Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Finding joy where we can, and muddling through where we can’t.

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

Dear elected officials: Trump is temporary, dishonor is forever.

This really is a full service blog.

The unpunished coup was a training exercise.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

Republican also-rans: four mules fighting over a turnip.

The desire to stay informed is directly at odds with the need to not be constantly enraged.

Democracy is not a spectator sport.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

People really shouldn’t expect the government to help after they watched the GOP drown it in a bathtub.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

The arc of the moral universe does not bend itself. it is up to us to bend it.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

If you don’t believe freedom is for everybody, then the thing you love isn’t freedom, it is privilege.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

One of our two political parties is a cult whose leader admires Vladimir Putin.

The real work of an opposition party is to oppose.

Live so that if you miss a day of work people aren’t hoping you’re dead.

Fucking consultants! (of the political variety)

Washington Post Catch and Kill, not noticeably better than the Enquirer’s.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

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30Comments

  2. 2.

    roshan

    Wouldn’t this be just another reason to clone Digby? Even her music tastes are exceptional. Clone her already, I say.

  6. 6.

    Origuy

    I’m genetically inclined to prefer men who look good in a kilt.

    Tempest was at the Highland Games I went to last weekend. I was on stage in a kilt, too. I’m the one with long hair.
    (The dancing starts about a minute in. I didn’t bother to edit out the intro.)

  7. 7.

    Yutsano

    @Origuy: It could just be because I’m tired, but watching you I was somehow reminded of Benjamin Franklin. Since from my perspective that’s a compliment, I think that’s a good thing.

  10. 10.

    Origuy

    @Yutsano: Much of Scottish country dance comes from 18th century France. I don’t know if Franklin danced during his time at Versailles, but he likely saw people doing similar figures. The footwork, though, is particularly Scottish.

  12. 12.

    roshan

    ZuZu, it’s called ratfucking, not “being creative”. Update your lingo if you don’t want to be left begging in the streets by these assholes.

  13. 13.

    Zuzu's Petals

    @Origuy:

    Very interesting.

    I have Crawford and Feguson and probably a couple of others.

    Along the lines of my comment in another thread, re “official” ghost towns:

    Did you know California has an official state tartan? Yep…based on the Muir tartan.

  16. 16.

    El Cid

    By gaining just two MP’s, Australia’s labor leader Julia Gillard can now form a government (albeit a minority government). Apparently in hard bargaining each gained strong backing of programs they were pushing, including rural development and digital infrastructure.

    [The two members were the final needed; without the Green Party given a heavy role in the new government and thus drawing their votes to form a government, Labor wouldn’t have achieved the government.]

    So thankfully we don’t have to yet see Australia go conservative, and maybe moving in the opposite direction based on their coalition.

  17. 17.

    bemused

    @El Cid:
    I’ve been shocked in the last few years at the increasing number of incidents of blatant, unapologetic flouting of rules/regs in campaigns, etc. People aren’t bothering to cover their tracks anymore. It is more and more right out in the open with a smirk and basically saying what are you going to do about it and just go ahead and try to stop us. I probably shouldn’t be shocked when R leadership rarely publicly condemns it, actively encourages it and/or do it themselves because anything goes to win.
    They still claim to have the patent on morals and values and I want to scream.

  18. 18.

    El Cid

    This is a huge scandal, intersecting Rupert Murdoch’s media empire deploying corporate for-profit wiretapping and privacy invasion of hundreds of the UK’s aristocracy, politicians, celebrities, police and military officials etc., and the major outcome has been a push to cut the BBC’s funding.

    Rupert Murdoch’s UK tabloid News of the World, earlier caught hacking the phones & data of the royal family apparently has had a much, much wider range of targets, perhaps hundreds, and perhaps with the help of police who didn’t want to fall out of favor with Murdoch’s news empire, and targeting not just royalty and celebrities but politicians and businessmen.

