywhere in the next few weeks or in the next few years. But in the face of the gruesome behavior of major elements of our society, the notion that we form a mystical American people, bound together in a mystical Union, has become quite hard to sustain.

What has brought to this point? We'll examine that question all week. But as a Union has turned into a Babel, deeply unhelpful behavior has long been emerging from all sides—from Red America but also from Blue.

Those mystical chords of memory are hard to spot at this time. All this week, we'll examine the following question in the wake of what happened on Saturday night:

Can anything resembling a mystical union survive the sea in which we, the former American people, are now condemned to swim?  

We're asking you to take a step back and consider a larger picture. Are we a "people" forming a "Union" today, or have we turned into a Babel?

Tomorrow: C-Span's Washington Journal hears from us, the people

SATURDAY: Another Communist / Bolshevik spotted!

SATURDAY, APRIL 25, 2026

Also, Gotham crime runs rampant: This very morning, we were surprised to learn what Mayor Mamdani has done.   

How will his term as mayor turn out? We have no idea! And of course, he's only been mayor since January 1. How much could he have done?

How will his tenure turn out? We plan to wait and see! But he has already let crime "sort of run rampant" in New York City—or so Rachel Campos-Duffy, the genial co-host of Fox & Friends Weekend, told Fox viewers this very morning, early in the 7 o'clock hour.

Right at 7:08 a.m., Campos-Duffy delivered that newsflash, referring to "the crime that Mamdani has allowed to, you know, sort of run rampant in the city because he doesn't care about that." 

Moments later, she turned to extremely familiar ground, saying that "his instincts are Communist. They're Bolshevik." 

At 7:11, she said that one of Mamdani's policies is "very Communist." But so it goes on this Fox News Channel program, which we would be willing to classify as an imitation of life.

How will the Bolshevik mayor's term turn out? We're willing to wait and see! We can show you what we found when we checked the surprising assertion that the mayor has been letting crime ("sort of") run rampant in New York City's streets.

When we googled the surprising claim, an infallible news source—"AI Overview"—instantly told us this:

"As of April 2026, NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration reported record-low crime stats in his first 100 days, including significant drops in murders and shootings."  

So said AI Overview! When we clicked to the source for the Overview's claim. we found this transcript of an April 2 press event about this important topic:  

Transcript: Mayor Mamdani and NYPD Announces Fewest Murders, Shooting Incidents in Recorded History for First Three Months of the Year  

Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani: Good morning, everyone. It is a pleasure to be here with you at 1 Police Plaza and to be joined by so many committed public servants. Thank you to Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch for your leadership and your partnership. I also want to extend my gratitude to Chief of Department Mike LiPetri and the members of the NYPD executive staff.  

[...] 

The data we are releasing today should be encouraging to every New Yorker. The numbers tell a clear, indisputable story: our approach to public safety is working. Crime continues to decrease in New York City.   

In the first three months of the year, New York City has recorded the fewest murders and shooting incidents since we began tracking these numbers, decades ago. This quarter, we saw 54 murders across the five boroughs, a drop from the previous record low of 60, set in 2018. When you compare these figures to last year, which had already set historic lows for gun violence, murders fell by a significant 28 percent. Year-to-date, the murder rate is down by more than 57 percent in Brooklyn, [and] more than 44 percent in Manhattan, and there have been no murders on Staten Island in 2026. In fact, it has now been 178 days since the last murder on Staten Island, the second-longest period in recorded history.   

Additionally, overall crime in public housing fell 7.2 percent year-to-date and reached record lows for murders, shooting incidents, shooting victims and robberies. None of that is accidental. It is a direct result of the hard work and commitment of so many in this room...There is always more work to be done, as we can see in the 11.7 percent rise in hate crimes across our city, with the largest increase being of anti-Muslim hate crimes, a 140 percent increase, as antisemitic hate crimes continue to comprise more than half of the total number.   

Major crime is down in nearly every category, however, across our five boroughs. The Bronx leads the city in overall major crime declines, with a 9.4 percent decrease. And I want to thank every member of the NYPD for all that they do to keep every corner of our city safe from violence.   

You can read the full transcript yourself.  When we googled, we saw no reports challenging the accuracy of those data. As you can see, this editorial by the anti-Mamdani New York Post accepted the numbers as accurate.  

Our conclusions go something like this: 

If you read the anti-Mamdani New York Post, "The first quarter of the year saw the fewest murders and shooting incidents in recorded history, plus excellent news on subway crime, retail theft and even record lows in murders and robberies in public housing." 

That's what readers have been told by the anti-Mamdani New York Post. But if you watched this morning's Fox & Friends Weekend, you were told that the city's very Communist, Bolshevik mayor is letting crime run rampant, driving tourism away!  

Can a modern nation function this way? You're asking a major question. But she always knows where the Bolsheviks are, and her two co-hosts play along!