One Day at a Time

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 18

Welcome back to One Day at a Time, dears—and no, we still haven’t seen Mother!, because honestly, the last thing 2017 needs is a two-hour avant-garde allegory that ends with a woman getting beaten to a pulp. However! That isn’t stopping us from reading all the batshit interviews that star Jennifer Lawrence is giving—like when she told MTV that Mother!’s crew built her a “Kardashian tent” where she could relax between takes! The tent contained, notes MTV, “photos of Kim, Kourtney, and Khloe,” scented candles, “episodes of Keeping up with the Kardashians that played on a loop,” and “little notes from the Kardashians that I had written, from them to me,” Lawrence explains, like a totally sane person. And while Lawrence’s tent actually sounds worse than Mother!, there’s more: The Kardashian-obsessed actress also insisted on telling co-star Javier Bardem all about the world’s least talented family. “She was laughing at me so hard,” Bardem told MTV. “‘You don’t know who the Kardashians are?’ Like she was talking to me about Einstein. ‘No, I don’t know who those people are,’” Bardem replied. “‘Who are them? What’s their planet? Where are they coming from? What do they want? Where is their spaceship?’” Good questions, Javier—and we deeply envy your ignorance. IN OTHER J-LAW NEWS… “Jennifer Lawrence sounds like a horrible person to be stuck on a plane with,” reports Vulture, citing an Entertainment Weekly interview in which Lawrence notes she’s “recently had problems with plane anxiety.” “I’m not afraid of the airplane, I’m afraid of me on the airplane and losing control of myself,” Lawrence said, noting she once screamed, “We’re going down! It’s coming down!” on a flight that had minor turbulence, and that she “once tried to jump out of an Air France flight.” “I can’t believe I didn’t get arrested,” Lawrence said. “I got really claustrophobic and I had to get out.” (Note to Air France: Maybe install some Kardashian tents on your planes?)

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 19

Yesterday was nice, wasn’t it? A pleasant return to what One Day at a Time used to be like, before the apocalypse, when we wrote about dumb celebrities being dumb. But now the real world intrudes, and we have to write about dumb presidents being dumb. 🙁 “Trump Threatens to ‘Totally Destroy’ North Korea” was today’s New York Times headline—which, yes, is exactly the headline you were terrified you’d read one day. “If the righteous many don’t confront the wicked few, then evil will triumph,” bellowed Donald Trump, who lost the popular vote by 2,864,974 votes, to the United Nations General Assembly. Trump also called Iran a “rogue nation,” declared North Korea a “band of criminals,” ranted about his “America first” agenda, and fear-mongered up an “unthinkable loss of life” should “Rocket Man”—his name for North Korean despot Kim Jong-un—continue on a “suicide mission.” THAT REMINDS US… The night Trump was elected, we did two things: We poured ourselves a very stiff martini (okay, fine, it was just a bottle of gin and an old can of black olives), and we said, out loud, calmly and clearly: “Ann, it will be okay. So long as this idiot doesn’t get us into a nuclear war in the next four years, we should consider it a win.” At the time, we thought that was a pretty extreme possibility! At. The. Time. If you’ll excuse us, we need to find another bottle of gin.

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 20

Republicans are trying to kill Obamacare again—and oh, how we wish that was the gin talking. Despite overwhelming disapproval from pretty much everyone, Republicans are attempting to push through another bill that would eliminate Americans’ health care. BUT WHY? “Republicans are caught between a rock and a hard place,” CNN explains. “The rock is seven years of near-constant campaign promises that the first thing they would do if given full power in Washington is repeal and replace Obamacare. To not make good on the promise—with total control of Washington and no one to blame—would be, in the minds of many Republican elected officials, a complete betrayal of their base, with potentially disastrous consequences on the ballot.” “Republicans campaigned on this so often that you have a responsibility to carry out what you said in the campaign,” Iowa Republican Senator Chuck Grassley admitted to reporters. “That’s pretty much as much of a reason as the substance of the bill.” There’s another pressure, too: money. Pointing to a “backlash from big donors” who are “furious” over Republicans’ ineptitude, the New York Times notes that donations to Republican candidates have plummeted—leaving the GOP “increasingly worried about having the funds they need” with rich donors holding back checks until they see results. So those are the reasons Republicans are trying to destroy the health and lives of countless Americans. Not a single one of them has anything to do with health care.

