Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

I did not have telepathic declassification on my 2022 bingo card.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

Infrastructure week. at last.

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

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

“Squeaker” McCarthy

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.

Conservatism: there are some people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

We still have time to mess this up!

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

It’s time for the GOP to dust off that post-2012 autopsy, completely ignore it, and light the party on fire again.

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49Comments

  1. 1.

    batgirl

    Fuck Susan Collins.

    From NYT:

    Ms. Collins, who backs repeal of the policy, said she would nonetheless vote against moving forward with debate because of a dispute with the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, over whether Republicans would be allowed to offer amendments to the bill.

    I totally hope she gets teabagged!

    ETA: Awww, dogs are very cute.

  2. 2.

    You Don't Say

    Very cute.

    I’ve always meant to ask: Are there multiple kinds of JRTs? I always think of JRTs as short-haired …

  3. 3.

    beltane

    Not nice of you to photograph their secret strategy planning session.

    I moved my bed to the other side of the room yesterday and the cats seem to have taken over. They do not let the dog up there at all now; the Feng-Shui in that part of the room must be more cat friendly.

  4. 4.

    Legalize

    They think their hiding, much like my male cat does when he stands behind a door with his long tail sticking straight out and flicking around.

  6. 6.

    eemom

    Ya want Zen? I gotcher Zen right here:

    “If most of us are ashamed of Shabby clothes and shoddy furniture,let us be more ashamed of shabby ideas and shoddy philosophies….it would be a sad situation if the wrapper were better then what’s wrapped inside of it.” ~ Albert Einstein

    This posted on the FB page of my TeaTard sister in law as her “status.”

    Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go honor my suicide pact with Irony.

  7. 7.

    Cliff

    And Molly is scared of the vacuum, so spent 6 hours today trying to decide if she was hungry enough to eat with the vacuum 3 feet from her food bowl.

    the introduction of hotdog bits sealed the deal, hunger overcomes fear yet again.

    ‘course she don’t know it now, but if she wants to eat/walk she is going to have to deal w/the vac there for a few more weeks or until she can ignore it.

  8. 8.

    NickM

    McMegan’s series, “writing about stuff I know nothing about” reaches its apparent apotheosis today with “How to Survive a Layoff.”

    Could someone please read it for me so I don’t have to?

  9. 9.

    Sentient Puddle

    @NickM: I shall attempt it.

    In the meantime, a lesson on fireplace safety.

    ETA: Oh Jesus. When the very first lines of it are this:

    The latest piece from the New York Times in the growing genre of “Older workers finding it hard to get new jobs after a layoff” has triggered the predictable musings about whether we should raise the Social Security retirement age,

    …I know I’m going to need to bust out the bottle of Excedrin before I’m done with this piece.

  16. 16.

    Martin

    @NickM:

    After becoming unemployed, you’ll still receive invitations to DC cocktail parties. This is your best job hunting opportunity! Don’t skip them! At these parties, use the following openings with any print editors as you hand them a martini and introduce yourself:
    __
    1. Your libertarian credentials are unparalleled and you would make a provocative and contrarian voice to their publication – plus the teabaggers LOVE libertarians and aren’t they a huge growth market!
    __
    2. As a libertarian, your main principle is the financial well-being of the publication, and as such, lying about whatever facts and bullshit arguments are needed to bring in page views don’t present a moral obstruction in any way. Lying is merely creative thinking in the free market!
    __
    3. Did I mention that my husband is a well respected writer over at Reason magazine and will link to and defend whatever tripe of mine that you publish providing much-needed cross-over readers?

  17. 17.

    Bella Q

    Only in 2010 could an election story have this headline:

    Picnics on top of altars? Wiccans say they don’t have them—and they don’t like O’Donnell spreading bunk. Ben Crair reports on the comments that may cost her the pagan vote.

    Granted, it’s at The Daily Beast, but really, wouldn’t it seem more appropriate for The Onion? Once again, reality has overtaken the mocking of what’s going on. Will someone please rouse me when this populace regains what little actual sanity there ever was?

  18. 18.

    cleek

    DADT Repeal DOA:

    The vote fell mostly along party lines, although Sens. Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor, both D- Ark., sided with Republicans to block the bill. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., also voted against the measure as a procedural tactic. Under Senate rules, casting his vote with the majority of the Senate enables him to revive the bill at a later date.

    fuck you, Blanche Lincoln.
    and fuck you, Mark Pryor.

    and, just for good measure: fuck you Arkansas for electing those two twats.