    Scotland Yard collected evidence indicating that reporters at News of the World might have hacked the phone messages of hundreds of celebrities, government officials, soccer stars — anyone whose personal secrets could be tabloid fodder. Only now, more than four years later, are most of them beginning to find out…
    __
    …Around the newsroom, some reporters were getting stories by surreptitiously accessing phone messages, according to former editors and reporters. Often, all it took was a standard four-digit security code, like 1111 or 4444, which many users did not bother to change after buying their mobile phones. If they did, the paper’s private investigators found ways to trick phone companies into revealing personal codes. Reporters called one method of hacking “double screwing” because it required two simultaneous calls to the same number. The first would engage the phone line, forcing the second call into voice mail. A reporter then punched in the code to hear messages, often deleting them to prevent access by rival papers. A dozen former reporters said in interviews that hacking was pervasive at News of the World. “Everyone knew,” one longtime reporter said. “The office cat knew….
    __
    …Within days of the raids, several senior detectives said they began feeling internal pressure. One senior investigator said he was approached by Chris Webb, from the department’s press office, who was “waving his arms up in the air, saying, ‘Wait a minute — let’s talk about this.’ ”
    __
    The investigator, who has since left Scotland Yard, added that Webb stressed the department’s “long-term relationship with News International.”
    __
    The investigator recalled becoming furious at the suggestion, responding, “There’s illegality here, and we’ll pursue it like we do any other case.” In a statement, Webb said: ‘‘I cannot recall these events. Police officers make operational decisions, not press officers. That is the policy of the Metropolitan Police Service and the policy that I and all police press officers follow.’’…
    __
    Scotland Yard officials ultimately decided the inquiry would stop with Mulcaire and Goodman. “We were not going to set off on a cleanup of the British media,” a senior investigator said. In fact, investigators never questioned any other reporters or editors at News of the World about the hacking, interviews and records show.

    (I guess maybe News of the World wanted to imitate Colombia’s national intelligence agency, which did the same, although hopefully NOTW won’t be passing along the info to right wing death squads to assassinate opposition figures and human rights leaders.)

    Funny enough, the NOTW editor whom was blamed by the various reporters interviewed with creating the hyper-crazed feeding frenzy coverage needing juicy results every 2 seconds, and who has since resigned from his wonderful position in Murdoch’s empire and has signed up as the Conservative Party’s media strategist and now the Prime Minister’s communications director.

    In an unusual gesture (in my view), the New York Times manages to credit the liberal daily UK paper The Guardian for having been the ones who kept investigating and covering the broader issue, not just the instance of the two found guilty of hacking the princes’ phones in 2007, leading to parliamentary investigations and a generally broad scope, not just those initial incidents.

    WHILE OCCASIONAL articles appeared about the various goings-on at News of the World, the scandal was somewhat of a nonscandal in the other tabloids. But The Guardian, a Labour-oriented paper with an undisguised disdain for Murdoch’s publications, aggressively pursued the hacking episode. Its exclusive on the Taylor settlement prompted the parliamentary committee to convene new hearings…
    __
    …The company had been able to prevent Mulcaire’s testimony [in a civil suit against a sort of ‘agent’ between tabloids and people who want to appear in them in which PI Mulcaire likely would have had to expose the hacking]. But when The Guardian published details of Clifford’s lucrative deal [apparently paid a $1 million to drop the suit], the litigation floodgates opened. More than three years after Scotland Yard closed the official investigation, solicitors and barristers now scrambled to bring new cases against News International and the police…

    Of course, everything all worked out for the best.

