SATURDAY: Shine on me, sunshine? Walk with me, world?

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2026

The president gay-baits Ossoff: We want to show you two bits of text from last night's Anderson Cooper program on CNN. 

In this, the first of these clips, the president is gay-baiting Senator Ossoff. Cooper is speaking with Tim Pawlenty, the former (Republican) governor of Minnesota, a person who never engaged in this kind of conduct:   

COOPER (10/16/26): Governor Pawlenty, I just want to play another part of the president's speech in Georgia today.

PRESIDENT TRUMP (videotape): I call him Pee-Wee Herman. Pee-Wee Herman, he looks like Pee-Wee. His name is Jon Ossoff, highly overrated. 

Somebody said he's a good-looking man. I don't think he's a good-looking man. I actually think Mike Collins is a good-looking man. And he's all man. He's all man. I'm not sure about Ossoff. 

If I am casting a movie for a senator, I like the white hair. I like the big, strong build, big, strong guy. But that's what I want. But he's a respected man.

COOPER: I'm not sure what he was insinuating about Ossoff, but why does he keep commenting on men's appearances? I mean, it's sort of fascinating to me.

PAWLENTY: You know, he says all kinds of things that are sort of entertaining. But you know what the voters want to hear is what's going on with my pocketbook, what's going on with affordability, what's going on in the economy...

Obviously, Cooper knew what the president was saying about Ossoff. (Pawlenty also avoided the obvious.) Next week, we expect to note the way this sort of thing is currently driving so much of MAGA (and Fox News Channel) politics.   

In this, the second clip, the president is Muslim-baiting Abdul El-Sayed. Cooper is speaking with Lulu Garcia-Navarro of the New York Times:   

COOPER: And Lulu, I want to play you something else the president said today about Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed.

PRESIDENT TRUMP (videotape): He's as bad almost as Mohamed Abdul El-Sayed. 

You know, I took a lot of heat for calling him "Mohamed." And I said, I don't care, I'm the president of the United States. I can call you whatever the hell I want. I can call you whatever I want, Mohamed.

And then today, a guy sends me something. His name is actually "Abdullah bah-bah-bah-bah-bah"—Mohammed El-Sayed. So, his middle name is Mohamed. So, I was right, almost.

Oh, by the way, how about that guy? He's a Jihadist. He's a radical left person. He hates our country.

COOPER: How do you think? I mean, do you think that works for the people he wants to turn out?

GARCIA-NAVARRO: No, I mean, I think it's racist, obviously. He's using "Mohamed" as a sort of slur, when it's the name of the prophet and for Muslims. And then beyond that, it's just more of the same...

By any normal standard, that was astonishing conduct by the sitting president. 

It was obvious Muslim-baiting. We were struck by the fact that Cooper was only willing to fashion a question as to whether this obvious baiting would "work." 

(In response, we wouldn't have used the highly general term "racist" ourselves.)

By the way, here's a quick thumbnail of the man who was being baited by our sitting president—the man who hates our country:

Abdul El-Sayed

Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed (born October 31, 1984) is an American epidemiologist and politician who is the Democratic nominee in the 2026 United States Senate election in Michigan.

Born and raised in southeast Michigan, El-Sayed graduated from the University of Michigan and was a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford, where he earned a doctorate in public health. He then earned his medical degree from Columbia University. He then became an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Columbia University School of Public Health. He was the executive director of the Detroit Health Department from 2015 to 2017. From 2023 to 2025, he served as director of the Wayne County Department of Health, Human & Veterans Services.   

[...]   

In 2003, El-Sayed graduated from Bloomfield Hills Andover High School, where he was a three-sport athlete and captain of the wrestling, football, and lacrosse teams. He then attended the University of Michigan...He graduated Phi Beta Kappa with highest distinction in 2007 with a bachelor's degree and gave that year's student commencement speech. 

