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 the Last Word, you can just click here.

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."

WEDNESDAY: As a tribute to waterfront values...

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 14, 2026

...Chekhov concocted this tale: The creepy monsters who creep and crawl have been crawling all over the modern American discourse. 

Can a large modern nation hope to survive in such desperate need of true, sustaining values?  Can some such nation hope to survive with the standard assembly of soul-damaged creeps sent out on that "cable news" channel? 

We'd expected to post this afternoon about this latest astounding behavior by the flailing American president. But instead, we'll offer Constance Garnett's influential early translation of Chekhov's spectacularly beautiful story, The Lady with the Lapdog.

Here on this campus, we prefer the David Magarshack translation for Penguin Classics. But we offer this start to the story as a tribute to the Redford character in The Horse Whisperer, and as a tribute to the way Terry and Edie create a world of better values in the undercard to On the Waterfront.

The American songbook asks this question: Who will glove your hand? In this famous scene, Terry answers that question. 

Chekhov's story starts as shown:

The Lady with the Dog  
(Constance Garnett translation)  

It was said that a new person had appeared on the sea-front: a lady with a little dog. Dmitri Dmitritch Gurov, who had by then been a fortnight at Yalta, and so was fairly at home there, had begun to take an interest in new arrivals. Sitting in Verney's pavilion, he saw, walking on the sea-front, a fair-haired young lady of medium height, wearing a béret; a white Pomeranian dog was running behind her.

And afterwards he met her in the public gardens and in the square several times a day. She was walking alone, always wearing the same béret, and always with the same white dog; no one knew who she was, and every one called her simply "the lady with the dog."

"If she is here alone without a husband or friends, it wouldn't be amiss to make her acquaintance," Gurov reflected.

He was under forty, but he had a daughter already twelve years old, and two sons at school. He had been married young, when he was a student in his second year, and by now his wife seemed half as old again as he. She was a tall, erect woman with dark eyebrows, staid and dignified, and, as she said of herself, intellectual. She read a great deal, used phonetic spelling, called her husband, not Dmitri, but Dimitri, and he secretly considered her unintelligent, narrow, inelegant, was afraid of her, and did not like to be at home. He had begun being unfaithful to her long ago—had been unfaithful to her often, and, probably on that account, he almost always spoke ill of women, and when they were talked about in his presence, used to call them "the lower race."

It seemed to him that he had been so schooled by bitter experience that he might call them what he liked, and yet he could not get on for two days together without "the lower race." In the society of men he was bored and not himself, with them he was cold and uncommunicative; but when he was in the company of women he felt free, and knew what to say to them and how to behave; and he was at ease with them even when he was silent. In his appearance, in his character, in his whole nature, there was something attractive and elusive which allured women and disposed them in his favour; he knew that, and some force seemed to draw him, too, to them.

Experience often repeated, truly bitter experience, had taught him long ago that with decent people, especially Moscow people—always slow to move and irresolute—every intimacy, which at first so agreeably diversifies life and appears a light and charming adventure, inevitably grows into a regular problem of extreme intricacy, and in the long run the situation becomes unbearable. But at every fresh meeting with an interesting woman this experience seemed to slip out of his memory, and he was eager for life, and everything seemed simple and amusing.

One evening he was dining in the gardens, and the lady in the béret came up slowly to take the next table...   

The beauty of where this story goes is truly a thing to see. 

In its time, this story was considered revolutionary for its ending—for the ending which didn't provide an ending.  Virginia Woolf wrote about the unusual ending. Nabokov called Chekhov's story one of the greatest ever written. 

We've loved this story for years. 

If we expect to survive as a nation, we have to remove the misogynist creeps from the American discourse. We also have to ask the question we've asked many times here at this site, the question about the trusted Blue American elites who refuse to report or discuss the misogyny crawling all over the Fox News Channel.

"We don't have a person to waste (Bill Clinton)." Nor do we have a whole gender,

The Magarshack translation: Writing for Penguin Classics, David Magarshack translated the opening in the manner shown:   

Lady with Lapdog
(David Marshack translation)

The appearance on the front of a new arrival—a lady with a lapdog—became the topic of general conversation...[S]he was fair, not very tall, and she wore a toque; behind her trotted a white Pomeranian. 

[...] 

And so one afternoon, while he was having dinner at a restaurant in the park, the woman in the toque walked in unhurriedly and took a seat at the table next to him...  

We have to drive the creeps from the American discourse. They deserve to get help after that.

HAPPINESS: It's not my place, Brother Maher said!

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 14, 2026

We'd call that egregiously wrong: No, that wasn't happiness that sacred Thoreau was describing at that point in his most famous book. At the start of the chapter called Solitude, he was describing something else: 

Solitude

This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore...Sympathy with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves almost takes away my breath...

