As hunting creeps into America’s last sanctuaries, the line between preservation and target practice dissolves — and even Smokey looks ready to file for early retirement.

There was a time when America’s National Parks were advertised as sanctuaries — cathedrals of pine and granite where the only thing stalking you was your own happiness. 

Now, thanks to the latest brainstorm from the Department of the Interior, they’re being gently rebranded as something between a safari and a roadside butcher shop.

Not everywhere — let’s be fair. 

The madness is selective. 

But that’s almost worse. 

It’s as if someone took a map of the American wilderness, closed their eyes, and started circling places with the enthusiasm of a man ordering off a menu: “We’ll have some hunting here, a little trapping there—yes, let’s add a side of field dressing near the visitor center.”

Welcome to America’s newest outdoor experience: National Park, Now With Bloodstains.

A Dispatch from the Confederacy of Oops, I Mean, the American South

Picture a democracy. 

Now set it on fire. 

Now draw a line around the fire. 

Congratulations — you've just gerrymandered the fire. 

Welcome to the American South in 2026, where the will of the people is less a sacred covenant and more of a rough first draft that the legislature reserves the right to edit, redline, and shred in the statehouse parking lot.

Let us begin with Calvin Duncan, a man who had the extraordinary audacity — the sheer, unmitigated gall — to win an election. 

In November, the voters of Orleans Parish gave Duncan 68 percent of the vote to become Criminal District Court Clerk. 

Sixty-eight percent. 

That is not a squeaker. 

That is a mandate delivered with the subtlety of a foghorn.

And so, naturally, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry signed a bill abolishing the position entirely.

The legislation merged Duncan's newly-won office with the civil clerk's position and helpfully appointed someone else to run the whole thing. 

No election needed. 

Somewhere between a bad acid trip and a civics lesson written in crayon, the Trump administration has decided that the best way to manage American science is to fire it.

Not trim it. Not reform it. Not even insult it in the usual, ritualistic fashion. No—terminate it, effective immediately, like a disgruntled nightclub owner tossing out the band mid-song because the trumpet player looks suspiciously literate.

All 22 members of the U.S. National Science Board—gone. Erased with the bureaucratic elegance of a two-sentence email, the digital equivalent of a guillotine blade dropped by an intern.

What kind of impulse does this?

A free jet, a grounded Boeing program, and a shopping spree for spare parts — Washington proves once again that nothing costs more than something we’re told is free.

There was a time, not long ago, when the American taxpayer was fleeced with a certain modesty — a sheepish decorum, as if the pickpocket at least tipped his hat after lifting your wallet.

Those days, alas, are gone.

We have entered a new era of plunder so brazen, so operatic in its stupidity, that it deserves not merely condemnation but a brass band and a commemorative plaque.

Consider the current aviation burlesque unfolding under the august banner of the United States government.

A free jet, a grounded Boeing program, and a shopping spree for spare parts — Washington proves once again that nothing costs more than something we’re told is free.
 
There was a time, not long ago, when the American taxpayer was fleeced with a certain modesty — a sheepish decorum, as if the pickpocket at least tipped his hat after lifting your wallet.

Those days, alas, are gone.

We have entered a new era of plunder so brazen, so operatic in its stupidity, that it deserves not merely condemnation but a brass band and a commemorative plaque.

Consider the current aviation burlesque unfolding under the august banner of the United States government.

A Boeing 747 — “gifted,” we are told, by the government of Qatar, as one might gift a fruitcake or an unwanted poodle — has become the latest object of taxpayer-funded alchemy. 

The Glorious Return of Military Darwinism

There are bad ideas, and then there are ideas so catastrophically, historically illiterate that they feel like they were drafted on a cocktail napkin somewhere between the third Old Fashioned and a lobotomy. 

Enter Pete Hegseth’s latest brainwave: making flu vaccines optional for members of the United States military.

Optional.

In the military.

Yes, the same institution that regulates the angle of your shoelaces, the exact geometry of your haircut, and the moral alignment of your socks now apparently draws the line at… vaccines. 

A partial inventory of the Trump Administration's Ongoing Demolition of Public Life

Lori Chavez-DeRemer resigns. The Border Patrol chief solicits prostitutes abroad. Trump sues the IRS he controls. Corey Lewandowski sells federal contracts. This is Washington, D.C.

Let us begin with Lori Chavez-DeRemer, because she is the freshest wound, though in this administration, she is barely a paper cut. 

The Labor Secretary — former one-term congresswoman, former mayor of the magnificently named Happy Valley, Oregon — resigned Monday, departing "to take a position in the private sector," which is the Washington formulation for: the inspector general was about to interview her and the walls were closing in like a particularly well-upholstered trash compactor. The White House, with its customary relationship to reality, announced that she had "done a phenomenal job." 

This is the same White House that will, when the report drops, have no memory of her whatsoever.

The allegations against Chavez-DeRemer constitute a scandal so baroque it would embarrass a Medici. 

An affair with her security detail. 

Fabricated official trips to cover personal travel. Fancy hotels, SUV rentals, and meals billed to the public. 

And now, for his next miracle, he will attempt to read

There are moments in American public life that force you to confront the outer limits of plausibility. This is one of them.

Donald Trump is scheduled to read from the Bible.

Read.

Not wave. Not autograph. Not hold upside down like a prop in a hostage video for literacy. Read. Words. In sequence. Out loud. Presumably without filing a lawsuit against the vowels.

I want to be very clear: I am not questioning his faith. I am questioning his relationship with sentences.

This is a man who has spent a lifetime treating language the way a raccoon treats a garbage can—aggressively, opportunistically, and with no long-term plan. His public statements read like autocorrect gave up halfway through and went out for a drink.

And now we are to believe he will navigate Scripture.

The Bible.

On the Obama Presidential Center, the Trump glass tower, and the magnificent American tradition of gilding the public with someone else's ego.

There is a window-starved building rising on the South Side of Chicago that looks, to any honest eye, as though a Crusader fortress mated drunkenly with a parking garage and produced this gray, hulking, joyless monolith — so aggressively ugly that one suspects the architect was settling a personal grudge. 

This is the Obama Presidential Center, which cost $850 million, a figure so grotesque it should be carved above the entrance as a warning, the way Dante inscribed Abandon hope above the gates of Hell. 

Santa Claus, Beloved Symbol, Alleged Fraudster

We are gathered here today to mourn the passing of Santa Claus’s reputation — found deceased under circumstances involving wire fraud, luxury dining, and what federal prosecutors have described, with the delicacy of people who have seen everything, as “extensive renovations to a lakefront property in New Jersey.”

The accused, Stefan Pildes — president of SantaCon NYC and evidently the first man to look at a red suit and see a revenue stream — stands charged with diverting more than half of nearly $3 million in charitable donations into what can only be described as a personal North Pole slush fund.