10 min sign hastily drawn before today’s Cloquet silent protest of Silent Pete, our Congressman.

My daughter picked me up at 7:30AM yesterday to help take down her set from Legally Blonde. A sold out hit everyone who was involved with it is still walking on air. I worked straight till 1:30 taking overbuilt structures apart with 2×6’s sutured together from students learning to construct houses. Their set was like a hurricane shelter. So much lumber! We saved, and I sorted, a half gallon of screws for the next production. We had five percuses (french for drills) to unscrew them out for re-use.
We loaded everything up at Lincoln Middle and transported it all to Denfeld high where everything was unloaded. Then went back to retrieve a second load. I was exhausted but that evening Claudia and I had a civic duty to join about 400 people protesting Pete Stauber for hiding before he snuck into the Cloquet library to meet local Republicans.
Like my appearance at the post office two months back I whipped up a sign suited to Republicans. I had planned to take my Trump warlock cutout but Claudia told me my golden haried witch was too provocative for a protest where organizers were determined to stay civil. This sign seemed to work. I got knowing looks from people who understood my message that the GOP was an apostate party of Lincoln judases.
Here are a few pics of the protest.




We walked the four blocks in front of the Library for an hour. The protest was planned to end after an hour which was well before we would confront departing Republicans. Five minutes before this termination Claudia’s foot slipped off the sidewalk and she took a precipitous face plant on the Sidewalk. She was instantly surrounded by helpers who brought safety kits. A Cloquet doctor in the march wrapped her up and applied a cold pack to slow the bleeding. She gave more blood than Trump to her cause and her cause for the greater good not an attempt to avoid further legal jeopardy as a mere civilian.
Here is my dear wife at urgent care after eight stitches. Today we went out and bought her a new pair of glasses. She’s got a shiner that looks like Goth mascara.

Many thanks to all and especially to Jen who works in the Cloquet Middle School. Jen drove us to Urgent Care waited until intake was finished with Claudia and she was being tended to. Then took me to our car so I could drive it back to the hospital. Jen was on pins and needles because Cloquet’s School Board was about to decide how deeply they must into staff to stay financially afloat this year. Even tenured staff like her could be on the chopping block.
As I carried my sign with Lincoln’s words I thought about whether I agreed with Lincoln. There is one person I’ve had a quarrel with for 9 years. I work hard to stick with my stubborn resistance to him without letting myself fall into the world of John Wilkes Booth. Besides, sociopathy and narcissism are mental conditions that Trump was born with. They are akin to the autism of his DOGE master Elon Musk. Today I watched a TikTok video of an extremely eloquent and logical young woman who introduced herself as being autistic. She had a lot of heat to vent the semi coherent son of the martyred Robert Kennedy who like Musk has been tasked with dismantling America. She took issue with Kennedy’s mediaeval understanding of what autism is.
People like them and like Trump happen. Kennedy’s grandparents gave his aunt a prefrontal lobotomy which horrified her siblings. This Secretary of Health and Human Services was born in the wrong century. God has her mysterious ways. Pope Francis knew that when he gave Vice President Vance a serious talking too before he went to meet his heavenly maker.
I think the words of Larry David, the humorist behind Seinfeld and Curb your enthusiasm was particularly shrewd in his letter to the NY Times editor today. Dangerously, but adroitly, he referenced Adolph Hitler. The Times wrote a prologue to the letter explaining that they rarely let writers use Hitler as a foil. They made an exception in David’s case because his words were eminently worthy of consideration.
I would add this: Over the years I’ve read how Adolph charmed a great many people including foreign women who seemed besotted with his power like Unity Mitford. She became a fervent Nazi. She shot herself in the head hours after Britain declared war on Germany.
Opinion:
“Imagine my surprise when in the spring of 1939 a letter arrived at my house inviting me to dinner at the Old Chancellery with the world’s most reviled man, Adolf Hitler. I had been a vocal critic of his on the radio from the beginning, pretty much predicting everything he was going to do on the road to dictatorship. No one I knew encouraged me to go. “He’s Hitler. He’s a monster.” But eventually I concluded that hate gets us nowhere. I knew I couldn’t change his views, but we need to talk to the other side — even if it has invaded and annexed other countries and committed unspeakable crimes against humanity.
Two weeks later, I found myself on the front steps of the Old Chancellery and was led into an opulent living room, where a few of the Führer’s most vocal supporters had gathered: Himmler, Göring, Leni Riefenstahl and the Duke of Windsor, formerly King Edward VIII. We talked about some of the beautiful art on the walls that had been taken from the homes of Jews. But our conversation ended abruptly when we heard loud footsteps coming down the hallway. Everyone stiffened as Hitler entered the room.
He was wearing a tan suit with a swastika armband and gave me an enthusiastic greeting that caught me off guard. Frankly, it was a warmer greeting than I normally get from my parents, and it was accompanied by a slap on my back. I found the whole thing quite disarming. I joked that I was surprised to see him in a tan suit because if he wore that out, it would be perceived as un-Führer-like. That amused him to no end, and I realized I’d never seen him laugh before. Suddenly he seemed so human. Here I was, prepared to meet Hitler, the one I’d seen and heard — the public Hitler. But this private Hitler was a completely different animal. And oddly enough, this one seemed more authentic, like this was the real Hitler. The whole thing had my head spinning.
He said he was starving and led us into the dining room, where he gestured for me to sit next to him. Göring immediately grabbed a slice of pumpernickel, whereupon Hitler turned to me, gave me an eye roll, then whispered, “Watch. He’ll be done with his entire meal before you’ve taken two bites.” That one really got me. Göring, with his mouth full, asked what was so funny, and Hitler said, “I was just telling him about the time my dog had diarrhea in the Reichstag.” Göring remembered. How could he forget? He loved that story, especially the part where Hitler shot the dog before it got back into the car. Then a beaming Hitler said, “Hey, if I can kill Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals, I can certainly kill a dog!” That perhaps got the biggest laugh of the night — and believe me, there were plenty.
But it wasn’t just a one-way street, with the Führer dominating the conversation. He was quite inquisitive and asked me a lot of questions about myself. I told him I had just gone through a brutal breakup with my girlfriend because every time I went someplace without her, she was always insistent that I tell her everything I talked about. I can’t stand having to remember every detail of every conversation. Hitler said he could relate — he hated that, too. “What am I, a secretary?” He advised me it was best not to have any more contact with her or else I’d be right back where I started and eventually I’d have to go through the whole thing all over again. I said it must be easy for a dictator to go through a breakup. He said, “You’d be surprised. There are still feelings.” Hmm … there are still feelings. That really resonated with me. We’re not that different, after all. I thought that if only the world could see this side of him, people might have a completely different opinion.
Two hours later, the dinner was over, and the Führer escorted me to the door. “I am so glad to have met you. I hope I’m no longer the monster you thought I was.” “I must say, mein Führer, I’m so thankful I came. Although we disagree on many issues, it doesn’t mean that we have to hate each other.” And with that, I gave him a Nazi salute and walked out into the night.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/21/opinion/larry-david-hitler-dinner.html