For a fuller chunk of that opening passage, see yesterday's report. To read the opening paragraph in full, you can just click here. 

Was that Thoreau as an ecstatic? We've reported, you can decide! But as every American schoolchild knows, he was reporting from a hut he himself had assembled—a hut he'd assembled near Don Junior Pond, which was once weirdly known known as "Walden."   

At any rate, he wasn't describing "happiness." We may get to that later on. 

Last evening, for millions of viewers of one "cable news" channel, the congenial nature of all the elements was quickly replaced with the opening monologue on the Gutfeld! show.   

The untreated mutt who fronts the show offered a joke suggesting that Barack Obama is secretly gay—a constant theme on this stone-cold nut-ball's gruesome show. 

(Kat Timpf just sits there watching.)

"I don't get it," Gutfeld said, as the audience laughed and applauded. "Don't get that one at all."

Gutfeld routinely ducks behind such disclaimers as he degrades the American world with his grimy suggestions. Believe it or not, his previous joke seemed to be pushing the theme that Obama had or has some sort of problem with birth certificate matters!

His first joke dealt with the zipper on Bill Clinton's pants, which remained open on Columbus Day. Thirty years later, untreated people like Greg Gutfeld can't seem to move on from there.  

This garbage can soils the American landscape every weekday night. Over the weekend, the Washington Post had offered this report on a familiar complaint by the sitting president:   

Trump fumes at ‘stain’ on Norway after missing out on Nobel Peace Prize

President Donald Trump has reacted angrily to missing out on the Nobel Peace Prize, disparaging the winner and describing the decision as an “indelible stain” on Norway.

Speaking at a rally in Syracuse, New York, Friday evening, Trump described this year’s winner of the prestigious prize, leading jurist and former U.N. human rights chief Navanethem “Navi” Pillay, as a “mystery person” he had never heard of, and said: “We will not forget, Norway, that you didn’t give this prize.” He followed up with social media posts on Friday and Saturday that criticized the award committee’s decision.

[...]

In his Friday night tirade against the Nobel Peace Prize result, which lasted about 10 minutes, Trump said he “should have received the Nobel Peace Prize, but didn’t. … This is an indelible stain on the country of Norway and those people that made such an disgraceful and embarrassing decision.” 

You read that correctly! Speaking at what was supposed to be a campaign rally, the president spent roughly ten minutes complaining that he'd been snubbed again. 

Judged by any conventional standard, his complaints were weirdly overwrought. As the Post's report continued, it also noted this:  

In posts on Truth Social late Friday and early Saturday, Trump, who is waging war against Iran, also said he “should have won 8 Nobel Peace Prizes” because he “settled 8 Wars” and was “about to settle, or win, two more, Iran and, Russia/Ukraine.”

In reality, some of the eight conflicts Trump claims to have settled have continued. Others were ended largely by others. 

All in all, whatever! He should have won eight Nobel Prizes, the overwrought person said. 

And yes, he went on for ten minutes! Is something "wrong" with this powerful man?

What should we think about this sort of thing? As we noted yesterday, in a new Club Random episode, Bill Maher, who we greatly admire, chose to say this about that:   

Bill Maher Is Dining With Trump Again Because He’s a Willing Dupe

Bill Maher is heading to the White House to meet with Donald Trump again partly because, in Maher’s words, “he was like, really nice.”

The last time the ostensibly liberal Maher made the pilgrimage to D.C. to meet with Trump, he indignantly lashed out at those who criticized him for doing so. Speaking on HBO’s Real Time after the summit in April 2025, Maher noted that Trump has been engaging in a “trade war and disappearing people, ruling by decree, threatening judges, gutting the government with glee.”

But despite these actions, which Maher himself said he is disturbed by, Trump still managed to impress him.

“Trump was gracious and measured,” Maher told his audience at the time. “And why he isn’t that in other settings, I don’t know and I can’t answer and it’s not my place to answer.” 

Why does the president do the various things he does? Bill said he doesn't know. 

Meanwhile, Bill Maher, please! He even said it isn't his place to answer that question. To our ear, he almost seemed to be saying that it isn't his place even to try to come up with an answer.  

In our view, that was egregiously wrong.   

Just a guess! We'll guess that almost everyone knows the unfortunate general answer to the question Bill posed. Beyond that, we think it's Bill's responsibility—he's a citizen, after all—to try to come up with an answer.  

Tomorrow: A wide refusal to serve

TUESDAY: Welker wastes the nation's time!

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 13, 2026

Brain cells under attack: Let's go with an easy one as we attempt to return to full services. 

