Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

Quote tweet friends, screenshot enemies.

Come on, man.

He imagines himself as The Big Bad, Who Is Universally Feared… instead of The Big Jagoff, Who Is Universally Mocked.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

The Giant Orange Man Baby is having a bad day.

Baby steps, because the Republican Party is full of angry babies.

If you’re looking for someone who’s young and athletic, go watch a fucking movie.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

Relentless negativity is not a sign that you are more realistic.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

It’s pointless to bring up problems that can only be solved with a time machine.

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

Optimism opens the door to great things.

The media handbook says “controversial” is the most negative description that can be used for a Republican.

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

A consequence of cucumbers

American History and Black History can not be separated.

Every reporter and pundit should have to declare if they ever vacationed with a billionaire.

Let’s finish the job.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

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94Comments

  4. 4.

    roshan

    __

    Hours before their special news conference today, the cat is out of the bag:
    NASA has discovered a completely new life form that doesn’t share the biological building blocks of anything currently living in planet Earth. This changes everything.
    __
    At their conference today, NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe Simon will announce that they have found a bacteria whose DNA is completely alien to what we know today. Instead of using phosphorus, the bacteria uses arsenic. All life on Earth is made of six components: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. Every being, from the smallest amoeba to the largest whale, share the same life stream. Our DNA blocks are all the same.
    __
    But not this one. This one is completely different. We knew that there were bacteria that processed arsenic, but this bacteria—discovered in the poisonous Mono Lake, California—is actually made of arsenic. The phosphorus is absent from its DNA. The implications of this discovery are enormous to our understanding of life itself and the possibility of finding beings in other planets that don’t have to be like planet Earth.

    link

  5. 5.

    JenJen

    OK. I’m pretty hacked off that Qatar beat out the US for the 2022 World Cup. Seems like about the dumbest possible place to have a soccer tournament in the middle of summer, for one.

    Grrrr. So is the US ever going to be awarded another international sporting competition? Are our bribes just not big enough?

  6. 6.

    Annelid Gustator

    I can’t believe there isn’t more talk about the single most important issue: the US got aced out of hosting the 2022 World Cup Final by Qatar. How is this possible?

  11. 11.

    dr. bloor

    I’m in a fucking fury, and almost drove my car into a tree whilst listening to Nice Polite Republicans on the radio. Everybody from Colin Powell to the Joint Chiefs to Gates to Beetle Bailey say they’re A-OK with repealing DADT, so what’s the NPR news lead? John Fucking McCain doesn’t like it.

  12. 12.

    LikeableInMyOwnWay

    Boy, this comes as a huge surprise. I missed the announcement last month due to having a family member in the hospital at the time.

    I love the understatement in articles like these:

    So what went wrong with “Rubicon”? According to most critics, it was the espionage series’s plodding pace and lack of thrills that made viewers lose patience and resulted in low ratings.
    As the Boston Globe’s Matthew Gilbert put it: “I was a big fan of ‘Rubicon’ at the beginning, and I admired its ambition to be like a 1970s conspiracy thriller. But I got increasingly frustrated with the scripts as the season progressed. It wasn’t the slow pace that got to me, so much as the stubborn withholding of information and revelation. Unlike movies, TV requires some weekly reward.”

    Heh. Or in other words, the thing began to look campy, almost spoofy, by the fourth episode, when viewers started to wonder if the writers were playing a game to see how far they could go with the interminable nothingness of the storyline before viewers blew up. But it turned out that the little game wasn’t that much fun, viewers just went away.

    “It wasn’t the slow pace that got to me”

    Yeah, nothing sells a “thriller” like a slow pace.

  14. 14.

    MikeTheZ

    @JenJen: Wonder if they figure a civil war in 2022 is more likely to be here than in Qatar…

    Anyone know if the Senate plans on taking up the continuing resolution at some point, or is DougJ out of a job?

  15. 15.

    WyldPirate

    @chopper:
    haha. Nice. Nancy calls their bluff and they’ll have to go on record.

    Still, it’s only a symbolic vote. I can’t see it passing the Senate without getting stripped out. I’m unsure if the nuke option is in play for this.

    Hope the Rethugs can’t dust off some fucked up procedural counter measure.

  19. 19.

    DougJ

    @MikeTheZ:

    It’s not a job, it’s actually something I don’t want to do and I’m disappointed that the shut down seems to have been averted.

  20. 20.

    Chyron HR

    @chopper:

    “We’re 23 months from the next election and the political games have already started trying to set up the next election.”

    Well, there’s a case of the pot calling the kettle orange.

  23. 23.

    MikeTheZ

    @DougJ: Heh. But we all have things we don’t want to do. Well, unless you’re a Congressional Republican, I suppose…

  24. 24.

