Kelly’s Irish Times, D.C.

The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. — It was with no small amount of trepidation that I hit the ON button to turn on the television Sunday morning. And with great relief, there was no immediate report of a mass shooting.

So let’s reboot this Thanksgiving and start again.

While some people seem hell-bent on committing mass suicide, taking other people down with them as they violently end their own miserable lives, I’m thankful for good friends who fed me two Thanksgiving meals this week.

Poor Donald Trump could not find anyone to have Thanksgiving dinner with him at Mar-a-Lago in Florida except for Kanye West, an outcast performer who is so desperate for attention from white people on Elon Musk’s Twitter that he decided it would be a good idea to bash the Jews in public, and his Holocaust denying racist friend Nick Fuentes, who sees Trump as America’s Hitler, which he thinks is somehow a good thing.

Trump and Kanye West racist friend Nick Fuentes: NAJ screen shot

If you pony up for the paywall, you can read the story from New York Times writers Maggie Haberman and Alan Feuer.

Trump’s Latest Dinner Guest: Nick Fuentes, White Supremacist

But I have vowed to #BoycottTrump and #BoycottMAGA for the entirety of the holiday season this year, so will save up my Gonzo rant for the new class of Republicans for Jan. 3, when they show up in the Capitol downtown to be sworn in.

While they campaigned to fight crime and stop immigration, to keep America white and Christian again (MAWC), the first order of business seems to be a useless investigation of Hunter Biden and what’s on his stolen laptop.

Boring. This won’t even play on TikTok, and it’s hard to see how even Musk expects to get traffic coming back to Twitter for that.

Now after being back in the metro area with 89 television channels after six months in the mountains with no signal, I was pleased to see the Alabama Crimson Tide back on CBS to take on the Auburn Tigers on Saturday, and to see Bryce Young back healthy as quarterback. The Tide won the game 49-27, but it was no Iron Bowl. I can’t believe they still call it that. It was the Iron Bowl when they played in my home town of Birmingham, the iron city, right?

Whatever. Football is not the key to life any more than religion, so I’m more interested in how to make government and democracy work in the nation’s capital.

If you really want to fight crime, the Federal Bureau of Investigation needs a new headquarters, and it needs to be located in Greenbelt, Maryland, not Virginia or Huntsville, Alabama.

F.B.I. Headquarters Move Could be a Legacy Project for Greenbelt’s Congressman, Steny Hoyer

Down in Georgia, thankfully people started voting early on Saturday in the critical runoff between Senator Raphael Warnock and Trump Republican challenger Herschel Walker.

Early voters in Georgia head to the polls Saturday for Senate runoff

I’m also thankful for all my friends on Facebook, who somehow still manage to pay attention and engage, as the platform appears to be running on auto-pilot as Mark Zuckerberg plays with his new Meta kid toys.

A perhaps described the situation best.

“Now that Elon Musk’s takeover has hastened the demise of Twitter, many are grasping for alternatives to their beloved town square. … While Facebook is still a thriving, active social network for the over-45 set, for my cohort a mass exodus has left it the digital equivalent of an Old Western ghost town where tumbleweeds blow across an arid landscape.

“Formerly the apogee of my social life … Facebook has reverted back to the spaciousness of the early internet, where people blogged about minutiae for an audience of 12. In the absence of peers, a thriving ecosystem still prevails. Unlike the TikTok algorithm, which is creepily accurate, Facebook is an erratic pu-pu platter of things I never knew I wanted to see.”

And I still don’t, so good luck getting likes on your stupid memes.

We are here to make a difference and change the world for the better, not to waste people’s time and massive amounts of internet bandwidth simply to spy on people’s personal lives and habits to make money.

Our best advice for the holidays? Try to take a break from television and the internet and have some fun. In other words, savor life.

We’re having fish and chips, dark beer and Irish whiskey shots on Sunday downtown at Kelly’s Irish Times, an old press bar in D.C. by the CNN, C-SPAN and NBC buildings. If I see any of your favorite on air heroes from the tube, I’ll be sure to wave.