All dysfunctional families are alike
By 
This is going to be a bit of a ramble, so sue me if I post too long:
*The death of Claudine Longet reminded me that I had a drink with her and her husband in Aspen around 1990. I was at the annual meeting of the Colorado bar association, and her husband, who had been her defense attorney when she was prosecuted for shooting to death the Olympic skier Spider Sabich, was a former student and friend of a senior colleague on the CU law faculty, who introduced me to the couple apres something or the other.
I was 17 at the time of the trial in 1977, which was quite a spectacular scandal at the time — there was a very funny and incredibly tasteless SNL sketch, “The Claudine Longet Invitational,” during which she accidentally kept shooting the competitors in the midst of their ski runs; this led to an actual on-air apology, after the show got a cease and desist letter — so I very well remembered who she was. But I gave no indication of this during our post-prandial (I’m tactful like that). She was a startlingly beautiful woman, and spoke softly with a charming French accent . . . Isn’t there a bootleg Rolling Stones’ song about her? (Not googling this).
*Longet was married for several years to Andy Williams, once a famous singer (“Moon River” etc.), and had three children with him, the youngest who the couple named Bobby after RFK Sr. They were big supporters of his presidential campaign and were in his suite at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles the night he was assassinated. Which is an awkward segue into this:
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is caught between his Make America Healthy Again supporters who want him to do more to advance their priorities, including curtailing vaccines, and a White House trying to combat President Trump’s unpopularity.
Protesters’ chants could be heard from inside the Cleveland City Club, where Kennedy was speaking to a bipartisan group of citizens as part of his recent tour of northern Ohio. His calls for parents to have more “choice” on vaccinating their children was met with applause from half of the room. The other half released exasperated sighs and gasps.
His travel schedule is about to get busier: Kennedy is expected to stump for GOP lawmakers, traveling to states with competitive races in the upcoming midterm elections.
This fucking guy.
Many Republicans in competitive races are already distancing themselves from the grassroots, vaccine-skeptical “medical freedom” movement led by Kennedy.
Many MAHA supporters also feel let down by Trump administration directives that rolled back environmental regulations and promoted pesticides. Some now see a Kennedy presidency as critical to attaining their policy goals.
Stephanie Weidle “100%” wants to see Kennedy run again. The 34-year-old Washington, D.C., resident was outside the Supreme Court last month during a rally to oppose protections for the weed-killing chemical glyphosate.
A reliable Republican voter, Weidle described the administration’s actions as disappointing. She wants to see Kennedy go further on examining the childhood vaccine schedule and limiting chemical use on crops.
“His hands have been tied,” Weidle said of Kennedy. She believes the White House has ordered him to back down from those controversial issues. “Republicans have made a grave misstep in not leading with MAHA.”
Vaccines are a flashpoint.
Are vaccines good or bad? Views differ!
*Speaking of which I wanted to say something about Jared Polis commuting the sentence of Tina Peters. While this is of course utterly indefensible, it does highlight something I’ve thought a lot about over the last five years, which is how Donald Trump’s attempted insurrection, which merely culminated on January 6, 2021, but actually lasted several weeks and was mostly right out in the open, is something that on some level simply has to be treated with overwhelming amounts of psychological denial by the whole system in general, and establishment politicians of both parties in particular. Commuting Peters’ sentence is a way of symbolically signaling that ultimately the sitting president of the United States trying to overthrow the government, and then spending the next five years continuing to deny that he lost the election, and insisting that an entire presidential administration was illegitimate, is just Not That Big of a Deal.
And while Polis’s act is a particularly stark example of that, it’s merely of a piece with pretty much everything that the political and legal systems have done in reaction to the insurrection, which is, functionally speaking, nothing. And those systems have done nothing, because doing something even minimally appropriate, like throwing Donald Trump in prison for the rest of his life, isn’t an option, because we’re an abusive relationship that we can’t get out of, and therefore people like Polis (and Biden and Garland and Schumer and Jefferies and basically everybody in the power elite) continue to act like what happened didn’t actually happen, because the alternative — getting out of this nightmarish national marriage — feels completely impossible.