S. Joel Garver

...Any other president would have been run out of office by this point. And don't come at me with him winning the election with some kind of "mandate." Tricky Dicky won in 1972 with nearly 61% of the popular vote and 520 electoral votes, and by August 1974 he resigned in disgrace over less.

...that's what you'd expect leaders to say. All this raging & flailing on the part of the Temu Tyrant seems tantamount to an admission of guilt, especially since the PSA did not mention the President, any members of his regime, or any specific military actions. Methinks he doth protest too much...

..."We'd like to thank these members of Congress for reiterating the law and would assure all our service members that our attorneys do everything in our power so that our military orders and protocols remain compliant with both US and international law." Even if that's an outright lie...

The daily outrages coming from this regime aren't surprising at this point. But calling for the execution of members of Congress for basically reiterating the law is pretty crazy, even for Moron Mussolini. First of all, a competent politician would have shrugged off the PSA or said something like...

A hand holding my book Selling Out Santa Hollywood Christmas Films in the Age of McCarthy with three red white and blue baubles in front of an American flag

A friend sent me a picture of my book.

It's tangible and exists, and I am so fucking proud of myself.

Today is officially publication day, and it's hard to wrap my mind around it. I know many of you have written many books, but I never thought I could. 1/3
www.barnesandnoble.com/w/selling-ou...

Managed to see them faintly. I have friends honeymooning in Iceland at the moment. I hope they're getting a spectacular show!

What direction?

I wonder how that works with a volume of collected essays by multiple authors?

How about we shut down the government for this very popular and specific goal and then, hear me out, we hold out for like a month and a half and then, ok this part is important, after a watershed election where we ran the table, ONLY THEN, fold and don't get the one thing we said we wanted.

Just when you thought the Democrats might have begun to nudge themselves into a better direction, especially when in a strong position after outperforming in the recent elections... 🙄

I should have posted some pics. In addition to the personalized note, each book has a gold embossed seal inside that says "from the library of" the couple.

...with a handwritten note inside. It was such a thoughtful, meaningful gesture, so creative & fun, especially as it was a great conversation starter with other guests, being able to ask about their books. I should also note that the couple met at a church book club (which we are also part of).

We went to a wedding yesterday where guests found their table for the reception by going to a bookshelf full of books, each with a personalized jacket with a name & table # on it, arranged alphabetically. Each book was unique, specially selected as a gift for that particular guest...

Medical costs & medical insurance are both crazy to me. My dermatologist recently prescribed me a biologic since my psoriasis is barely kept at bay with topicals & my psoriatic arthritis is only getting worse. The catch? $21,500 per dose, 4x/yr. Insurance pays for it, minus co-pay. But wtaf?

A family friend was telling us about what her husband shared about his experience in Broadview before he was deported back to Mexico. She's been sharing to friends and family because she's just in disbelief & horror what her husband told her. She wasn't able to talk to him until he was in Mexico.

I assume these tacky gold embellishments are just put up with construction adhesive and can be easily popped off, and the White House returned to its understated elegance, once its occupant is no longer a tin-pot tyrant given to tasteless, gaudy, cheap ostentation.

It's crazy to me that US news outlets - who would almost never refer to Mike Johnson or Stephen Miller or Kristi Noem or Charlie Kirk as "far-right" - insist that Mamdani is "far-left" when his policy positions align w/ the New Deal or the default center left positions of most European democracies.

Dick Cheney may have been anti-Trump, but he's also a large part of why we're in this current mess: continual expansion of executive power, violations of international and domestic law without consequence, and a scorched-earth approach to politics prioritizing party power over policy or process.

The #1 lesson from yesterday’s blowout:
Humanities majors killed on the job market
1) Mamdani- Africana Studies
2) Spanberger -French
3) Sherill - Global History

Daine Grey and Jacquelyn Frazier-Lyde Santiago were "not recommended" by the Philly Bar Association for reasons other than simply not responding to their evaluation. Not sure the exact reasons, tho they're likely to all be retained anyway.

That's why I always go in with a prepared list. Our line was moving relatively quickly. Just a lot of people in line.

There was a *line* at the polls this morning at 10:30am. That is wild on an off-year election. I haven't encountered a line like that except for presidential elections. Not sure what it means, but it was striking.

I've come down with a bad cold and woke up super congested. But, on the plus side, Dick Cheney is dead. I'm hoping we can add a few good election wins - PA Supreme Court, Philly DA, VA governor, NY mayor, Prop 50 in CA - to the plus side before I go back to sleep tonight.

It's crazy here - Halloween central. The neighbors go all out with decorating, and folks come from surrounding neighborhoods.

We ended up with around 190 trick-or-treaters tonight, from babies in strollers to high schoolers, with a wonderful array of costumes. The 50 packs of fruit snacks were a hit, along with 2 bags of mandarin oranges and 48 packs of ramen. We are only left with candy.

We had a couple brief follow-up exchanges. They conceded they have less problem with state and local welfare - which really undermines their argument since they'd started with "taxation is theft" kind of rhetoric, but ended up retreating to "well, federal welfare is unconstitutional." 🤷🏻‍♂️

I was tired & grumpy this afternoon, which led me to picking fights with idiots online - generally against my better judgment. Discussions around SNAP benefits pushed me over the edge. One libertarian commenter baldly asserted that there was no welfare pre-New Deal when Marxists took over. I replied

When will you get to Anathem? That's one of my favorites.

(RNS) - Last Friday (Oct. 17), the Rev. Hannah Kardon, a United Methodist minister in the Chicago area, stood alongside other protesters demonstrating outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Broadview, Illinois. As a line of Illinois State Police began marching toward her and other demonstrators, gripping wooden batons, footage shows the pastor with her hands raised in prayer. Officers then pushed into the protesters, forcing them back. One officer shifted his stance, reared back and began shoving his baton like a battering ram - jamming it repeatedly, Kardon says, into her leg. A few seconds later, the pastor was pulled from the crowd and thrown to the ground. All the while, Kardon says, she never stopped praying. When officers began to arrest her, they tied her arms behind her back and placed her along the curb. "I said, 'God, please help these people to know that what they're doing is wrong, and help them to turn around," Kardon, who leads United Church of Rogers Park in Chicago, said in an interview. Her leg, she said, has developed visible bruises.

NEW: 200+ Chicago-area clergy — Protestants, Catholics, and evangelicals — have signed a letter decrying ICE's efforts and voicing a willingness to put their "bodies on the line" for migrants.

"What Kristi Noem and her ICE agents are doing is immoral," they write. religionnews.com/2025/10/21/a...

Not necessarily, esp since we know so much about how poorly designed & biased student evals often are. Maybe a representative sample of evals and/or student comments. Could also include teaching materials, peer observations, teaching commendations or nomination letters, measures of student success.