Once captain of his high school's football team, he hates the U.S. today! Along somewhat similar lines, here is some background on Ossoff, whose background is not widely known:

Jon Ossoff   

Thomas Jonathan Ossoff (born February 16, 1987) is an American politician who has served as the senior United States senator from Georgia since 2021. He is the youngest incumbent U.S. senator, and a member of the Democratic Party.

[...]

He attended The Paideia School, a private school in Atlanta. While in high school, he interned for civil rights leader and U.S. representative John Lewis. Ossoff is a 2009 graduate of Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service with a Bachelor of Science degree in culture and politics. He earned a master of science degree in international political economy from the London School of Economics in 2013.   

[...]   

Ossoff is married to Alisha Kramer, an obstetrics and gynecology doctor at Emory University, where she completed her residency in 2023, and a graduate of Georgetown University and Emory University School of Medicine. Ossoff married Kramer in 2017 after 12 years of dating. On the night of Ossoff's election to the United States Senate in January 2021, Kramer was working an overnight shift in Emory University Hospital in Atlanta. They have two daughters, born in December 2021 and June 2025.  

Just a guess: Those two girls got a very good deal when the gods selected their parents.

At any rate, despite the president's recent gay-bating, Ossoff doesn't seem to be gay. Of course, as (almost) everyone knows by now, many millions of good, decent people are.  And we don't have a person to waste, as Bill Clinton used to say.

In recent weeks, the gay-baiting and the Muslim baiting have been general over MAGA elites and the Fox News Channel. With respect to that sad situation, we speak to this obvious question:   

Shine on me, sunshine? Walk with me, world? What the heck's up with that?   

Our record-shattering answer:  

We Americans can't fact-check or name-call our way back out of our current national mess—"back out of all this now too much for us," as Frost confusingly had it. 

Instead, we'll need to emerge into a world of deepened American values—some of them seeming to be a bit Reddish, some of them tilting toward Blue. 

We need a deeper connection to happiness. More on that to follow.

HAPPINESS: Scarborough savages Donald J. Trump!

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 16, 2026

In search of a citizen's duty: We saw it this morning on Morning Joe, in the program's first half hour. We want to compliment David Gilmour of Mediaite for presenting tape and a transcript so quickly.   

Joe Scarborough went right at it! He assailed the way the sitting president has now decided to play a role in "the killing of grandmothers"—but also in the killing of children and the killing of innocents in general. 

He made reference to a Reuters report which appears beneath this headline: 

Order to limit Starshield for Ukraine came from inside White House, sources say   

Are the sources right this time? Scarborough assumes that they are. Meanwhile, back at Mediaite, Gilmour's summary of the Reuters report can be perused by clicking here. 

In this follow-up report, Gilmour posts the videotape from today's Morning Joe. Headline included, Gilmour's report starts like this:   

Scarborough Shreds Trump’s ‘Absolute Betrayal’ of Ukraine: ‘In Bed with Vladimir Putin’   

Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough tore into President Donald Trump over what he called the “absolute betrayal” of Ukraine, accusing the president of siding with Russian President Vladimir Putin as Washington eases pressure on Moscow and restricts satellite capabilities used by Ukrainian forces.

The host launched into the blistering monologue on [Friday] amid rapidly deteriorating relations between Washington and Kyiv, declaring: “I just can’t get Ukraine off my mind and the absolute betrayal of Ukraine.”   

Gilmour's report continues from there. On the accompanying videotape, Scarborough is shown saying this on this morning's program as he speaks with Ed Luce of the Financial Times:  

SCARBOROUGH (10/16/26): I just can’t get Ukraine off my mind and the absolute betrayal of Ukraine.   

The whole world is rising up against Donald Trump’s just outrageous embrace of Vladimir Putin’s killing machine. The fact that he’s doing diesel deals to pump billions of dollars into Vladimir Putin’s killing machine. The fact that we have reports from Reuters, last night, that it was the White House that ordered the Pentagon to slow down the Starlink satellites, to make sure that Russia’s fastest, deadliest missiles could get into Kyiv and kill grandmothers, kill children, kill grandfathers, kill innocents. 