  19. 19.

    Cacti

    A little info has come to light on yesterday’s “middle class CFO” from the CNBC townhall.

    Velma Hart is CFO of Amvets, a 12 million a year non-profit with 255 employees. Her husband is the Facilities Director of the Verizon Center, the DC area’s 20,000 seat venue for professional basketball, hockey, and major music concerts.

    The biggest drain on her standard of living will be the $50,000 a year private college her oldest daughter will start attending next year.

    Sounds like she’s from the Prof. Todd Henderson bracket of the middle class.

  23. 23.

    Mark S.

    Also, I love how all our fiscal conservatives don’t blink at spending $725 billion dollars on defense. That’s a little more than we spend on collecting bear DNA.

  24. 24.

    General Stuck

    I just love this pic of the two JRT’s Mr. Cole

    And you all need to pace yourself, because unless dems propose a bill to drown the federal government in the bath tub before the election, or offer gov subsidies to the man diaper industry, there ain’t likely nothin’ going to pass congress.

    It is all stand up comitragedy pol theater and I’m just grateful dems get to write the script this cycle, instead of the wingnuts. Consider it preproduction for democratic campaign ads.

    Because wingnuts believe they have the hold cards and will not give dems anything like anything that hints at success legislatively. I hope I’m wrong, but doubt it.

  25. 25.

    Sentient Puddle

    @NickM: OK, so the piece wasn’t as headache-inducing as I thought it would be. But as one would normally expect with Megan McArdle, it’s still bad. It’s just that normally, one would feel the urge to go line by line, saying “Here’s how this one’s wrong, and then this one, and oh god, this one’s a doozy…” Here, you can pretty much swat the whole thing down with minimal effort.

    I’m glad I highlighted the quote above. The statement is pretty moronic (older people are having trouble getting back into the workforce after layoffs, so clearly we must raise the retirement age and make life even shittier for them!), but it doesn’t fit in context with everything else she says…except for one way that I’m sure she didn’t intend.

    See, what steps she goes on to list boil down to a pretty simple idea: Make sure you have an emergency buffer in your finances so that you can tide yourself over until you get a new job. Which yeah, is not bad advice. Problem is, she apparently forgets that bit at the beginning about how the problem being discussed here is older workers not being able to get back into the workforce. An emergency buffer ain’t going to do them much good if they’re in the “permanently fucked” state.

    Really, a classic case of missing the forest for the trees going on here.

  28. 28.

    Superluminar

    Did anyone else see the IBM ad at the top of McWrong’s page saying: “it’s time to ask smarter questions”? Heh indeed…

  29. 29.

    jl

    Thanks for cute pic, Cole.

    But do those dogs actually sleep? I have received no evidence to date that those dogs ever quit moving, for any reason.

    The coordination between the two dogs looks suspicious to me.

    They may be both crawling under the bed, very slowly. in order to commit joint deviltry.

    I would look into it, if I were you.

  30. 30.

    Rosalita

    They actually SLEEP? I recently met two JRTs in person. They had pens side by side. They would jump and spin in unison (barking all the while of course). What a hoot.

  31. 31.

    Creature

    They think their hiding, much like my male cat does when he stands behind a door with his long tail sticking straight out and flicking around.

    One of my girls won’t even go that far. She’ll scamper head down into a corner and think she’s absolutely invisible. I play along, of course, and make like I can’t find her. Good times.

  32. 32.

    mds

    I wonder if they’re hiding from the latest PPP polling that has Joe Manchin down by three points, thanks to the enormous influence that manic progressive blog commenters wield in West Virginia politics.

  33. 33.

    batgirl

    @Sentient Puddle: Also an emergency buffer already assumes a certain class status where one doesn’t have to spend every freakin penny they earn just to meet their basic needs.

    People like Todd Henderson and McArdle just don’t have a frakkin clue about how most people live and/or they just don’t care.

  34. 34.

    Cacti

    @Allison W.:

    Yes, it’s true. She made a comment about going back to franks and beans.

    She’s just one of those regular folks who can send two kids to private school in Washington, DC.

