Dan Kostelec

Pretty accurate! I spent a couple of hours at the PA DMV (PennDOT) today, and this tracks

I’m pretty sure that the adults (who we never see) in the Peanuts universe are a bunch of jerks.

The speaker of the House of Representatives is a joke — or at least would be if it weren’t so serious.

We must treat the autocratic, fascist takeover of the American government seriously, but these are NOT serious people. They deserve all of our mockery.

Thanks for sharing it. And thanks for thinking so

😂

To all who are reading this, most of whom I imagine largely agree with me, but a few I am sure do not, if you’ve got this far thanks for reading. I wish you peace. I wish you happiness. I wish you a long life.

My thoughts go out to his family. My actions, I hope, in their small way will help to make our country a better place. It is all I can hope for right now.

It’s all too human.

So did Charlie Kirk deserve to die? No, I don’t think so. Will his death mean anything in our national conversation with ourselves about political violence, guns and their position in our society and their involvement with said political violence, and our terrible tendency to demonize each other.

Violence is baked into our system. We have never been a nonviolent people. Rather, we are a country that claims to abhor violence but does it anyway, and often. Can we be different? That’s the question, isn’t it?

2025: Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman, along with her husband, were killed in their home, following the nonfatal shooting of State Senator John Hoffman and his wife.

2021: the storming of the United States Capitol building by a mob, many of whom were armed, which resulted in nine deaths and potentially the attempt of many more, including the hanging of the vice president on the ground of the Capitol itself.

2011: an assassination attempt on representative Gabby Giffords.
2017: an assassination attempt on representative Steve Scalise.

There have been many more other attempts and plots over the years which were thwarted by authorities or by the perpetrators’ own incompetence. But are we better than we were then?

Teddy Roosevelt, no longer president but running for reelection in 1912 was actually shot, and we remember the shooting at Trump’s rally when running for reelection after four years out of office last year.

Following Lincoln, three more presidents were killed by assassins while in office: James Garfield in 1881, William McKinley in 1901, and John F. Kennedy in 1963. Gerald Ford was shot out in 1976 and Ronald Reagan was actually hit in 1981.

We fought a 4-year-long civil war, following decades of escalating political tensions, including the beating — nearly unto death — of Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, and culminating with the assassination of president Abraham Lincoln in 1865. Are we better than we were then?

America was founded on violence and political violence soon became more of a feature than a flaw. Alexander Hamilton was killed by Vice President Aaron Burr in 1804, just 21 years after the end of the Revolution. Are we better than we were then?

Political violence solves nothing: it just begets more. We need look no further back than the assassinations in quick succession of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy, one nearly right after the other in 1968. But can we be better than we were then?

He was someone who liked the sound of his own voice and would debate his opponents, often in bad faith, but would engage with those opponents.

Charlie Kirk was a racist, a xenophobe, an antisemite, a transphobe, a white supremacist. To pretend otherwise is whitewashing his past and ignoring a common shared reality. But should he have been killed, murdered, assassinated? No.

Please don’t think that I’m here to defend him. I’m not — I AM trying to make a larger point, and I hope that I succeed by the end of this screed.

This is long, so buckle in. Or scroll on by: I won’t be offended.

Charlie Kirk did not deserve to die. The list is REALLY short of who actually does, and we all eventually will. But it’s not up to us to decide who lives and who dies.

What level of nonsense have we descended to?

Man alive, “Foundation” is good!!

Neil Gorsuch, along with the other five “conservative” justices on the Supreme Court, seems to have the overall political and legal acumen of Aaron Sorkin’s fictional judge Peyton Cabot Harrison, III.

And YOU will know that you’re a badass.

Fin

You’re not feeling that confident about yourself in your job or career? Fake it! “Fake it ‘til you make it” is the phrase, I believe. And what are “they” going to do if they discover that your confidence is all an act? They’ll see that your competency is higher than they ever imagined.

5/6

Take some of the unearned confidence of the middling, meh, very mid, cis men that you know (and we all know them; heck, some of us WERE them) and apply it to yourself.

4/6