Thursday, October 9, 2025
Payson's Three Stooges
Perfect — here’s a blog-ready version with a strong headline, a short social-media intro, and the full post polished for rhythm and punch:
🧠The Three Stooges and the Great Payson Experiment
When small-town politics meets the Trump playbook — what could possibly go wrong?
The Three Stooges and the Great Payson Experiment
Somewhere between a MAGA rally and a bad rerun of The Three Stooges, three local Tea Party heroes — Steve Otto, Charlie Bell, and Jim Ferris — hatched a plan. They watched Donald Trump lie, cheat, and gaslight his way to power and thought, “Why can’t we do that right here in Payson?”
Their target wasn’t Washington. It was our quiet little town — the perfect testing ground for political theater, where primaries draw fewer voters than a church bake sale. The Stooges realized that if you can get ten angry people in a community-center meeting to chant “deep state,” you can run the place.
And so, they did what all great con men do: they invented enemies. The “deep state” became the library. Fiscal prudence became starving the schools. Building a new pool for kids? Clearly Marxism with lifeguards.
To the MAGA faithful, it all sounded heroic — a crusade to “save” Payson from, well… reading, learning, and swimming. It worked. The gullible cheered, the reasonable stayed home, and the Stooges took their seats.
Then the wrecking began. The library? Targeted. Schools? Starved. The pool? “Unnecessary.” Their newest trick? Handing over all council power to the city manager — the one they chose. That’s right: democracy outsourced to a yes-man.
The professionals who once kept Town Hall running have packed up and left. What remains is a government run like a back-alley poker game — only without the cards or the brains.
So good luck, Payson. The great MAGA experiment rolls on. It’s the same Trump show — just with cheaper microphones and fewer indictments.
Wednesday, October 8, 2025
The Nasty Bitch
Pam Bondi: The Cult’s Favorite Fox
Pam Bondi is precisely the kind of woman Trump would adore — loud, loyal, and allergic to truth. Watching her dodge straightforward Senate questions was like watching a feral fox chew through a fence — all hiss, no substance.
Trump handpicked Bondi for one purpose: revenge. He needed someone mean enough to swing the axe but dim enough to believe it was a patriotic duty. Bondi was the perfect lickspittle for the job — tail wagging, claws out, ready to shred decency for her master’s applause.
This is the Trump formula: surround yourself with people who lie easily, smile wickedly, and see the law as a speed bump on the road to power. Bondi fits the mold like a glove dipped in venom.
For the MAGA cult, that’s not a flaw — it’s the feature. They cheer when decency is mocked. They love the swagger, the smirk, the “own the libs” sneer. The cruelty is the point. It gives the broken dogs of the movement a bone to gnaw on — someone else to blame for their busted dreams and unpaid bills.
Bondi and her ilk thrive on grievance. They know that anger is the last refuge of those who’ve lost everything else. So they feed it. They sell hate like snake oil and call it freedom.
The rest of us can only watch in disbelief as decency is replaced by deceit, and justice is traded for vengeance — all wrapped in the flag and blessed with a fake prayer.
Tuesday, October 7, 2025
Life behind the Chain Link fence sponsored by the Republican Party
The Chain-Link Fence Nation
When we moved to Payson about five years ago, it felt like a clean start — a new home in a new neighborhood, the kind of place where everything still smelled like lumber and fresh paint. At first, we stayed in our little bubble, going to the same stores and driving the same roads. But as time passed, we began to wander — and what we saw painted a different picture of this town and, really, of America itself.
The symbol of that quiet struggle is the chain-link fence. It seems to whisper, “I don’t have much, but you’re not getting it.” Drive a few miles in any direction and you see them — small fortresses guarding tired trailers, rusting cars, and hope that’s gone a little thin.
Years ago, I asked a young woman from New Zealand what she thought of America. Her answer stuck with me: “People here don’t have much house pride.” She was right. Too many yards are filled with junked cars, plastic debris, and half-collapsed dreams. The Walmart parking lot tells another story — shiny new cars, people with jobs, people who clearly have some money. So how do those same people end up living behind sagging fences?
Maybe the answer lies in the choices made along the way. The casino instead of the savings account. Tattoos instead of a retirement plan. The mindset that tomorrow would somehow fix today. Then one day, the mirror says you’re sixty, the bank says you’re broke, and Social Security says “that’s it.”