    LikeableInMyOwnWay

    @Cat:

    I found that it was a show you could put on pause, and not know the difference, thereby saving wear and tear on your DVR.

    So it did have some merits. Like being able to watch it with the sound off and no caption, and not miss anything.

  25. 25.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @WyldPirate: Either it works and the sub-250k tax cut stays or Rs piss off either their tax cut supporting voters or their supporters who want them to say no to anything Dems want. Plus, as an added bonus, we get to see an orange man turn red.

  26. 26.

    chopper

    @WyldPirate:

    I can’t see it passing the Senate without getting stripped out.

    senate dems are a bunch of shitbirds. then again, maybe they’ll have their shit together enough to get behind the easiest-to-get-behind issue in years and make the GOP filibuster a tax cut for every income-earning american.

    it’s such a winner, you just know they’ll fuck it up.

  28. 28.

    Judas Escargot

    @roshan:

    Yep. If true, this find is a big, big deal.

    If this organism really exists, then at least one of three things must be true: (1) It came from off-planet; (2) life evolved on earth independently more than once; or (3) it’s possible for a life form to evolve a completely, chemically different form of DNA and survive. Any one of those three would be a Darwin-level discovery.

    Alien life, in the original sense of the word.

  29. 29.

    Punchy

    So how will the media spin the fact that Republicans are about to vote against tax cuts? Oh….yeah. By only talking about how the Dems cheated the bill through the House, or some such shit.

  31. 31.

    Basilisc

    The Rude Pundit has some ideas for ads:

    1. “Republicans want billionaires to be richer. We want poor people to be able to eat.”
    2. “Republicans want billionaires to be richer. We want you to not have feces on your food.”
    3. “Republicans want billionaires to be richer. We want the men and women who rescued people after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 to get healthy.”
    4. “Republicans want billionaires to be richer. We want firefighters and police officers to be able to get fair pay.”
    5. “Republicans want billionaires to be richer. We want all Americans to be able to openly serve in the military.”
    6. “Republicans want billionaires to be richer. We want women and men to make the same wage for the same work.”
    7. “Republicans want billionaires to be richer. We want to make the nation safe from nuclear weapons.”

    Would be nice to see these in newspapers, TV commercials, web ads etc constantly for the next two years.

    Would also be nice to have a pony.

  34. 34.

    chopper

    @Punchy:

    they’ll try. procedurally it was a slick move, of gooper proportions. bless the house dems, i didn’t know they had it in em.

    now the inevitable mess in the senate. i forsee the GOP raising a huge stink and holy joe carrying their water in front of the cameras. “this is an issue that should be resolved in the new senate, not in the last days of a lame-duck session.” lather, rinse, repeat.

  35. 35.

    pragmatism

    ahem. its salma. i am aware of the spelling of the names of all large b00bed women. its boring, but its my life.

  36. 36.

    The Dangerman

    @chopper:

    lol, boner’s getting pissed. apparently house dems did have an ace up their sleeve.

    Hold on, after all the procedural shit the Right has pulled, Boehner gets his panties in a twist over a procedural trick?

    Somebody get me a really tiny violin to play for this orange fucker.

  37. 37.

    LikeableInMyOwnWay

    What’s really hilarious is that given the GOP House majority, the razor thin Dem lead in the Senate which is subject to collapse at the drop of a hat, and a centrist non-confrontational president, the Republicans could, if they wanted to, do some serious good work with serious conservative policy in the next couple of years.

    If they had any ideas, or any integrity, or any goodwill, or any desire to leave the country better off than they found it ….

    Never mind. Just fuckin with ya.

  38. 38.

    Tax Analyst

    @chopper:

    house dems did have an ace up their sleeve.

    Good news!

    Good grief, as shitty as things are on Capitol Hill, just take a moment and consider how much shittier they would be if Nancy Pelosi weren’t there.

    Pelosi’s got the balls that far too few of the House Dems possess and the brains that NONE of the House Republicans could ever even dream of having. It’s no wonder at all why the GOP spends so many two-minute hate sessions demonizing her.

  39. 39.

    The Grand Panjandrum

    @roshan: Gizmodo may have the facts wrong here. According to another report these organisms were produced by the scientists and show that life could use something other than phosphorus as building blocks in DNA.

    Researchers say they’ve forced microbes from a gnarly California lake to become arsenic-gobbling aliens. It may not be as thrilling as discovering life on Titan, but the claim is so radical that some chemists aren’t yet ready to believe it.

    Not quite as startling but fascinating nonetheless.

  40. 40.

    Peter

    So, is there any way for Cole to get rid f those damn stupid ARIZONA STRONG ads? They kind of clash with the tone.

  43. 43.

    LikeableInMyOwnWay

    @Peter:

    I kind of like the idea that Cole can help support his blog using righty ads that mostly irritate his left-leaning audience.