    BY THE SPRING of this year, News International’s papers had firmly switched their support from Labour to the Tories. An avalanche of unforgiving coverage culminated on April 8, one month before the general election, in a Sun story headlined “Brown’s a Clown.” Brown’s strategists assumed that Murdoch’s motives were not purely ideological. They drew up a campaign document conjuring Murdoch’s wish list should David Cameron become prime minister. Among the top items they identified was the weakening of the government-financed BBC, one of Murdoch’s biggest competitors and long a target of criticism from News International executives. On May 11, David Cameron officially assumed the position and elevated Coulson to the head of communications.
    __
    Within the week, Rupert Murdoch arrived at 10 Downing Street for a private meeting with the new prime minister. Cameron’s administration criticized the BBC in July for “extraordinary and outrageous waste” during difficult financial times and proposed cutting its budget.

    Exactly. What we should all learn from finding out that a right wing billionaire’s billion dollar media empire systematically employs, well, wiretapping, it’s time to crack down on that awful public broadcaster BBC for wasting so much money that maybe could be vacuumed up by Murdoch’s empires.

  19. 19.

    El Cid

    @bemused:

    They still claim to have the patent on morals and values and I want to scream.

    Remember, whether they’re the government in power and wanting to use unstoppable force to torture or spy on anyone, they are the patriots who are moral and in the right, or whether they’re the heroic rebels screaming how the government is an illegitimate repressive junta and how they need to overthrow it one way or other, they will always be the braver, purer, more moral party.

  20. 20.

    bemused

    @El Cid:
    The ends justify the means no matter how despicable and immoral because they have God and money/greed on their side.
    Wow, the News of the World story is huge but Foxbots won’t hear about it. Most of them have probably never even heard the name Rupert Murdoch and his history but if told would dismiss it as liberal conspiracy to take down their cherished fair and balanced channel.
    I get email from the Friends of the US Chamber of Commerce. I have no idea how I got on that email list but I haven’t opted out because it’s interesting to see what they are up to. One time, I was urged to send them money and get Laura Ingraham’s book “Obama Diaries” free! Yesterday, the Chamber email was “Honor America’s Workers by Fighting for Jobs”
    “Support Our 60-Day, Post-Labor Day Push” with $60 donation, of course.

  21. 21.

    wilfred

    Meanwhile:

    BAGHDAD (AP) – Days after the U.S. officially ended combat operations and touted Iraq’s ability to defend itself, American troops found themselves battling heavily armed militants assaulting an Iraqi military headquarters in the center of Baghdad on Sunday. The fighting killed 12 people and wounded dozens. It was the first exchange of fire involving U.S. troops in Baghdad since the Aug. 31 deadline for formally ending the combat mission, and it showed that American troops remaining in the country are still being drawn into the fighting.

    This is not a combat troop.

    apnews.myway.com/article/20100905/D9I204T00.html

  22. 22.

    El Cid

    @wilfred: There will soon be a new strategy introduced which will fix this situation and it will have a name very much like THE SURGE but maybe with a gooderer name.

  25. 25.

    bemused

    @cleek:
    Of course but nowhere did I say only R’s do it. However, I don’t buy the equivalency game that rightwingers love to play on cable tv, that D’s are doing it just as much as R’s.

  26. 26.

    Jay in Oregon

    I’ve gone to the Pacific Northwest Highland Games for years to hear Tempest and some other great bands. This is the first summer that I’ve missed it.

    Here’s Tempest and another band I love, Wicked Tinkers, jamming onstage:

    youtube.com/watch?v=YwEsadb8UY8

  27. 27.

    Breth

    Interesting that the flute intro is really an old tune called “The Otter’s Holt”. Lovely song.

  28. 28.

    celticdragonchick

    @Jay in Oregon:

    I love good Celtic rock. It would be nice if I could see Tempest here at Grandfather Mountain.

    One of the best Celtic/Americana/Klezmer/punk fusion bands I have ever heard at the Grandfather Mtn Highland Games was Scythian.

    Youtube here of the wedding/concert at Sunflower Fest last year. “Dance all night” must be experienced in person at least once in your life. It is electric.

  29. 29.

    shortstop

    I’m genetically inclined to prefer men who look good in a kilt.

    I couldn’t find any in this video.

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