That’s all in Donald Trump’s hands. He’s the one in charge of this, and you see leaders from across the world speaking out against Donald Trump, I would say, getting in bed with Vladimir Putin, but he never really got out, did he? 

[...]

These events are shocking even by Trumpian standards. He's doing everything he can to help Vladimir Putin win this war. Why?  

On the videotape, Luce tries to answer Scarborough's question. As before, so too today—we compliment Scarborough for creating the most intelligent discussions in all of daily cable news, largely through the participation of an array of highly informed guests like Luce. 

(Richard Haass was also involved in this morning's discussion.)   

On this morning's program, Scarborough was discussing a hugely important, if puzzling, policy choice by the sitting president. Increasingly, there's also the endless array of gratuitous insults delivered by Trump, along with his weird (if inconsequential) public statements and Truth Social posts.   

Last night, Lawrence O'Donnell was walking that second beat. As he frequently does, he derided the president for "the utterly insane, breathtakingly stupid things he says every day." He attributed this undeniable state of affairs to the sitting president's "declining cognitive ability," his "cognitive decline."  

Is it true? Is the most powerful person in the world experiencing a cognitive decline—even a significant cognitive decline? As we've noted many times, here's what his niece, the doctorate-holding clinical therapist, said on CNN earlier this year. 

For the record, the key words here is "untreated:"  

ERIN BURNETT (2/26/26): You've known him your whole life. Do you actually see a decline?

MARY TRUMP: I do, but I think it's important to remember that Donald has never been fit in any capacity. Obviously, what we're dealing with now are age-related cognitive declines. We're dealing with physical issues that the White House tries to cover over.

But this is somebody who for decades now has had serious, undiagnosed and untreated psychiatric disorders, which are only going to worsen, especially given the pressure he's under and given the cognitive and physical declines.

The key word there is "untreated." Mary Trump was describing a serious set of medical conditions which have gone untreated.   

As for O'Donnell, he now refuses (or isn't allowed) to bring medical specialists onto his show to offer an informed assessment. Instead, he is inclined to offer his own home brew of diagnosis, larded with personal insults.   

That leaves us with Bill Maher's claim, which we've discussed in the past few days. "What, me honor my citizen's duty?" he almost seems to have said. 

Fellow citizens, why does our sitting president behave so strangely, even reaching to the point described this morning by Scarborough? This is what Bill said:    

"I don’t know and I can’t answer and it’s not my place to answer.”  

We'd call that a very strange statement. We'd say it's his place to try. We'd say it's his duty as an American citizen, as a citizen of the world.

Bill interviews guests with a wide array of specialties. In our view, it's his duty as a citizen to interview medical specialists about the president's odd behaviors—odd behaviors which may spill over into the killing of children.   

We vastly admire Bill's achievements, and Bill is hardly alone in the stance he's adopted here. There is no major Blue American journalist or media figure who hasn't run away from the question Bill seemed to regard as none of his freaking business.  

The president's behavior has become stranger and stranger. Every journalist has taken a dive concerning what's right there before them.

What does this have to do with happiness. you might ask at this point. Also, how about the state of mind Thoreau described at the start of his chapter called Solitude?   

With that, you're asking an excellent question. We'll address that question in the weeks ahead as we thrash about at this site, looking for amended ways which may let our nation survive.

THURSDAY: Peltola returns to The Last Word!

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2026

New York Times gone wild: We were glad to see Mary Peltola back on last evening's Last Word. 

Previously, she had appeared on the show on September 9. The following day, we gave you this basic background:   

Mary Peltola   

Mary Sattler Peltola (born August 31, 1973) is an American politician and former tribal judge. She served as the U.S. representative from Alaska's at-large congressional district from 2022 to 2025. 

