Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The Giant Orange Man Baby is having a bad day.

the 10% who apparently lack object permanence

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

Innocent people do not delay justice.

They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.

The real work of an opposition party is to hold the people in power accountable.

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

They don’t have outfits that big. nor codpieces that small.

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

If you thought you’d already seen people saying the stupidest things possible on the internet, prepare yourselves.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

The gop is a fucking disgrace.

The only way through is to slog through the muck one step at at time.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

Balloon Juice, where there is always someone who will say you’re doing it wrong.

If America since Jan 2025 hasn’t broken your heart, you haven’t loved her enough.

Republicans firmly believe having an abortion is a very personal, very private decision between a woman and J.D. Vance.

Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

America is going up in flames. The NYTimes fawns over MAGA celebrities. No longer a real newspaper.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

Republicans choose power over democracy, every day.

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31Comments

  3. 3.

    Linda Featheringill

    I still have not reconciled myself with the idea that there really is a God on the one hand and on the other hand evil people prosper.

    How could the same Power make maple trees and these jerks, too?

  4. 4.

    Mike Kay

    Another Neo-con chicken hawk.

    According to wiki, Thiessen graduated college in 1989. Yet he declined to enlist to fight Iraq during desert storm. They all HATE arabs but none of them will fight.

    Not a single mutherfucking neo-con has ever served in uniform.

  5. 5.

    burnspbesq

    Additional evidence that God loves us and wants us to be happy:

    Bernie Kerik was sentenced yesterday to 48 months in Federal prision.

    His case started out as garden-variety New York corruption: he accepted $250K in repairs on his apartment from a contractor, then tried to influence the award of city contracts to said contractor, and failed to report the value of the repairs on his federal income tax return.

    The amazing part: he also was judged guilty (the press release from the US Attorney’s office is unclear as to whether he pled guilty or was convicted, but I don’t remember hearing about a trial so I assume he pled) of three counts of lying to federal investigators … when he was being vetted for appointment as Secretary of Homeland Security. Yes, you read that correctly.

  6. 6.

    geg6

    Andrew has been stellar on this. Theissen’s reliance on the Magisterium as his defense is ridiculous to anyone who is Catholic and serious about their faith. To call for torture under the Just War doctrine is easily refuted but, since a Nazi is running the show in Rome, I don’t expect and have not seen anyone from the hierarchy to do it. The fact that they turned over the Catholic cable channel to his paen to Church sanctioned torture shows us all how far the Vatican has fallen back into the the swamp of immorality that characterized the Inquisition under Benedict. So glad I dumped my childish loyalty and faith in the twisted and sick Church of Rome back before I even realized how sick and corrupt it truly is.

  7. 7.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    I think the Washington Post could use a makeover. Just the name though.

    First, let’s end some lexical discrimination. For too long, the “t” has had to be in last place. I propose promoting it to the front of the word, swapping with the first letter for added affirmative action. Thus:

    Washington Tosp

    Next, let’s alphabetize, enough sloppiness! (Except the newly promoted “T” gets to stay put)

    Washington Tops

    Hmm.

    Now, “op” is such a dated, cold war sort of word, how about replacing it with something more now, more with it, like “IM”?

    Washington Tims

    Of course nothing can hold its own in this modern, digital age without the obligatory “e” added gratuitously, thus:

    Washington Times

    And there we have it. The transformation is complete.

  9. 9.

    Napoleon

    It is like Fred H. and the brain trust that runs the WaPo tried to come up with a new hire for a columnist that would create the biggest impression that the WaPo is a total joke.

  10. 10.

    Cat Lady

    So glad I dumped my childish loyalty and faith in the twisted and sick Church of Rome back before I even realized how sick and corrupt it truly is.

    A reporter for the Irish Times was on the BBC the other day saying that the churches in the Dublin parish are sparsely attended on Sundays, and there is only one new ordained priest for a parish of 2 million due to the abuse reports recently released. The anger is directed at the bishops and in particular they have really strong feelings about Cardinal Law. As a Bostonian, I feel their pain. I’m not and never have been Catholic, but if he ever shows his face here again, he’ll be captured and waterboarded, and he’ll deserve it. The Irish feel the same way. If there are any more Catholics left in Ireland in 5 years I’ll be shocked. Someone needs to go medieval all over all of their sorry hypocritical asses.

  11. 11.

    Biscuits

    I saw that segment on Cspan yesterday morning (briefly). I did not know who the guest was but immediately thought he looked like republican baby huey.

  13. 13.

    SGEW

    @Cat Lady: I realize that it’s tongue-in-cheek, referential (and, of course, classically ironic), but advocating for the torture of members of the Catholic hierarchy is still in pretty bad taste, imho.

    To tell the truth, that 90’s Tarantino catch phrase gives me the willies nowadays, as our government (and the WaPo) has, indeed, “gone medieval.”

  15. 15.

    rootless_e

    @SGEW: what’s bad taste about it? Law never expressed any remorse about his lifetime of facilitating pedophiles. He’s as evil as any member of the Bush administration and the same goes for the people who protected him.

