I first learned of International Women’s Day in the 70s, on a Polish research vessel surveying a chilly Georges Bank. My female Polish counterpart clued me in. It was a very popular holiday in Europe, eastern and western. Today I marvel at the strength of President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico. Too bad we can’t have a President like her here. We could have, twice. Now I don’t think I will ever see it in what’s left of my lifetime.

One story jumped out at me today from The New Republic about a woman showing strong leadership and resistance to the chaos being caused by FOTUS and FElon. The ousted head of HR at the IRS, Traci DiMartini, a 21 year civil servant who has never had a bad performance review or discipline action against her, was placed on leave for “ineffective management” and “insubordination” to DOGE. Her crimes and misdemeanors? She told the IRS staff where the firings were coming from. She refused to call them back to work over the weekend after they’d already worked 60-70 hours in the heat of tax season. She DARED call out “flagrant prohibited personnel practices”.

She is challenging her dismissal. “It’s my job to stand up and be the buffer between politicals and career employees, and I’m just trying to do my gd dmn job”. Good on you, Ms. DiMartini. What an excellent example you are setting for others in the same situation.

I spent lots of time on ships and can swear in several languages. I love the fight in this woman, and saved the best quote for last: “They have no idea who they picked a f-ing fight with.”

Here’s a brief update on the future of the Salon.  As we’ve talked we felt it important to maintain the record of work done by Susan and the other writers for the last umpteen years, and there is some discussion of some go forward presence, though that’s not defined in any way yet.  In the meantime, we’ve decided to keep the website alive for now, and will keep commenting active for the next month or so.  We’re going to do some updating to the platform to reduce costs and workload, so you’ll see some changes to the page in coming weeks.

We’ll keep our customers updated on future decisions as we make them.

El Jefe

News item: Biden Pardons His Son. In another timeline, this news would cause a universal gnashing of teeth as yet another outgoing president abuses the power of the pardon as he passes them out like party favors in the waning days of his term. It’s what lame ducks do, and we’ve all come to expect it.

Remember Marc Rich?

But all I can say, upon reading the headlines on Sunday, that Joe Biden gave his sole surviving son a sweeping pardon for his crimes is “Good for you, Joe.”

This comes after a long drawn-out sideshow of Hunter Biden’s trials, aborted plea deals, stolen laptops, and President Biden’s repeated assurances that pardoning his son was a non-starter. Not since Billy Carter was derided and defiled simply because he was a presidential family member that took advantage of that fact, has a relative been drawn-and-quartered and given public whippings by the Righteous Right.

The abuse had to stop, and we finally got to see Biden eke out a win after all this time, even if it was (literally) by his own hand.

The timing of the announcement couldn’t have been more perfect, coming as it did after Don the Con promoted a former heroin addict to the Department of Health and Human Services, and named a scheming and disgusting former felon to Ambassador to France. What a massive F-You to Americans and the entire world over just these two actions. Given the smelly s–t sandwich that Bronzer Boy just served up to us, the sackcloth and ashes being worn by right wingers over Hunter’s reprieve is laughable by half.

In his way, I think, President Biden simply realized the truth of what was first noted by French philosopher Michel de Montaigne when he considered the negative blowback he would receive over his son’s pardon.

A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.

It has been a while since the last time we had a president-elect Trumpelstiltskin. I can still remember the sick feelings of loss and disgust when he won the first time by a gnat’s eyelash. But the post-election malaise that is setting in right now is unprecedented as is every other damned thing this time.

I bear witness to the fear and loathing taking place from Lubec, Maine to Lebec, California, as we await the second term of His Shartfulness with two observations.

First, what is with the dipping viewership of broadband cable news channels MSNBC and CNN? I don’t recall that from before. Is the whole Left in such a state of loathing and disgust that watching it unfold again and again on TV is too much to bear? Yes. I can understand the spectacular crash and burn of Joe and Mika’s once-popular morning show on MSNBC (more on that later), but the whole liberal news genre seems to have to scrounge for a vanished audience. Yes, it’s hard to watch, but it’s time to wake up and taste the bitter dregs. America really screwed the pooch this time, but we still need to pay attention, more so because this time we really dug ourselves a hole by electing an a-hole.

The other thing that seems to be new is the desire to be fair and impartial, especially after being treated to such over-the-top rhetoric before 11/5. Joe and Mika went to Mar-A-Lago to make nice with the president-elect, and they lost 31% of their audience almost immediately. Could it be that, as Jon Stewart posited the week after their pilgrimage, they said he was Hitler?

But it didn’t stop there. Whoopi Goldberg is willing to “wait and see.”

Quoting her: “I’m not going to waste a lot of time on what he might do. I’m gonna wait because I need to see what he will do so that I know what I’m gonna do.”

Are you kidding me? Whoopi has the distinction of being compared to Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s filmographer, by an anti-abortion ad that was aired during a commercial break on The View. That really happened.

At least they didn’t call her Hitler.

Even Ana Navarro (who I remember as an evil Republican back in the good old days) said, “I spent weeks telling people he was apocalyptic. I’m not going to change now because it’s still the same man! I think that’s when we lose credibility.”

Ya think?

You can’t spend months proclaiming from the mountaintops that the apocalypse is nigh if Captain Bone Spurs gets elected, and then adopt a reasonable “can’t we all get along?” approach when it actually happens. That’s lazy. That’s disingenuous.

And it just isn’t who we are.