A member of the Democratic Party, she previously served as a judge on the Orutsararmiut Native Council's tribal court, was executive director of the Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, Bethel city councilor, and member of the Alaska House of Representatives...  

Peltola was first elected to Congress in an August 2022 special election after the death of incumbent Don Young...

Peltola was re-elected to a full term in 2022. She lost re-election in 2024 to Nick Begich III. She is a candidate for U.S. Senate in 2026, challenging incumbent senator Dan Sullivan.  

In politics as in various branches of show business, the smile can be a powerful weapon. We're not sure we've ever seen a political candidate who defaults to such an array of smiles.  To see her session on last night's Last Word, you can just click this.

With control of the Senate at stake, we're praying for Candidate Peltola. Weirdly, though, the New York Times, for whatever reason, came up with this somewhat peculiar front-page report on September 25:

TIMES EXCLUSIVE
Angry Outbursts, Slurs and Firings: Tumult Rocks a Key Senate Campaign  

National Democrats cheered when Mary Peltola, the former Alaska congresswoman, declared in January that she would run for the Senate.

Ms. Peltola, an Alaska Native who grew up fishing for salmon on the Kuskokwim River, was well-known and well-liked statewide, even by Republicans. Her party hailed her as one of its strongest prospects for ousting a Republican incumbent and winning control of the Senate.

But behind the scenes, her political operation has been marked by tumult, a pattern that stretches back to her time in Congress. Former aides describe angry and profane outbursts, sometimes directed at aides and sometimes expressed about others who had displeased her. In one instance, she shoved an aide, according to a former staff member who was present and two others who were told about it at the time. Another conflict led to a surprising staff shake-up on the eve of the primary election last month.  

And so on from there. Meanwhile, no one has it but the Times? There may be a very good reason!

According to the lengthy Times report, Peltola was "well-known and well-liked statewide." But some staff members were unhappy. This was one key issue:

For some on her staff, one task exemplified the disregard Ms. Peltola appeared to have for her employees: feeding her daughter’s pet chameleon, Meatball.

Meatball’s preferred diet consisted of live crickets, according to three staff members familiar with the demand, including two who fed the chameleon. Ms. Peltola instructed aides to purchase the insects at a pet store and then feed them to Meatball.

Aides initially went to Ms. Peltola’s apartment in Washington to feed Meatball, but the congresswoman later brought the reptile into her office on Capitol Hill. On at least one occasion, the crickets escaped in the office and had to be recaptured, according to two former aides who witnessed it as well as a photo viewed by The Times that showed aides in the office trying to trap the crickets using manila folders and small paper cups. 

Live crickets for Meatball gone wild! The endless report was written by Kellen Browning, a young reporter who's six years out of college (Pomona, class of 2020). 

A great deal is at stake in each of this year's contested Senate campaigns. It seemed to us that the Times was indulging in peculiar journalistic judgment of a type which was quite widespread as the paper covered Campaign 2000.   

In this analysis piece for the Atlantic, Jonathan Chaoit blamed the highly self-involved staffers. At this site, we flashed back to highly questionable journalistic judgment once put on display by the Times.

HAPPINESS: "Hello, sunshine," the songwriter said!

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2026

A brilliant comedian's duty: Shine on me, sunshine? Walk with me, world?   

That was the start to a pop music hit which went to #1 on the Billboard Hot Country charts. For what it's worth, those lyrics may not be all that different from Thoreau's reported experience.  

Describing his time by the shore of Walden Pond, the sacred being said this at the start of the chapter called Solitude:   

Solitude

This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself. As I walk along the stony shore of the pond in my shirt sleeves, though it is cool as well as cloudy and windy, and I see nothing special to attract me, all the elements are unusually congenial to me. The bullfrogs trump to usher in the night, and the note of the whippoorwill is borne on the rippling wind from over the water. Sympathy with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves almost takes away my breath...   