    It is so …. Balloon-Juicy. So perfect that one could imagine John making fake righty ads himself and pasting them on the site.

    But, they’re real. It’s win-win.

  47. 47.

    Michael D.

    @JenJen:

    Seems like about the dumbest possible place to have a soccer tournament in the middle of summer, for one.

    Not quite. Qatar has developed a zero carbon emissions air conditioning system that will be in place for the Cup.

    Still, I wish the US got it. It’s not that I think we deserve it any more than anyone else. I would really like to just see soccer take off here.

  48. 48.

    Corner Stone

    @LikeableInMyOwnWay: Me from a thread this August:

    I swear to FSM if Rubicon slows down any further we’re going to enter a time paradox. Or the movie The Watchmen.
    Either way we’re boned.
    __
    It feels like Bullet Time in The Matrix series.

    Rubicon

  49. 49.

    The Bobs

    @roshan:

    If the DNA looks pretty much like normal DNA but with the phosphorus replaced by arsenic, it may not have evolved independently. Suppose the organism evolved in an environment that was phosphorus poor but arsenic rich, it may have simply started to substitute the chemically similar arsenic for phosphorus.

    Maybe this will be clear after the press conference.

  50. 50.

    Punchy

    “this is an issue that should be resolved in the new senate, not in the last days of a lame-duck session.” lather, rinse, repeat.

    GREAT! By which time, the tax cuts have expired. Which is all I really want.

  54. 54.

    twiffer

    apparently fable 3 was written by the GOP.

    SPOILERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    turns out the only way to defend your nation, without being independently wealthy, is to oppressively tax the poor, defund all institutes of education, enact child labor laws, ravage the natural resources of your nation and abandon your foreign allies. fuck off, lionhead studios.

  56. 56.

    JenJen

    @Michael D.: Fair enough. Still, though, I don’t see a lot of North Americans making the trip to Qatar. Please tell me you can at least drink there, and then, well, maybe. :-)

    I was just so stoked for hosting it again in the US, and was actually surprised we lost the bid considering all we put into it.

    Honestly, though, I feel worse for the UK. They haven’t hosted since 1966, and that’s just wrong. They gotta be feeling worse about Russia today than I’m feeling about Qatar.

  60. 60.

    Suck It Up!

    @Basilisc:

    I like the idea of reinforcing the fact that Republicans want billionaires to be richer but the reader is going to quickly forget what it is Democrats stand for. Its too long.

  61. 61.

    WyldPirate

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    It seems a rather Pyrrhic victory to me.

    Sure, we get the greedhead Rethugs in the House on record voting for the the rich and against lower 98% of earners. I just see it going no where in the Senate and I don’t see–unless reconciliation can be used–getting 60 votes to invoke cloture.

    Now the game changes if we get reconciliation votes and the Dems can round up 50 votes. I don’t know that that is possible.

  62. 62.

    Cain

    @JenJen:

    OK. I’m pretty hacked off that Qatar beat out the US for the 2022 World Cup. Seems like about the dumbest possible place to have a soccer tournament in the middle of summer, for one.

    Good grief, nobody would come thanks to our crazy visa setup and the intrusive body searches and what not. Even worse, they’d never give any visas to the huge fans like the south americans and central americans and the mexicans, and the indians, and the fujians, and the africans, finally no the canadians!

    Yeah… on the other hand, a lot of people into fetishes would be joining the TSA.

    cain

  65. 65.

    daveNYC

    …do some serious good work with serious conservative policy in the next couple of years.

    And they will, because these days the only serious conservative policy is cutting taxes and punching hippies.

  67. 67.

    PeakVT

    @PeakVT: Ok, definitely bacteria. I thought it would be an archaea because they are usually the critters that are found to be thriving in highly toxic environments.

  68. 68.

    Annelid Gustator

    @Cain: Yeah, you bet! Qatar will welcome with arms wide open all the alcohol swilling rabble who want to come to the WCF! And definitely all the gays! Assuredly, Jews won’t have any hassles!

  73. 73.

    WyldPirate

    @The Bobs:

    Good point, The Bobs.

    It sounds like a lot a premature jocularity to me and trumpeting of results to get grant support for astrobiology.

    It makes a lot of sense that a bacterial species could evolve to incorporate arsenic instead of phosphorus in nucleotides. Arsenic can bind to oxygen. I assume that it can form diester bonds between adjacent nucleotides. Oxidation of the arsenic triesters attached to the nucleotides should release energy to drive the formation of DNA polymers forward. That’s basically the purpose of the phosphate groups attached to the nucleotides.

    I think it is premature to determine that this is an alien life form, especially when it comes from an exotic environment like Mono Lake.

  75. 75.