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 21

Hurricane Maria is (so far) responsible for two things: crippling Puerto Rico with winds so ferocious it killed at least 10 people, knocked out communication and power (possibly for months), and destroyed 80 percent of the island’s crops. Hurricane Maria’s second tragedy? It RUINED Melissa Joan Hart’s vacation! “And just like that, our family vacation is canceled,” the former Sabrina the Teenage Witch star whined on Instagram. “Such a bummer but we plan to hit the @nickresortpuntacana resort [in nearby Dominican Republic] another time this year.” Us Weekly reports that this isn’t the first time Melissa has posted tone-deaf nonsense—like the time she promoted her clothing line on the 14th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. “Free shipping in honor of the victims, families & first responders of 9/11,” Melissa posted on Twitter. UGH! On the upside, at least that poor, damaged resort won’t have to listen to Melissa complain about how her frozen coconut pineapple margarita isn’t slushy enough.

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 22

Guys! Calm down. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is doing everything in his power to turn his festering viper pit of a social media site into a place that doesn’t swing elections for orange-hued racists at the behest of Russian oligarchs. Sure, Zuckerberg ignored President Obama’s direct warnings that Russian troll farms were buying Facebook ads to influence the presidential election in swing states. But he’s definitely doing something about it—nine months after Trump was elected. According to the Washington Post, Zuckerberg announced he will finally cooperate with Congress and hand over information about 470 fake Russian accounts and more than 3,000 ads intended to manipulate public sentiment against Hillary Clinton. “I care deeply about the democratic process and protecting its integrity,” said Zuckerberg, who values profits over the democratic process and integrity. “It is a new challenge [a challenge he was warned about BY THE PRESIDENT last year] for internet communities to deal with nation states attempting to subvert elections. But if that’s what we must do, we are committed to rising to the occasion.” So yeah, expect big changes on Facebook… by, say 2028?

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 23

As you know, One Day at a Time loves sick burns. And today’s burn du jour comes from an unexpected source: North Korea’s missile-happy leader, Kim Jong-Un! Rewind to Tuesday’s entry, in which President Trump called Kim a “Rocket Man” on a “suicide mission,” subtly adding that if push came to shove, America would “totally destroy North Korea.” Apparently, however, North Korea’s “sick burn” technology is much further along than anyone realized, because Kim hopped on national television to say, “I will surely and definitely tame the mentally deranged US dotard with fire.” DOTARD! This insult undoubtedly had Trump falling over himself in search of the office dictionary (left behind by the Obama administration) to discover what a “dotard” is. (Psst! It’s an old person, especially one who has become weak or senile. OUCH!) Trump attempted to clap back on Twitter, calling Kim “a madman,” but… too weak, and too late! Kim Jong-Un has coined the “Bye Felicia” insult of 2017, which leaves Trump with nothing to do but search for some salve for that wicked, sick burn. (By the way, stocking up on salve isn’t a terrible idea, because… you know… impending nuclear holocaust.)

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 24

Oh, and speaking of dotards: On Friday, the president was in Alabama giving one of his boisterous, racist dog-whistle speeches to a crowd of slack-jawed, drooling, willfully ignorant supporters when he said, “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now.’” Trump was referring to players (like Colin Kaepernick) who take a knee during the national anthem to draw attention to the continuing fatal police shootings of unarmed Black men. The president also made time to disrespect women (again) by using the gendered epithet “bitch”—and while disgusting, you have to admit his endless ability to cram both racism and misogyny into a single sentence is pretty impressive. Flash forward to today’s games, when NFL teams across the country responded to the president’s race-baiting by taking a knee, locking arms, or refusing to even come out of the locker room during the national anthem. When asked why he chose to kneel during one of today’s games, Miami Dolphins Michael Thomas told reporters, “I’ve got a daughter, and she’s going to have to live in this world. And I gotta do what I got to do to make sure she can look at her dad and be like, ‘Hey, you did something to try and make a change.’” And that’s probably something a racist, woman-hating dotard will never understand.