And right on cue, along comes Trump — the master of misplaced blame — offering absolution. It’s not your fault, he says. You’ve been cheated. And so the people who spent a lifetime being sold bad deals buy one last one: the idea that the man who built the casino is somehow their savior.
Monday, October 6, 2025
The spoils are sliding
The Spoils Are Sliding
Almost forty years ago, when I worked at a surface coal mine, it wasn’t unusual for the spoils to slide. For those who’ve never stood beside a dragline the size of a church, here’s what that means:
To get to the coal, you first have to move mountains — literally. The overburden, all that useless dirt and rock sitting on top of the coal, is dug up and piled somewhere out of the way. But gravity, that relentless accountant of the universe, keeps the books balanced. You can only stack dirt so high and so steep before it begins to move back down. Slowly at first — inches a day, maybe less — until one morning you come to work and the entire spoil pile has crept halfway back over the coal you just uncovered. A slow-motion disaster.
The strange thing is how deceptively calm it all looks while it’s happening. You can stand there and watch a fifty-foot wall of dirt ooze forward at the speed of a glacier. If you blink, you miss it. But give it enough time and it swallows everything.
That, my friends, is what’s happening to our democracy.
Our freedoms — the hard-won layers of rights and norms that generations dug out for us — are being buried again under the slow slide of corruption, lies, and authoritarianism. The spoils are sliding.
The Trump movement, with its contempt for truth, justice, and the rule of law, is the gravity pulling it all downhill. Each day, the slope steepens a little more — a judge attacked here, a journalist smeared there, another election rule “adjusted.” And because it happens gradually, many Americans barely notice. They don’t see the slow crawl of authoritarian dirt creeping over the coal seam of liberty. They go about their lives, unaware that the thing we’re losing isn’t some abstract idea — it’s the ground beneath our feet.
History tells us that democracies rarely collapse with a bang. They erode with a shrug. Rome didn’t fall in a day, and neither did Hungary, Turkey, or Russia. Each thought they were “too strong” to fail — until the weight of apathy and propaganda buried their freedom for good.
So what’s the message?
Don’t stand there watching the slide and telling yourself it’s no big deal. Don’t believe that “it can’t happen here.” It is happening here.
The overburden is moving. The spoils are sliding.
If we don’t start digging back — voting, organizing, speaking out — the coal seam of our democracy will be gone before we realize it was ever there.
Sunday, October 5, 2025
A Good Day at the Donut Hall
Post: “The S-Word That Scares MAGA More Than Math”
They just kept pouring through the door—actual people, in Payson—coming to hear a Democratic Socialist. I know, I know, that’s like spotting a Prius at a monster-truck rally. The red hats must’ve felt a disturbance in the Force.
And the best part? It was a great presentation. Nobody handed out hammers and sickles. Nobody pledged allegiance to Karl Marx. Nobody nationalized your barbecue grill. Just regular people talking about how maybe—just maybe—the economy should work for everyone, not just the yacht club.
Of course, to the MAGA crowd, anything that isn’t Trump-approved automatically falls somewhere between terrorism and Satanism. They think “Democratic Socialism” means government agents will seize their bass boat and redistribute their beer fridge.
But here’s the shocker: Democratic Socialism is just democracy with better manners. It says, “Hey, maybe the people who make the country run should have a say in how it’s run.” Radical, right? It’s the idea that healthcare, education, and retirement shouldn’t depend on which billionaire your congressman owes a favor to.
You already live with a little socialism every day—Social Security, Medicare, public schools, libraries, fire departments. You like roads? Guess what, comrade—you’ve been driving on socialism this whole time.
The “Democratic” part means it’s all done through voting, not dictators. The “Socialist” part means we invest in people, not hedge funds. The “MAGA interpretation” part means they scream “COMMUNISM!” every time someone mentions dental care.
So yeah, a bunch of people in Payson showed up to learn about Democratic Socialism. Nobody was brainwashed, nobody grew a beard and moved to Cuba. Turns out, when you explain that it’s about fairness, dignity, and democracy, people lean in.
Maybe that’s what really scares the red hats—an idea that makes sense.