Left Jabs

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The Real Reason Jeopardy! Won’t Record to my DVR

For years, my Xfinity DVR has faithfully recorded every episode of Jeopardy! . Lately, for some reason, it refuses. It records everything else. I can time-shift every series, every game, every movie. I can still record the local news on WDIV, the same NBC affiliate that carries Jeopardy. I just can’t record Jeopardy. I suspect Republicans. No, this is not an existential crisis, but it has been enough of an annoyance that I was cajoled — or perhaps threatened — by my family into investigating the mystery. So I turned to AI (they/them) to see if they might know something about it. I withheld my theory about Republicans. They walked me through all the usual diagnostic gyrations with the remote, and I dutifully followed all the steps I knew I’d already followed. They sagely deduced that the problem was not on my end, but Xfinity’s. They concluded there was a “DVR/guide-data problem” in the Xfinity system, and they found other users in the Detroit area who...

Double Standards, Foreign and Domestic

I’m writing today on two subjects that don’t have much in common: Democrats and Ukraine. I bring them together only to discuss the double standards they each, in their own way, are forced to deal with. The two situations are in no way equivalent — Ukraine being in far more peril — but they do have parallels. We all know how Democrats are expected to maintain the moral high ground, to impeccably observe ethical norms that feel almost quaint in the age of Trump. This is also true of Ukraine and Putin, but we’ll get to that. Republicans, of course, are expected to be omnivorously corrupt. The self-dealing and grand larceny barely raise eyebrows in the media these days. If it isn’t about the Communist takeover of the Democratic Party, it isn’t news. Even so, Democrats largely live up to the higher standard, foolish as that sometimes seems, and are still quick to remove anyone who’s not squeaky clean from their ranks. Republicans, of course, have unlimited l...

Abdul El-Sayed and the Start of Silly Season

We’re not yet officially in the “silly season,” that cascade of bullshit that will dominate what passes for political discourse between Labor Day and the November midterms. But as with Christmas, the silly season comes earlier and earlier with each election cycle, and one could argue that it kicked off unofficially last Tuesday, with the Michigan primary. The silliness was, as usual, aided and abetted by the New York Times, in a series of disingenuous takes on the narrow victory of Abdul El-Sayed over Haley Stevens in the race for the Democratic Senate nomination. The Times’ started hyperventilating over the rise of El-Sayed weeks ago, strongly echoing its equally biased misreading of the rise of Zohran Mamdani. Both candidates were Muslims with funny names who weren’t afraid to speak the word ‘socialist’ out loud. Even worse — even more likely to make the Times’ editorial board queasy — they were both willing to openly blast the conventional wisdom abo...

Move to the Center, My Ass

This piece isn’t that old, but it bears repeating. It was written in the immediate aftermath of last year’s off-year elections, when Democrats made an unusually strong showing, which according to the legacy media was a sign of weakness. Now, as we enter the silly season leading up to November, that same media can be counted on to make the midterms seem like a contest between two legitimate entities. Already the stories feature Democrats hopelessly, and haplessly, locked in ideological struggles that threaten their ability to walk and chew gum, mostly because the Trumpian apocalypse story is getting old. If it seems like we’ve heard all this too many times before, I’m with you. And as you’ll see, I’ve even written about it. In the run-up to last Tuesday’s election, it was hard to avoid the overpaid pundits repeating the oldest and laziest clichés in the pundit handbook: “Democrats need to move to the center.” “Democrats are out of touch with voters....

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes — And Your Nose, Throat, and Lungs, As Well

Here in Michigan, we are a bit smug when it comes to climate change. We think of ourselves as unusually well positioned for the increasingly dire future we can see for the planet. Geography favors us. Hurricanes, droughts, and wildfires feel reassuringly remote. True, ice storms and other severe weather events are more frequent than they used to be, but compared to other parts of the country the climate here is relatively benign. Our confidence stems, first, from our northern location, where global warming has made our cold winters generally more comfortable than they once were, and where the summers only occasionally get higher than the mid-80s. But the real source of our confidence, or smugness if you like, comes from the four Great Lakes that surround us. We have, as a state, access to a full one-fifth of the world’s fresh water. In that sense, there’s no place like it in the world. And make no mistake, water is already a crisis in many parts of th...

A Few F-Bombs, Which Seem Appropriate to the Current Situation

As I’m not writing this week, I’m re-running my most profane piece, an exploration of FAFO, a term that has grown ever more pointed as time goes by. The piece goes back to February 2025, before the tariffs, before the Epstein scandal went nuclear, before the Iran War. Back then, things were looking quite bad indeed, especially for large parts of the MAGA base. And while, as the title says, these F-bombs were entirely appropriate then, they’ve only grown more so since. I try not to write the word ‘fuck’ too often. This is not from any prudishness or discomfort — I use it regularly in everyday speech — but seeing it in writing quickly gets old and tired. I do use it occasionally for effect, but the effect is usually minimal. In this post, however, I can’t get around it. This one is about the ironic, unintended meanings of the redneck t-shirt slogan “Fuck Around and Find Out.” A masterpiece of trashy thought, trashily expressed, I can’t talk about...