A customer asked about my relationship with Fenway. I started to answer in the comments but it got a little long. I thought y’all might like to know as well. So here’s my story, you won’t need to subpoena me for details. I didn’t know what to title this, so I stole from Dropkick Murphys.

Basic history: I was born in Brighton, but my parents moved to Waltham, the Watch City, when I was 2. Dad and my Uncle Dick worked at Buck Printing on Ipswich St, at the corner of Landsdowne St. It has been a nightclub-The Ark- a roller rink, an arcade/bar. I googled the address, it’s now a bowling alley and bar, Lucky Strike Fenway. You can see the old building from the Mass Pike. The Buck Printing sign on the roof could be seen from the park, before the Jumbotron days. Dad said they’d sometimes take their breaks up on the roof on game days/nights. Uncle Dick was always scoring tickets, and would take me and my brother to games when we were kids. They lost a lot back then, but we always had hope. I loved keeping score, and trying to convince Unk that we shouldn’t leave before the end to beat the crowds because they just might come back. During my college years at Northeastern, I lived in an apartment along the Green Line half a block from the Fenway stop. You could still get really cheap bleacher seats and SRO tickets. We’d get the latter, then roam around sitting in empty seats until someone kicked us out. I loved that old place, but it’s gone crazy upscale in the 40 years since I left New England Last game I witnessed was Jon Lester’s no hitter, May 19, 2008. Reminds me, I’m overdue for a pilgrimage. I try to catch games in places I’ve lived, so I’ve been to Oakland, Houston, and Seattle. Juanita Jean and I share a deep love of baseball, but sadly we never did get to one together before I left Fort Bend. About the Fran, both of my grandmothers were Frances, so it’s my middle name. I always liked it better than my real first name, but don’t tell my mother.

Russian state media is laughing at the US, saying that the files in TFG’s basement contain information about new nuclear weapons, and that they’ve already seen them.  Let that sink in.

Meanwhile in Russia: Putin's mouthpieces on state TV are taunting America about "Top Secret" documents sought during the raid of Trump's estate, which they claim had to do with the newest nuclear weapons developed by the US and gleefully imply that Moscow already got to see them. pic.twitter.com/hmmphB4Utf

— Julia Davis (@JuliaDavisNews) August 13, 2022

For decades now, decades, I have lived in either a right-leaning or a full-on batcrap crazy Republican congressional district. I was being represented by people that didn’t represent me. The doozy to beat all doozies was (not) being represented by Tom DeLay, whose house, by the way, was 3 blocks from my workplace.

All of the negatives of that last experience was more than balanced by meeting a bunch of the scrappiest Democrats that I had ever seen. The Fort Bend Democrats. Texas politics invaded my life and I was hooked. Out here on the Left Coast we Californians are much more calm and soft-spoken. In large part because we all agree (for the most part) and pass blue urine.

But when I landed here in CA CD-42 my congressman was a guy named Ken Calvert, who was at the time, a 20-year veteran who never had a serious Dem opponent and never accomplished anything. Basically he’s office furniture, maybe a credenza, but I prefer him as a chair.

A La-Z-Boy.

So the only good thing about him as my congressman was that he didn’t ever do anything which was fine with me.

Then came The Former Guy (every time I see the shortened TFG reference I think of the other phrase that must have been invented in New York (starts with “this”, ends with “guy”) and you say it with a Queens accent). Calvert obeyed and went totally MAGA. Then in ’21 came the redistricting, and Calvert lost his comfortable 62-38 edge. He was moved to CD-41, currently represented by Mark Takano, a Dem (Takano is running in CD-39), and CD-41 is now a by-god swing district.

But wait, it gets better. Ken Calvert’s new district is only half California redneck. The other half, new to him, is the Palm Springs area. To those who don’t know, Palm Springs is dominated by the largest LGBTQIA+ community in the country. He doesn’t fit in at all. No one east of Banning is going to vote for him.

And his Democratic opponent? Will Rollins, a young, energetic former federal prosecutor who brought many a 1/6 insurrectionist to justice. My sister calls him “eye candy”. And you can see from the photo of him and his partner, Paolo, that she isn’t far off.

Calvert is flush with corporate funding, chiefly oil companies to the tune of over half a million. He hasn’t held a town hall in 10 years. Will depends on small-dollar donors, and has gotten the attention of the DCCC. But if you wanted to support Will I don’t think he’d mind. Go here.

And yes, I buried the lede again.

My friend Pam is a perfect lady, an AKA with pearls, a graduate of the University of Texas with a degree in English, and attends the Methodist Church.  She is about the same age that I am.  Having been friends with her for 30 years, I have rarely heard her curse and even then it’s mild.

She defended Beto’s speech by telling me, “That was not cussin’. That was punctuation. That was an exclamation point.”

