Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

In my day, never was longer.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

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

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

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

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

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

A last alliance of elves and men. also pet photos.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

The revolution will be supervised.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

… pundit janitors mopping up after the GOP

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

The republican caucus is already covering themselves with something, and it’s not glory.

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

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

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Archives for April 2011

Two thoughts on the big day

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1. Events like this should be like the World Cup of streaking, and yet the whole thing went off without a hitch. I expected better of the Brits.

2. Nobody thinks about strategic alliances anymore. It seems to me that England gains little from marrying a figurehead to some other fruit of English nobility, an event about as fairytale as the Prince choosing one of Cinderella’s stepsisters. The world is an unpredictable place. England might do well to stabilize its key alliances and marry into some other inbred clan that passes national power from one useless generation to the next. I suggest Barbara.

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Open Thread: Not Laughing with You, Donald

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(Jeff Danziger’s website)

Since the election of Barack Obama, the Republican Party has proved that one of its central intellectual arguments was right all along. It has long claimed that evolution is a myth believed in only by whiny liberals – and it turns out it was on to something. Every six months, the party venerates a new hero, and each time it is somebody further back on the evolutionary scale.
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Sarah Palin told cheering rallies that her message to the world was: “We’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the American way!” – but that wasn’t enough. So the party found Michele Bachmann, who said darkly it was an “interesting coincidence” that swine flu only breaks out under Democratic presidents, claims the message of The Lion King is “I’m better at what I do because I’m gay”, and argues “there isn’t even one study that can be produced that shows carbon dioxide is a harmful gas.”
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That wasn’t enough. I half-expected the next contender to be a lung-fish draped in the Stars and Stripes. But it wasn’t anything so sophisticated. Enter stage (far) right Donald Trump, the bewigged billionaire who has filled America with phallic symbols and plastered his name across more surfaces than the average Central Asian dictator. CNN’s polling suggests he is the most popular candidate among Republican voters. It’s not hard to see why. Trump is every trend in Republican politics over the past 35 years taken to its logical conclusion. He is the Republican id, finally entirely unleashed from all restraint and all reality…

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I Guess This Is Proof Enough

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Yesterday, Rand Paul demanded that Donald Trump prove he is a Republican. I think we have found all the proof we need that he is, in fact, a member of the GOP:

During a TV interview Tuesday morning, Trump–who spent his high school years enrolled at the New York Military Academy–said, “I actually got lucky because I had a very high draft number. I’ll never forget, that was an amazing period of time in my life.”

He went on to recall, “I was going to the Wharton School of Finance, and I was watching as they did the draft numbers and I got a very, very high number and those numbers never got up to.” The word “deferment” was not mentioned by Trump during his chat with the morning show hosts on WNYW, the Fox affiliate in New York City.

However, Selective Service records reveal that Trump, the fortunate son of a multimillionaire real estate baron, took repeated steps to avoid serving in Vietnam.

By the time his number (356) was drawn during the December 1, 1969 draft lottery, Trump had already received four student deferments and a medical deferment, according to military records on file with the National Archives and Records Administration. An extract of Trump’s Selective Classification record, seen here, was provided in response to a TSG records request.

In fact, the December 1969 draft lottery occurred about 18 months after Trump graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied business at the Wharton School. So, while claiming that he would “never forget” being at Wharton watching the draft numbers being drawn, the 64-year-old Trump seems to have misremembered, as candidates are fond of saying.

The racist draft-dodging son of a millionaire. What more proof do you need?

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Open Thread

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I kind of like the Royal Wedding- the pageantry of it all is kind of fun, and it all seems kind of harmless given that they have no real authority. It is certainly no worse than our unofficial American royalty of Paris Hilton and the various political dynasties that pop up from time to time. I’ll take a Kate Middleton and Prince William over the Bush clan any day of the week. Plus, I find Kate to be absolutely stunning- just poised and confident and looking like she is having a lot of fun. She needs to eat a sandwich though, now that the wedding is over.

My mother also got to see her favorite thing, too, which is everyone singing God Save the Queen while the Queen just stands there silent.