Last weekend, in her full interview with Abdul el-Sayed for Meet the Press, Kristen Welker journeyed down an extremely tired old road  

Friends, let nip it in the bud! At the end of the 32-minute unedited session—this portion didn't actually air—Welker went with this:

WELKER: OK. Let's finish by talking about 2028 and looking ahead a little bit...  

Uh-oh! People who own TV sets could already see it coming! 

"Could we just get through 2026," El-Sayed helplessly asked.  

Inevitably, the answer was going to be no. Welker soon went with this:

WELKER: Finally, last question. Do you think that America is ready for a Muslim president?

EL-SAYED: That's not a question I'm asking. I think Michigan is ready for a Muslim senator.  

If only she'd ended the foofaw right there! But under eternal rule of the guild, this manifest foolishness followed:

WELKER (continuing directly): But do you think America is ready for a Muslim president?

EL-SAYED: That's irrelevant. I think Michigan is ready for a Muslim senator.

WELKER: OK. But you don’t rule out the possibility that—

EL-SAYED: I have no intention of ever running for president. That is not a thing I've ever wanted to do...  

El-Sayed was forced to continue the ritual from there. We thought of all the years in which time-killing TV hosts tormented the late Bill Richardson with cloying questions of this familiar type.   

Kristen Welker is smarter than this! But plainly, they can't help themselves. These pointless questions must be asked. It's one of the guild's oldest rules. 

HAPPINESS: Maybe by the end of the week!

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 13, 2026

First, though, INABILITIES: Say what? Shine on me, sunshine? Walk with me, world?

In our view, it was a good way to start a song. Sacred Thoreau was in a similar place when he penned the following words on the shore of Concord's famous Barron Pond. 

It's the start of the fifth chapter in his famous book, Barron. For the original text, click here:

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...

The writer felt "sympathy with the poplar leaves!" This is widely viewed as an excellent place to be.

But also, "Shine on me, sunshine / Walk with me, world!"  In our view, it was a beautiful way to start a song—a song which went to #1 on the country charts in 1972. We heard it again on the road back from Durham, years ago, after watching a certain second grader take part in a schoolwide spelling bee. At the time, she was the greatest kid in the world, tied with her younger sister, who was also the world's greatest kid.

We'll refresh you on the song by the end of the week. But also, we'll offer some thoughts on its relevance.

(At one time, the pond was known as Walden Pond. We've linked you to Thoreau's original text, which did include the word "trump.")

That song was a portrait of happiness. First, though, a different focus. First, we'll look at the inabilities which currently put us in danger.

We'll start today with an aggressive challenge to Bill Maher. It's voiced in an opinion piece by Mediaite's Michel Luciano.

As readers know—as we've often said—we've always admired Bill's enormous achievement. Today, though, Luciano can be spotted offering this, unflattering headline included:

Bill Maher Is Dining With Trump Again Because He’s a Willing Dupe

Bill Maher is heading to the White House to meet with Donald Trump again partly because, in Maher’s words, “he was like, really nice.”

The last time the ostensibly liberal Maher made the pilgrimage to D.C. to meet with Trump, he indignantly lashed out at those who criticized him for doing so. Speaking on HBO’s Real Time after the summit in April 2025, Maher noted that Trump has been engaging in a “trade war and disappearing people, ruling by decree, threatening judges, gutting the government with glee.”

But despite these actions, which Maher himself said he is disturbed by, Trump still managed to impress him.

“Trump was gracious and measured,” Maher told his audience at the time. “And why he isn’t that in other settings, I don’t know and I can’t answer and it’s not my place to answer.”

And so on from there. Now for a bit of background:

Last week, during a Club Random chat, Bill said that the president has offered another dining invitation and that he's going to take it. At some length, Luciano says that Bill is wrong to do that.  He says that Bill is making himself "a willing dupe of a malevolent president."

We can't necessarily say that Luciano is wrong. For ourselves, we're going to focus on this part of Bill's statement from last year:

“Trump was gracious and measured,” Maher told his audience at the time. “And why he isn’t that in other settings, I don’t know and I can’t answer and it’s not my place to answer.”  

In our view, Bill was flat-out wrong about that—though also, stone-cold wrong. In our view, it is his place to try to answer that deeply consequential question. We'd even say it's been his responsibility to try to fashion an answer.

Why does the sitting president do the things he does? It's too late to avoid the disasters which may follow November's mid-term elections. But Bill was saying he doesn't know, and that "it's not his place to answer." 

We're in awe of what Bill has achieved. But we'll call that spectacularly wrong.  

We'll discuss INABILITIES all week long. Tomorrow, we'll start right there, with that.   

Tomorrow: What, him interview a specialist?