Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

I didn’t have alien invasion on my 2023 BINGO card.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

After roe, women are no longer free.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

Hot air and ill-informed banter

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

I’m pretty sure there’s only one Jack Smith.

Today’s GOP: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

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

The revolution will be supervised.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

Happy indictment week to all who celebrate!

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Archives for May 16, 2013

I Don’t Understand

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I honestly do not understand why the NHL is not popular than it is. I mean, I absolutely love the sports I played (soccer, lacrosse, etc.), I love sport I didn’t play (college basketball- the NBA is just ten pounds of suck) and I am near fanatical about the NFL, but hands down, the best sport in my view is playoff hockey in the NHL. I know many of you do not feel the same way, but if there was playoff hockey every night of the year, I would never watch another Steelers game, despite how much I love them.

But NHL playoff hockey is that good, and I do not understand why more people don’t get it. I will watch every damned game (and, consistent with these season, will, as I watched every single Pens regular season game and have watched every playoff game played to date).

So why do you all not like it?

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Hands Down, the Worst 200 Bucks I Have Ever Spent

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Because I have two dogs who love cat food I have basically surrendered my dining room table to Tunch’s food bowl, because the dogs can not reach it. I’ve watched him try to psych himself up and jump up to the table, which he can still reach, but I felt bad for all the effort my 11 year old life partner was going through. So I spent a couple hundred bucks on a cat tower for Tunch, and moved his food there. He responded by jumping up on the table where his food normal was, reached over, and knocked his bowl off the cat tower so the dogs could eat his food.

Regardless, I still love him, and many of you have asked for Tunch pics, so here is an action shot of him using his cat tower:

worthlessprick

Asshole. That seriously is the closest he has ever been to HIS GOD DAMNED CAT TOWER. Also, too:

prick

I guess just the proximity to the concept of climbing shit tired him out.

There you go. The most awesome and simultaneously worthless fucking cat on the planet.

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Open Thread: Trolls, You Could Write A Book About Trolls…

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And, per the Stranger‘s book reviewer, Paul Constant, someone has:

I saw the weakest minds of my occupation destroyed by blog comments, hate-eating hysterical shivering, dragging themselves through message boards at dawn looking for a troll to fight. I started writing professionally about eight years ago, just as comments became less a curiosity and more a given. But many of the journalists I met who’d been in the business before the arrival of comments could already become flushed with outrage about the very existence of reader feedback. Their faces would get red and they’d scream—and, yes, sometimes sob—about every mean thing someone left in the wide-open space below their stories….

When novelist and poet Travis Nichols worked for the Poetry Foundation, one of his jobs was to oversee a project in which comments were allowed on poetryfoundation.org. Perhaps the foundation expected an Athenian discourse about the nature of poetry and art in the digital age. And I’m sure the comment threads inspired some of that. But they also fomented a slew of bullies, off-topic comments, conspiracy theories, ax-grinding, and treatises on the sad state of American poetry. In an interview with Paul Killebrew, Nichols admitted that the negative comments made him feel “deeply, deeply bonkers for a few months, largely because I took a lot of the rote online bullying personally.” The comment section was soon scrapped entirely, which caused several angry commenters to create their own sites accusing Nichols of fascism.

And now, finally, Nichols gets his revenge, in The More You Ignore Me (Coffee House Press, $15.95), a novel in the form of one ridiculously long blog comment posted by our narrator, known only as linksys181. He’s recently been banned from a wedding blog (for a young couple he has never met) for excessive trolling, and he’s taking one last opportunity, on an unrelated blog called BrendaCooking Fun.com in response to an unrelated comment from someone called cookiekitty7, to justify his online existence…

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Manly Men Update

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From the comments:

Frankly, I’ve found almost without exception, that Conservatives bark is worse than their bit. If you confront them in person or show the slightest bit of backbone during an argument about politics they turn into a giant pussy! I also truly believe that is part of the explanation for their gun fetish. To compensate for their feelings of inadequacy and because they are fearful little bunny rabbits trapped in a mans body.

From a facebook escapade earlier today with an old friend who now works at RAND and apparently is now a full-fledged wingnut:

Old friend who works at RAND posted the following: “Things you will never hear: I was born at Planned Parenthood.”

I challenged him and pointed out that abortion is one of the minor aspects of PP and lots of lives were saved because of it. My quote was actually- “Something else you will never hear. Poor women thanking middle-aged white men at RAND for helping them have access to pap smears, birth control, prenatal care, breasts exams, and lot of other vital services.”