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Let’s Cut the Crap on Trump

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Here’s the nut of Trump’s problem:

Trump hasn’t disclosed his financial documents
Questions over Trump’s net worth have persisted for years and his refusal to reveal actual figures in the past is one reason some believe he’ll never run for president, since to register as a candidate involves extensive financial disclosures. Trump sought to tamp down such criticism by pledging to release his financial documents if President Obama released his long-form birth certificate. The president did just that Wednesday. Trump responded by saying he’ll release his financial documents “at the appropriate time.”

There’s no “appropriate” time for Trump to release his financial documents, because most of what Trump says on any topic on any given day is a baldfaced lie, and his favorite topic is the vastness of his riches.  His whole faux empire of rented helicopters and jets, over-leveraged hotels and fake reality shows is built on an illusion of fabulous wealth.  Filing the disclosures required to run for President would show once and for all that he’s miles from being a billionaire, has filed for bankruptcy numerous times, and that the “art” of his deals is that he gets to be the face for other people’s money.

Trump may or may not announce a run for President, but he will certainly not file the paperwork required for a real run for the office.  He knows that the clickslaves in the press who are slavering over his current freakshow are aching to garner more precious hits by mining his financial documents.   And he knows that this time he can’t file a nuisance lawsuit when reporters prove that he’s a garden variety millionaire instead of the $6 billion dollar man he claims to be.

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Beam Me Up, Scotty

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Today, the eyes of the world will be drawn to a momentous and history-making occasion…

Shortly before 4 p.m., all eyes will turn toward the Kennedy Space Center, 12 miles east across the wide expanse of the Indian River Lagoon. There, at Launch Pad 39A, if the weather allows, the shuttle Endeavour will thunder into the sky on a pedestal of flame, carrying six astronauts on a two-week mission to the International Space Station…
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Some of the interest in the Endeavour mission is no doubt because of the drama involving its commander, Capt. Mark E. Kelly, whose wife, Representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona, was gravely wounded in a shooting in January. She is here to watch the launching. And some of it is no doubt because of an anticipated visit by President Obama.
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But the main draw is the fact that after this liftoff, and the launching of the Atlantis in two months, there will be no more space shuttle voyages. After three decades, the program has just about reached the end of the line.
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“You’re not going to see another one — this is going to be it,” said Truman Scarborough, who was Titusville’s mayor in the 1980s and served as a Brevard County commissioner for 20 years.
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Mr. Scarborough and others said that for the past three or four launchings, the crowds have been getting larger as the program nears its end. Officials were forecasting perhaps a million or more for the Atlantis launch, a crowd that would rival the glory days of the space program, when a mammoth Saturn V rocket propelled the Apollo 11 astronauts toward the moon.

(What, you thought I cared about the royal wedding?)

I’m not even a big fan of the space shuttle — as a publicity stunt, it’s mostly been a distraction and a waste of precious funds that could’ve gone into real space science — but this is a good article about the end of one more version of the American Dream. Back in the 1970s, “we” were young and naive enough to believe that boldly going where no man had gone before would open up new opportunities, not just ‘new frontiers’ to despoil once we’d crapped up the home planet beyond repair, but new chances for African-American women and (closeted) gay Asian men and half-breed aliens to move into brave new worlds that had formerly been the sole domain of crew-cut white guys.

Especially since, per the Washington Post, we’re shutting down SETI, too:

The SETI Institute has put its $50 million Allen Telescope Array (ATA) into hibernation, effectively shelving its search for extraterrestrial life.
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In an e-mail sent this past Friday to ATA private donors, SETI Institute CEO Tom Pierson said there was a shortage of $5 million needed to fund the operation of the giant radio dishes that search the universe for signals from deep space. Starting this week, operations of the Hat Creek Radio Observatory north of San Francisco, where the ATA is located, will be suspended, and the 42 dishes will be put into hibernation.
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Scientists and astronomers said the timing was disastrous, as the Kepler telescope had recently identified 1,235 possible new planets, many of which could be similar to Earth in size and habitability…
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SETI has set up a page where people can donate to try to save the ATA here.

More possibilities than ever before that we’re not alone, and we’re letting the utilities be shut off for non-payment. Maybe we’re just embarrassed to have anyone see what a dump we’ve made of this lovely little blue marble.

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