She’s right, you know.

Tonight, in Mineral Wells, Texas

When a @GregAbbott_TX supporter laughs, yes, laughs out loud so everyone could hear, while Beto described the massacre of 19 children and 2 teachers in Uvalde, Beto quite appropriately lets loose with a MF.
Yep.
It was a pretty good one too. pic.twitter.com/t5LLMIPXeP

— BetoMedia (@BetoMedia) August 11, 2022

Late reporting by WaPo has indicated that the extraordinary step of raiding Mar-a-Lago was due to the presence of Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI) regarding nuclear state secrets still in possession of TFG despite the fact that he promised he gave it all back to the National  Archives. But this is not the 1/6 call logs, or secret Space Force intel, or even transcripts of Putin meetings. This is not something that gives Trump any personal leverage or advances any political agenda. Why would Trump do this?

Let’s review Trump’s motivations, starting with his narcissism. The fragile construct of his ego in stark contrast to his actual attributes means that zero zero zero tolerance can be had for anything that makes him look like the loser he is. This supposed superiority is rooted in his belief in himself as the ne plus ultra of eugenics.

Then there’s money. Trump uses every means possible, other than hard work, to grub as much money as his tiny claws can catch onto. He ties this to the ego via selling his name as the avatar of luxury and quality when it’s really it’s the epitome of crass and tawdriness. To him, counting up money is how you determine who the “winners” are.

Money and Ego – that’s half of “MICE,” an acronym denoting the usual reasons someone commits espionage: Money, Ideology, Coercion and Ego.

And that’s what we’re discussing here – the pilfered documents include nuclear secrets. These are not call logs, or work product or Space Force doodles. These are to a spy what the crown jewels are to a cat burglar.

Ideology is unlikely to be his motivation, unless one counts an affinity towards strongman dictators and his desire to be like them.

Coercion is certainly a possibility – the “Pee Tape” is still a theoretically out there, and if not that, other forms of kompromat abound with TFG.

Even with a reason-challenged brain in a reality-challenged bubble, there is no motive for Trump to have stolen TS/SCI nuclear documents in order to win an election or own some libs or outwit the deep state or write his Mein Drumpf memoir.

He’s clearly broken the Presidential Records Act. It’s looking more and more like he broke the Espionage Act as well.

Code name: Reality Loser

Since Monday, I’ve been cogitating on the FBI’s search of Mar a Lago and why TFG would’ve so stupidly taken potentially top secret documents from the WH to hide in his basement in Florida.  What was he doing?  What was he thinking?  As all of us have experienced, TFG does lots of things without thinking, and being a malignant narcissist, everything is always about him and his effort to gain some kind of advantage over his perceived enemies.  What was this about?

My first thought was that TFG was going to release documents throughout his next campaign trying to impugn his enemies and using them to back his false claims that there is an effort by the “deep state” to take him down.  But as more information comes out about this sorry episode, it now looks to me like he was intentionally trying to provoke the FBI into doing exactly what they did.  Since it was discovered that he stole secret documents when he finally vacated the WH, he and his lawyers have been playing games with the FBI which lead to a search back in June after he virtually ignored a subpoena to disgorge the documents they sought.  Since then, he and his lawyers have been slow-playing the agency, and they acted on Monday after apparently a TFG insider “ratted” him out by confirming the location of the documents.

“During the search on Monday, TFG took to Truth Social and public statements to rage about the “raid” and the FBI “breaking into” his safe.  The facts so far haven’t supported his claims, especially since the Secret Service let the agents in and one of Trump’s lawyers was present during the search.  Almost immediately, TFGland went to DEFCON 1 and started firing up the rage machine. One of the main accusations, lead by his allies in congress, was that the FBI was “planting evidence” to take him down.

Well, there it is.  It appears, and I believe that this is true, that TFG’s plan all along was to provoke the FBI to act against him personally so he could claim the “deep state” was out to get him.  I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised that the “rat” was someone TFG picked to be the informant.  We’ve all heard about Schedule F, TFG’s plan to unravel the federal government by firing thousands of career public servants and replacing them with his loyalists at all levels of the federal government.  Part of this plan is to empty out DC, moving agencies out into the heartland like he did the USDA, which he moved to Kansas City.  The agency has struggled to recover, having lost thousands of career employees who quit rather than move.

Call me cynical, call me a conspiracy theorist, but I believe that all of this is TFG and his enablers creating a new reality for his supporters as part of his relentless campaign to take over the US government for himself.  It’s already working; thousands of his supporters are raging on social media and in their be-flagged jacked-up TFG Train trucks, and one nut has already been killed after trying to break in to the FBI field office in Cincinnati.  I can only hope that Merrick Garland is one step ahead of him; my fear is that he’s not.