Well, it’s the afternoon already, and I am just now getting down to writing my daily post. The main reason is that I started the day with my annual dermatologist appointment. I find this a weird appointment. You go the office, they take you into a room and tell you to take off all your clothes, two people come in, one looks at you all over and talks to the other one, who is taking notes. Then, they tell you to get dressed and come back next year. I understand that it is important to get looked at for possible malignancies. But that does not stop the appointment from being weird. Once, they come into the room, it takes less than 5 minutes. I don’t know what medicare pays them for those 5 minutes, but it looks like a great business model.

It is so rare to have good news these days, that I must share this with you, even though this is something that affects only a small segment of my audience. As that small segment knows, and as the rest of you don’t, Bob Carpenter retired last year after 20 plus years as the Washington Nationals’ TV announcer. Today, it was announced that the commentator for next year will be Dan Kolko. Kolko has been the guy who conducts interviews with players in the dugouts, and gives little snippets like what the first baseman had for breakfast that morning, and,yes, he weas the guy that typically spelled Carpenter when he was away or off. I think it is good news. I have never met Kolko, but based on his 10 years in his present job, he is either a great guy or a great actor, and both of those are important qualities for his new job.

Yesterday, I watched a little of Marco Rubio’s testimony before the House something committee about Venezuela, and today I watched a little of Tom Homan’s press conference about ICE in Minneapolis. I will say that Trump officials do have a great knack of not really saying very much, but that Rubio has the ability not to say very much very well, and Homan probably would sound like he was saying nothing even if he was saying something.

My impression of Rubio’s performance leads me to think two things: (1) he speaks well enough that he’d make a formidable presidential candidate, and (2) because he speaks well enough to be a formidable presidential candidate, the Republicans will nominate someone else. I don’t know what the members asked him yesterday, but he obviously feels that shooting boats out of the water and killing their crew in order to stop drugs that were never coming into this country from coming into this country is not an act of war and is okay. He also obviously feels that stealing Venezuela’s oil and returning only a part of it to be used for the ‘benefit’ of the Venezuelan people (what “benefit” means, I don’t know), and using the rest as he and Big Don want, is perfectly fine. Whether he mentioned the fact that some of the money is being held in off-shore accounts, and that some of the oil is being transported by companies with very questionable backgrounds (the news has reported these things over the past few days), I don’t know. What he thinks about them, I don’t know. But I will say (and this is a complement), he did look proto-presidential. (Actually, I don’t know if proto-presidential is a term or not; my computer does not think it is. Is it?)

Tom Homan is something else. He looks so tough and mean that you’d be scared when he wished you a happy birthday or Merry Christmas. As I understood him this morning, speaking of his new job as head of ICE activities in Minneapolis, he said: we know there have been some mistakes made, and that we are going to correct those, and the way we are going to correct those is by doing exactly what we have been doing in the past when the mistakes were made. Yes, this is what I think he said. But even if he didn’t say this, he looked like he was saying this, and that is what is important.

To be fair, he did say that they were going after targeted people. This might mean that they are going to stop stopping people on the street based on their racial profile and requiring them to provide identification on pain of otherwise having to spend time first in Louisiana and then in Djibouti or Zanzibar. But in response to one of the two or three questions asked by members of the press who were not agents of nees operations to the right of Newsmax, he refused to say that someone with no criminal record, other than illegally coming into the United States, was not a criminal who could be targeted.

But he said he might be able to tone down the intensity of ICE in Minneapolis, if only the state and local governments would cooperate and give them all the information they needed to arrest people and help them out. He kept calling the people he arrested “threats to public safety”, as if anyone who sneaked across the border is ipso facto such a threat. And he is obviously fixated on the number of arrests: an increase in the number of illegal immigrants in jail means that there will be fewer illegal immigrants on the streets, he said, “It’s simple math.” Yeah.

I don’t think we have seen the end of this yet. Are they going to stop breaking into houses without warrants, in violation of the Fifth Amendment? Are they going to stop raiding churches, schools and workplaces? Are they going to stop detaining children? He certainly did not say that his law enforcement officers were going to show their names or faces, and I see nothing that will limit the amount of advertising that the Trumpistas (a Venezuelan term, perhaps) are doing to recruit more officers. How many of them have criminal records, we don’t know. We don’t know if they (like the folks they say they are chasing) are murderers, rapists, drug dealers, or residents of mental instititions. Or even how many were at the Capitol on January 6. But one thing is clear. That is that they have had some success in recruiting retired dermatologists. You remember that guy (and an American citizen, to boot) that they dragged out in the snow from his house, basically naked in subzero weather? That is an act that could only have been performed by a highly trained retired dermatologist.

In the meantime, will the government be shut down again Saturday morning? The only issue is the inclusion of more ICE funds in the appropriations legislation. These funds, by the way, or not needed by ICE, which has been funded more than sufficiently for some time to come through the Big Beautiful Ugly Bill legislation. So, on both sides, this is a fight for principle, not for practicality. In a normal world, this would make compromise easy as apple pie. But in the non-Panglossian world we live in…..