He responded: “My point was that no new life has ever come from Planned Parenthood.”

My response: “Your point is, well, wrong. Plenty of new lives have occurred because of Planned Parenthood. Women who would have died of uterine cancer or breast cancer, women who otherwise had no access to pre-natal care, women who would have died from STD’s or other issues or lost their reproductive abilities, and so forth, but were saved by access to health care at PP are every single day maturing, becoming more financially secure, and going on to have happy lives as mothers. Because of the care they received at PP.

Quite simply, you have no idea what you are talking about. This is just right wing bullshit you are regurgitating, and you’ve got some jackass from Clear Channel backing you up. That alone should be cause for some reflection.

And what about so-called ‘old life,’ btw. You know, the people who already exist and who are not some semi-meiotic glob of cells (my bad- in rightwing parlance that is a BABY)? Seriously, Joe. I thought you folks at Rand were quants and not prone to speaking out of your hindquarters.”

He deleted my comment, unfriended me, and blocked me. Way to be.

Nothing scares wingnuts more than someone willing to confront them with actual facts to counter their bullshit self-constructed mythology. It terrifies them. They can not even counter with facts, they just run away and hide.

There is a reason that DougJ refers to Pale Fire a great deal and why we talk about epistemic closure and why these guys need their own news channels and papers, because anything that confronts their artificial bullshit reality really scares the shit out of them. All they have is regurgitating bullshit, and when you point that out, they freak out. They have their own language, their own reality, and anything else just scares them pantsless.

And this can not be repeated enough- this is allegedly a quant at RAND who deals with facts and makes policy recommendations to the government. And our news media will just barf up every news release of their alleged studies, because the puke funnel is alive and well.

My only regret is that I was blocked before I could get this guy’s deep thoughts on ACORN and Benghazi.

Our entire establishment is right wing, venal, and stupid. And proud of it.

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The Manly Men of the Right

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This should be fun:

Men who are physically strong are more likely to take a right wing political stance, while weaker men are inclined to support the welfare state, according to a new study.

Researchers discovered political motivations may have evolutionary links to physical strength.

Men’s upper-body strength predicts their political opinions on economic redistribution, according to the research.

And as we learned in 2012, Nate Silver has a lispy effeminate voice, so his stats couldn’t possibly be right. Also too:

Kevin-Williamson

I had a genuinely new experience at the theater tonight: I was thrown out.

The show was Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, which was quite good and which I recommend. The audience, on the other hand, was horrible — talking, using their phones, and making a general nuisance of themselves. It was bad enough that I seriously considered leaving during the intermission, something I’ve not done before. The main offenders were two parties of women of a certain age, the sad sort with too much makeup and too-high heels, and insufficient attention span for following a two-hour musical. But my date spoke with the theater management during the intermission, and they apologetically assured us that the situation would be remedied.

It was not. The lady seated to my immediate right (very close quarters on bench seating) was fairly insistent about using her phone. I asked her to turn it off. She answered: “So don’t look.” I asked her whether I had missed something during the very pointed announcements to please turn off your phones, perhaps a special exemption granted for her. She suggested that I should mind my own business.

So I minded my own business by utilizing my famously feline agility to deftly snatch the phone out of her hand and toss it across the room, where it would do no more damage. She slapped me and stormed away to seek managerial succor. Eventually, I was visited by a black-suited agent of order, who asked whether he might have a word.

Let the masculinity of that salmon shirt and scarlet kerchief wash over you while you wonder what is wrong with America when a dominant conservative male can’t slap a bitch around during a showing of Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812.

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Thursday Evening Open Thread

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(Narration mildly NSFW)

Speaking of spiky yet oddly lovable primitive predators from before the dawn of time, Dave Weigel reports “Witness the Devastating Impact the Benghazi Story Has Had on Hillary Clinton’s Poll Numbers“:

Public Policy Polling has come out with some of the more trollish-yet-useful polls of the 2016 race. (By definition, any 2016 poll conducted in 2013 is trollish.) Because they always put a ballot test in the questionnaire, PPP’s robots get a pretty lean, accurate measure of what people think of the candidates as candidates, not as famous people….

No wonder that, as Dan Amira reports in NYMag, “Mitt Romney’s Chief Strategist Thinks Hillary Clinton Would Lose 2016 Democratic Nomination“. (Or at least, he’s willing to say that to the National Review.)

***********
Apart from prodding the h8terz, what’s on the agenda for the evening?

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