    But it’s Barack Obama’s fault her daughter chose a $50k a year college.

  35. 35.

    binzinerator

    @NickM:

    McMegan’s series, “writing about stuff I know nothing about” reaches its apparent apotheosis today with “How to Survive a Layoff.”

    Hmm, let me guess….for McArgle-Bargle and the Glibtards you only get laid off because you are inferior, lazy, or lack initiative. So her advice will be about owing up to the fact that you are worthless to real Producers and cannot compete because the Invisible Hand has sorted the Wheat from the Chaff, the Productive from the Lazy, the Wolves from the Sheep.

    Once you accept your personal responsibility for your failure and lack of competitiveness, you can move on with your life and with perserverence and effort find gainful employment and fulfillment as a washroom attendant or Wallmart greeter, as befitting your stunted value to the Market.

    Any other interpretation as to why you lost your job is nothing more than sniveling to be fed from the tit of the Nanny State.

  39. 39.

    binzinerator

    @binzinerator:Yeah, the McMegan prescription for surviving economic stress: First, have a lot of money.

    Bad, foolish, old Ms. Reid.

    McMegan says she made a lot of mistakes, some of the flawed human kind, like a shopping spree, even though it might have been cheaper and better for her than seeing a shrink for depression and taking anti-depressants that her health insurance, if she still had any, may or may not cover.

    And worse, some of those mistakes were of the Randian kind, like her taking time out to help someone dying of cancer. This was very foolish and irresponsible. Let them buck themselves up. Responsible unemployed people pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, there is no reason why the sick and dying cannot comfort themselves. It’s just a matter of making appropriate choices.

    But in a glibertarian world Ms. Reid’s single worst mistake, her most unfortunate choice, was to grow older.

  40. 40.

    Comrade Mary

    Speaking of dog tails, it was just a few weeks ago that I completely and fully recognized that dog tails are never sinuous like cat tails and typically move in only one plane of motion.

    A few weeks ago, a neighbour several houses away was looking down and talking to a pet while standing just outside of his open garage door . All I could see of the animal was a gently waving dark tail, nothing more. I filed this away for the moment as “That is one odd dog he has”, but still couldn’t consciously say why it seemed so odd.

    A couple of evenings later, I saw the same neighbour walking along our back lane, coaxing along an unleashed, cautious but curious sealpoint Siamese.

    And thus I was enlightened.

  41. 41.

    Mnemosyne

    Charlotte loves to hide under the ottoman so she can play “Surprise!” on the other two cats, but she tends to forget that her big white butt is hanging out the other side.

    Sometimes she waits so long for one of the others to walk by that she falls asleep with her butt hanging out, which makes it extra funny.

  42. 42.

    Linda Featheringill

    @General Stuck:

    Consider it preproduction for democratic campaign ads. Because wingnuts believe they have the hold cards and will not give dems anything like anything that hints at success legislatively. I hope I’m wrong, but doubt it.

    I agree. Since the Republicans will block everything the Democrats try to do, might as well force everything out into the open and film everything and make ads out of it.

  44. 44.

    Linda Featheringill

    FWIW, predictions on the House races:

    It takes 218 seats to control the House, by my calculations.

    538 says the house will wind up with 210-215 seats.

    Electoral-vote says the house will wind up with 224 seats, plus 30 races still too close to call.

    The DCCC has sent out money and professional organizers for get-out-the-vote campaigns to all but 5-6 states.

    The DCCC has also sent out money and professional campaign workers to 26 Democratic candidates trying to take House seats away from Republicans.

    I say that it’s not over until it’s over.

  45. 45.

    Mnemosyne

    @Linda Featheringill:

    Electoral-vote says the house will wind up with 224 seats, plus 30 races still too close to call.

    Electoral-vote is saying that the Republicans are going to flip 46 seats from D to R, plus win an additional 30 seats? Republicans are going to win 76 new seats this fall?

    I want some of whatever the hell they’re smoking over there.

  46. 46.

    Linda Featheringill

    @Mnemosyne:

    No, no, no!

    I probably misspoke.

    Electoral-vote thinks that the Democrats have a lock on 224 seats. There are an addition set of 30 races that are too close to call. So the Democrats will likely end up with more than 224 seats.

    Better?

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