  17. 17.

    EconWatcher

    @Cat Lady:

    The implosion of the Catholic Church in Ireland is an amazing historical phenomenon that has been very underreported here. When I was in Ireland in the early ’90s, the place was so Catholic that whenever a city bus drove by a church, you would see everyone–I mean everyone–on the bus simultaneously cross themselves (in Cork at least).

    Now, just a few years later, the churches are empty save for a few old people, just like in nominally Catholic countries like France, where the Church for practical purposes died long ago. And as far as I can tell, it’s almost entirely due to the abuse scandals from the Christian Brothers orphanages and elsewhere.

    You’d be hard pressed to come up with many similar examples of an institution that went from near omnipotence to irrelevance in such a short period of time. (Maybe the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1980 to 1992 is an analogy).

    As an alum of a Christian Brothers school (I had a good experience), I find it very sad, but the collapse was of course well earned and deserved.

  19. 19.

    SGEW

    @rootless_e: Torturing members of the Bush Administration would be equally questionable, in my opinion. To wit: advocating for the torture of anyone is in bad taste.

  20. 20.

    R. Porrofatto

    @Mwangangi:

    First thing I noticed, too. Ridiculous, idnit? Even in a piece excoriating Thiessen’s arguments in favor of it, Scherer simply can’t bring himself to call it torture. Of course, neither can the Washington Post, NPR, or the NY Times. I love all the “harsh treatment” and “harsh interrogation” and “abuse” dodges, but my favorite has to be the Times’ parroting the Bush liine: enhanced interrogation; “enhanced” being such an inherently positive word, this one’s probably the most explicitly Orwelliian of the bunch.

    Interrogator: I think it’s time we enhanced this interrogation.

    Suspect: Thank god, this chair is killing me.

    Interrogator: You misunderstand. I’m now going to play the piano and sing my questions in the style of Noel Coward, while dancers perform Latin hand-jive behind me.

    Suspect: Okay, I’ll talk.

  23. 23.

    Hawes

    I went to high school with Marc. My friend wrote a piece in the paper about what courses to take Senior year, she suggested AP European History because the class was small: “There are only 5 people (Thiessen never shows).”

    The guy was an annoying, pasty coward then, and he is now. Routinely described as one of the densest, most obtuse people in our class.

    So, of course he was promoted through the Bush Administration into the WaPo. Of course he was.

  24. 24.

    adolphus

    @Napolean

    That’s a good data point that shouldn’t be ignored. And people who tout the drop in church attendance should bear in mind that this trend could reverse as soon as this Sunday. On the other hand, just because a family sends their child to a religiously affiliated school, doesn’t mean they adhere to that church’s precepts or are loyal to the larger organization higher than the teacher or principal of that school.

    That there is a problem for the Catholic Church in Ireland should not be ignored, however.

  25. 25.

    EconWatcher

    @adolphus:

    I think Napoleon’s statistic about education in Irish parish schools is interesting but does not really answer the evidence that the Catholic Church has collapsed.

    It sounds as if Ireland never developed a secular, state-sponsored system of public education; it left elementary education to the Church. So even if the Church has lost all credibility, Irish kids will still go to parochial schools unless and until the Irish state offers a comprehensive, public alternative. Obviously, that kind of change can’t happen overnight.

  26. 26.

    Blue Raven

    @adolphus:

    That there is a problem for the Catholic Church in Ireland should not be ignored, however.

    You mean, “That the Roman Catholic Church is a big part of the problem in Ireland should not be ignored.” That institution has been responsible since its ascendance in the fifth century CE for systematically rewriting that nation’s history, suppressing knowledge, repressing freedom of thought and expression, perverting sexual health, and restraining its development as a modern nation. The sooner Ireland can stop thinking St. Patrick shat the island out of his arse while St. Brigid wiped it, the better.

  27. 27.

    Cat Lady

    @EconWatcher:

    The orphanages, hospitals and schools were all run by the church which is why the abuse was so severe and prolonged. The Gardai deferred to church authorities when reports surfaced. There is really no alternative in Irish civic life to church run institutions, which the Murphy Report really laid bare, and is currently the cause of the Irish cynicism and despair. How do you get your country back from centuries of intertwining with the church? I wish them luck. No on does recrimination and self-doubt quite like the Irish.

  28. 28.

    danimal

    Thiessen looks like another one of the right wing bullies that hides behind the skirt of the church, or the military, or the flag… once they are called out. The right wing used to have a coherent, though flawed, ideology. Now they just have emotional catharsis masquerading as policy and schoolyard taunts imitating political discourse. Torture is a policy of the weak.

  29. 29.

    Fergus Wooster

    @Blue Raven:

    The sooner Ireland can stop thinking St. Patrick shat the island out of his arse while St. Brigid wiped it, the better.

    LOL. You might appreciate Stephen Fry’s debate performance (the proposition was that the Catholic Church is a Force For Good in the World). You can imagine which side he takes, and who wins.

    If I were gay, I’d be pining for him.

    http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2010/02/08/stephen-fry-v-the-catholic-church

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