Losing My Perspicacity, July 23, 2025

RIP to everyone's favorite Prince of Darkness

Author

Julie DiCaro
July 23, 2025

Good morning and Happy Wednesday! Thanks for starting your day with me.

A day after losing Malcolm-Jamal Warner, we’ve also lost Ozzy Osbourne at the age of 76. That’s a sentence I never thought I’d write, mainly because, as a kid, the Tipper Gores of the world had Little Julie convinced Ozzy Osbourne was some variety of immortal satanic hellhound who ate bats and bit the heads off pigeons. ( I’m not kidding. This is what we thought.)

It wasn’t always that way. For a period in the 1980s, Osbourne was one of the key targets for the rock-is-scary movement that was promoted by political conservatives but found receptive ears among parents of every stripe.

He was a legend of bad behavior. At a record company conference, he once bit the head off a live dove. On tour in 1982 in Des Moines, it was a dead bat that he decapitated. Osbourne later said he thought the bat was a toy, but antics like that were reported widely and stirred parental fears.

Let’s all keep in mind that Ozzy did a lot of drugs. And anyway, he did try to make amends with the bats.

“I left a 20 sack of coke in the forest behind my house as a peace offering with the bats and when I went back to hunt for dinner, the bag was gone but the bloody wankers left a pile of bat droppings in my dime bag. That was when I decided that those ***** were not worth my apology. So I brought the dime bag of coke and bat droppings back to the house and Sharon and I just mixed it all up in the blender and snorted it.”

I remember being at a slumber party in 2nd or 3rd grade, all of us terrified because Ozzy Osborne was playing the Metro Centre in Rockford, IL, 30 miles away, and we expected … some kind of black mass to blot out the moon or something — I don’t even actually know what we thought was going to happen. In hindsight, his music isn’t even that hardcore (I mean, we play "Crazy Train" at all manner of sporting events now), but I remember high school kids getting sent home from school for wearing his T-shirts. And I went to public school in rural Northern Illinois! I can only imagine how it went over at parochial schools in larger towns.

(All of this, of course, coincided with the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, which, in hindsight, begs the question: Why the hell were our parents so gullible? If you haven’t listened to the You’re Wrong About podcast episode on this, you should.)

So, imagine my surprise when I grew up and realized that Ozzy was just a burned-out, doddering dad who just wanted to stay home with his dogs and kids, watching ghost hunters on TV. Turns out, Ozzy was less Prince of Darkness and more of a typical middle-aged dad who had minimal idea what was happening in his home at any given time. So relatable.

So, RIP, Ozzy. Despite what concerned parents everywhere wanted us to think, you seemed like a pretty lovable guy. Bonus points for being a huge chaos goblin that probably made Tipper Gore dive for her valium every time your name came up.

Today: Republicans flee Washington rather than deal with the Jeffrey Epstein issue; Lisa Murkowski has been had; WaPo loses more star reporters; Alina Habba gets demoted; and The High Note.

Let’s do it.

That’s… uh…one way to deal with it, I suppose

Now that Congressional Democrats have finally realized they can use the furor over Trump’s attempted suppression of the Jeffrey Epstein story as a weapon, Mike Johnson has kicked everyone out of the House chambers for the summer to avoid having to deal with it.

WASHINGTON — The GOP-controlled House is cutting short its last workweek before the summer recess because of a fight on Capitol Hill over the release of the government’s files on the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

The House was scheduled to hold votes on Thursday before lawmakers departed for their five-week recess. Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., even told reporters Monday night that he wouldn't send lawmakers home early this week.

But Republican leaders informed rank-and-file lawmakers on Tuesday that the final vote of the week would now be a day earlier, on Wednesday afternoon. The shift in schedule occurred because of a standoff on the Rules Committee, which decides how legislation comes to the floor but has been ground to a halt by the Epstein issue.

Meanwhile, Trump is handling all of the renewed focus on Epstein in his typical calm, thoughtful manner:

REPORTER: Gabbard has submitted a criminal referral. Who should the DOJ target? TRUMP: It would be President Obama. And Biden was there with him ... the leader of the gang was Obama. Barack Hussein Obama. He's guilty. This is treason.

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com)2025-07-22T15:57:47.596Z

Hey Republicans, your leader’s brain is leaking down his swollen ankles and spilling out all over the floor. Time to put him to bed.

I hate that President Obama felt the need to respond, but he did.

I only wish they had ended it, “PS, release the Epstein Files.”

Lisa’s getting upset

Gosh, if only there’d been some way of knowing this was going to happen. On a related note, we need to start sending much more intelligent people to Washington.

I give you Exhibit A, Lisa Murkowski (R-AK):

Sen. Lisa Murkowski said she feels ‘cheated’ after she won a concession in the recently passed tax and spending law to protect wind and solar projects, only to see the president and his administration issue recent orders that she said seem designed to quickly quash such projects. ‘I feel cheated,’ she said in an interview Friday. ‘I feel like we made a deal and then hours later, a deal was made to somebody else.’

Have you met Donald Trump or literally anyone on your side of the aisle?

Murkowski said the executive order “just pulls the rug out from from underneath the deal” she’d made for the yearlong window for tax credits.

“I read it as just a total affront to what we had negotiated,” she said.

Sooner or later, people have got to learn that bending the knee won’t save them, it just means Trump thinks he can keep going back to the well to take advantage of them. Just ask Columbia.

Reporters are fleeing WaPo

More reporters have taken the chance to break free from the Washington Post (speaking of sentences I never thought I’d write….), most notably Associate Editor and Pulitzer Prize winner Johnathan Capeheart and TikTok guru Dave Jorgenson.

The flood of high-profile editorial talent fleeing the Washington Post as the storied newspaper revamps its opinion section to focus exclusively on “personal liberties and free markets” continued to grow this week as Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Jonathan Capehart decided to take a buyout.

Capehart’s departure comes just days after longtime Post reporter and writer Philip Bump announced that he had also accepted a buyout and had written his last column, which followed the paper’s beleaguered CEO Will Lewis’ ultimatum to staffers to leave if they “do not feel aligned” with the company’s new direction.

Meanwhile, Jorgenson announced his departure to start his own media company.

I’m leaving the Washington Post. Follow along and subscribe to my (free) newsletter as I go independent and start my own company. LNI.media

— Dave Jorgenson (@davejorgenson.bsky.social)2025-07-22T09:52:11.284Z

Alina Habba has been demoted

I won’t lie, this was fun to see.

Trump’s former personal lawyer Alina Habba has been replaced as interim U.S. Attorney for New Jersey after serving the maximum of 120 days on the job. Trump had officially nominated her for the position, but her nomination became stalled in the Senate. Federal judges could have authorized her to remain on the job, but they instead named her top deputy, Desiree Leigh Grace, as her replacement.

I know that, as a woman, I’m supposed to support other women, particularly in male-dominated industries like law enforcement. However, my support is conditional on those women 1) not defending serial sexual abusers; 2) knowing how to introduce an exhibit into evidence at trial; and 3) not using their position to harm other women.

Smell ya later, Alina.

The High Note

Each Day, I do my best to leave you with a smile on your face, a song in your heart, and the will to fight another day.

My husband and I went to see The Daily Show live not long after Stephen Colbert had left to start his own show on Comedy Central. At the time, The Colbert Report was white hot, and when Jon took questions from the crowd before TDS began, my husband stood up and asked Jon if he could get him tickets to Colbert, making Jon genuinely snort with laughter.

Anyway, here’s what Jon had to say about CBS canceling Colbert’s The Late Show.

Survive and advance out there, kids. Don’t let the bastards get you down.

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