    Cain

    @Punchy:

    So how will the media spin the fact that Republicans are about to vote against tax cuts? Oh….yeah. By only talking about how the Dems cheated the bill through the House, or some such shit.

    I don’t think you understand. Teabaggers bring in money. That’s why Bristol won third place in DWTS, and why they are looking to get Todd to be on the show. They had huge ratings. Everybody in media is making money off these culture warriors to the detriment of our country. Those fools are getting parted with their money at a furious rate.

    They are the new market. All we need to do now is to somehow group them into a future’s market so that bankers can take advantage of them even further.

    cain

  76. 76.

    BDeevDad

    Greatest tweet ever:

    I wonder if anyone told @SarahPalinUSA that ‘Going Rogue’ is also a British slang term for unprotected anal sex.

  77. 77.

    WyldPirate

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    I’m with you here, OO. I would relish the opportunity to see the Rethugs forcibly made to turn themselves into pretzels for self-fellation purposes to explain their vote in favor of rich people and against the less well-to-do.

  79. 79.

    Brachiator

    @The Grand Panjandrum:

    Three cheers for Speaker Pelosi! Make those bastard show their hand.

    I am loving this stuff. Even the IRS Commissioner is forcing Congress to make a stand, since it’s not just about 2011 taxes, but the ability of the IRS to get the 2010 Tax Year processed:

    Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Douglas Shulman has written to congressional leaders informing them that he has directed the IRS’s technology team to reprogram its computers with the assumption that the Alternative Minimum Tax will be patched by the end of the year.
    __
    Shulman’s letter came in response to a letter sent last month by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont. and ranking Republican member Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, as well as House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Sander Levin, D-Mich., and ranking member Dave Camp, R-Mich. (see Lawmakers Promise to Patch AMT).

    It’s one thing for the Republicans to make threats about stopping the government cold. It’s another thing to deliberately overlook the chaos that would inevitably result.

  80. 80.

    kay

    @Cain:

    That’s why Bristol won third place in DWTS, and why they are looking to get Todd to be on the show.

    DWTS was a huge scandal where I live. People here think the Palin family rigged it.

    It was a lot of fun to listen to. I shamelessly fanned the flames of outrage, asked several follow-up questions, like that.

  81. 81.

    Larry Signor

    @Wildcat12: Thanks for the link. Here is more on Pawlenty and the creep he pardoned:

    Jeremy Giefer served time in jail in 1994 for having sex with a 14-year-old girl. But you wouldn’t know it to look at the record of the man now charged with sexually molesting his daughter more than 250 times over the last eight years.
    That’s because two years ago, Governor Tim Pawlenty, Attorney General Lori Swanson, and then-Chief Justice Eric Magnuson unanimously voted to wipe Giefer’s record clean, granting him a pardon extraordinary.

  83. 83.

    WyldPirate

    @The Bobs:

    I read your article and it is perfectly clear now as I expected.

    For fucks sake. Nothing worse than a bunch of goddamned drama-queen scientists, I keep MSNBC on most of the time and they have been butchering the shit out of the report all morning in relation to the NYT article which is a much more clarifying piece.

    The NASA PI was interviewed on MSNBC this morning and he was pimping the story from a funding standpoint hard.

    When I think about this story in relation to politics, it is a perfect illustration of the advantages the Rethugs have in messaging over the Dems. They can come out in soundbytes with arm-waving hysteics and get Joe SixPack all riled up. But Joe SixPack can’t bother to sit still enough to listen to some dry ten minute explanation refuting the Rethug horseshit lies.

    Damn. We are so fucked as a country. We would be a lot better off with out the goddamned TeeVee and bubbleheaded idiots spouting lies and being “fair and balanced” by lending equal credence to lies v. the truth.

  87. 87.

    Gin & Tonic

    Interesting post over at ZeroHedge about the Madoff bankruptcy trustee going after JPMorgan for $6bn, saying they were complicit in the fraud.

    Interesting sub-text, where the brief apparently credits, by name, six attorneys (presumably associates) for their work on the case. Making some reasonable assumptions about names, five of the six seem to be women.

  89. 89.

    TooManyJens

    So, in the Great Site Redesign of 2010, may I humbly suggest NOT making it so that every paragraph is in a new bar to the right, like this dude?

    http://www.hopstudios.com/nep/unvarnished/

    And yes, it is supposed to scroll way to the right like that. This is the only blog I know of that’s designed to be completely horizontal. There may be others.

    God, I hope not.

  91. 91.

    pragmatism

    @Larry Signor:
    LOLZ. you know what she did was good becaue the great orange boner called it “chickencrap”. and there was much rejoicing. i heart selective outrage.

  94. 94.

    Tim I

    @WyldPirate:

    That’s Salma, for god’s sake. A woman that good looking deserves to have her name spelled correctly.

    Who the hell is Friedrich, anyway?

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