Shine on me, sunshine? Walk with me, world? Not quite the same thing, but close. 

That said, the country hit was the farthest thing from a report about solitude. It was written and performed by Donna Fargo, just another Pacific-10 great.   

(The leading authority speaks: "Fargo attended High Point College in North Carolina, then earned a degree at the University of Southern California. After graduating from USC, she became a teacher at Northview High School in Covina, California, eventually progressing to head of the English Department.)

In the song which opens that way, Fargo's subject was happiness, the focus of very few songs. We think it's a beautifully written song—possibly, part of a broader anthem for this struggling nation's future.   

She wrote a song about being happy! Inside the song, its second start goes exactly like this: 

Good mornin', mornin'.
Hello, sunshine.
Wake up, sleepyhead...   

It's a song about waking up to the instant joy of the day. That's something we Americans rarely do in the troubled, desperately threatened nation in which we all reside at the present time. 

Meanwhile, how have millions of us been sent off to bed each night? With the gruesome cretin of the Fox News Channel polluting the American air in this familiar way:   

GUTFELD (10/14/26): Mayor Mamdani announced that he will end carriages drawn by horses in New York City.  

"I guess I can go back to acting," said one woman.   

PHOTO: Sarah Jessica Parker  

AUDIENCE: [Mixed reaction]

GUTFELD: I don't get that joke. 

I don't get it.   

"I don't get it," the creepy man said. It was one of his standard evasions.

Here at this site, we did. 

This creepy man can't stop himself from this nightly behavior. Last night, his insult to the horse named Sarah Jessica Parker was followed by a joke about Governor Hochul's allegedly frozen eyebrows.

Normally, that theme is reserved for Nancy Pelosi. Inevitably, he then offered this:   

GUTFELD: Security video has people doubting Kelly Clarkson's version of shopkeepers refusing to sell her an expensive mechanical bird. 

She claimed that they treated her like the Julia Roberts character in Pretty Woman, but no one believes that anyone would pay her for sex. 

In the end, this is all this little mutt has. He had opened with this mandated obsession:

GUTFELD: Good evening, everyone. Hillary Clinton is launching a podcast. It's being co-hosted by Kara Swisher. That's right, and Bill already suggested a title for it:  

"The Only Two Women I Wouldn't Bang."

That's what this little mutt said. Included in his three-minute opening was a joke on the (standard) theme that Kamala Harris is a hopeless drunk, followed by a joke on the theme that AOC is blindingly stupid.  

(To power his insult of AOC, the little mutt pretended that she had made a dumb remark in which Alaska wasn't part of the United States. She has made no such remark. His premise had been invented.)   

This garbage can rolls out every night on its "cable news" channel. Kat Timpf, the New York Times' idea of a feminist, is reliably willing to sit there, say nothing and watch.

Meanwhile, the sitting president behaves in the increasingly disordered ways which get disappeared on this "cable news" channel, and which are frequently avoided by the New York Times itself. But also, in one way, by Bill Maher, as we've been noting this week. 

We don't agree with all his views, but we're huge admirers of Bill around here. What he does isn't hard. What he does is impossible.

We're in awe of Bill's achievement. But at one point, Bill offered this thought about why the sitting president does some of the things he does:

 "I don’t know and I can’t answer and it’s not my place to answer.” 

No one admires Bill's achievement any more than we do. Way back in December 1983, he taught us what to do when the light bulbs in a comedy club's condo have all somehow burned out.

(You don't go out and buy light bulbs yourself. You get the owner on the phone and make her bring light bulbs over!)

Bill taught us that—the first rule of comedy we would know. (The second rule of comedy we were taught: Always eat the free food!)

Bill taught us the light bulb rule! But does he have a citizen's duty? 

Tomorrow, we're going to suggest that he does. But what does that have to do with happiness?  

We may even get to that.

Tomorrow: "No people are uninteresting."