Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

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

You cannot shame the shameless.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

The GOP is a fucking disgrace.

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

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

Hot air and ill-informed banter

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

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

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

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

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

Nothing worth doing is easy.

I really should read my own blog.

A lot of Dems talk about what the media tells them to talk about. Not helpful.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

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Open thread

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Among the negative aspects of waking up every few hours to feed a baby, you find yourself more likely to send poorly thought out emails or nod off and drive into a tree. It could be pure luck that the car and my reputation are still intact. At least as intact as they were before the baby*. Knock on wood.

On the upside, having your dreams interrupted means that you remember more of them. From this I have learned that I have strange dreams. Take last night. I was in a group from GI Joes who met some leaders from COBRA at an airport for some sort of board meeting and a presentation by I don’t remember who, maybe one of the red vipers who fly the little Terrordrome planes. For some reason I arrive late in the meeting room and take an open chair at the table between some young women who work for COBRA. They give me side eye while another young woman walks up and tells me that she was sitting there. Not wanting to make a diplomatic incident out of it, I get up and then find out that it was the LAST. CHAIR. AT. THE. TABLE. The overflow seating seems to be a couch with some teenagers on it. WTF, I say, I AM WOLVERINE, because apparently I am, and YOU DO NOT SEAT WOLVERINE ON A COUCH WITH JUSTIN BIEBER AND THE INTERNS. On top of that, I mutter to some other Joes a little too loud, it is ridiculous that COBRA should give plum seating to the typing pool. This seemed unfair and a little misogynistic as they most likely had important jobs at COBRA and just like to sit together, but Wolverine is an old guy and deserves a little slack for that stuff.

Next I remember Julia Roberts, who apparently also works for GI Joe, in her office trying to talk the same young woman out of her life of crime. Look at you, Roberts says, just out of college and working for COBRA. Is that what you want to do with your life? Funding terrorism? Dealing guns? Spreading evil? Cooking me pot? In response the young woman pulls out a bag of brownies and Roberts gives her ten bucks. Then the baby woke me up.

Chat about anything, including but not limited to what Freudian, Jungian and/or New Age dream interpretation methods would say about my subconscious.

(*) We have a garage in an alley which makes backing straight out not an option. Instead you have to turn an awkwardly tight arc while pulling in or backing out. Anyhow SOMEone, and I am not pointing any fingers, keeps dinging our front bumper on the side of the garage door during the entry/exit maneuver and blames it on me even though there are two of us and I am pretty sure I cannot remember ever having done that.

Reader Interactions

41Comments

  1. 1.

    Laertes

    As a general rule, there’s nothing in the world more boring than someone else’s dreams.

    You are, apparently, the one exception to that rule. That was awesome.

  2. 2.

    Boudica

    Definitely worried about the loss of your power and stature to younger people, especially women, brought on by the birth of a daughter who will someday surpass and replace you…..

  3. 3.

    Litlebritdifrnt

    We got the bill in for my husband’s air lift from Columbus County Hospital to New Hanover Regional. $33,700.00. I hate the health system in this fucking country I truly do. $34K because someone couldn’t read a fucking EKG correctly and panicked.

  4. 4.

    Ben Cisco

    Puppet Pal Pat McCrory has previously stated that the two 24yo campaign workers who received senior government positions were the most qualified for the jobs. Oops.

  6. 6.

    Belafon

    If I were high enough up to make decisions, I would require that alleys where houses have been built with the garage in back must be two lanes wide. You could narrow them at the ends in order to keep them from being used as roads, but not only would it reduce the issues you are talking about, it would probably cause more people park in their driveway rather than on the street as they do in my neighborhood. The way it is right now, a lot of the main roads, including the one leading into my neighborhood, are essentially one lane wide.

  7. 7.

    Citizen_X

    That, Tim, is much more realistic than the usual Syria discussion downstairs, where a strike against Asaad will either a) work, or b) trigger World War III.

  8. 8.

    R-Jud

    I’ve always remembered my dreams. The other night I dreamt that I was directing my cousin in a ketchup commercial, but the edit had to be reviewed by the House Ways and Means committee. They argued over it to the point where I was so frustrated that I ran out the door, tearing off my clothes, and dove into a swimming pool. Then hundreds of kittens were swimming under the water with me, in a sort of Disney-style musical number.

    This was before I had any heavy pain meds to hand, mind you.

    ETA: Sweet Jesus, LilBrit. That blows. Is that your out-of-pocket cost, or does the insurer pick up some of that?

  9. 9.

    ruemara

    @Litlebritdifrnt: Holy shit. Is this with or without coverage?

    Tim, I have to give you props for a hell of a dream. If I dream, lately, I don’t recall. It’s just black from start to finish.

  15. 15.

    Litlebritdifrnt

    @R-Jud: @ruemara:

    Sorry missed your comments. Yes he has State Employees Health Insurance so hopefully it will be covered. Have no idea what the coo-pays and deductibles are going to be on it though.

  16. 16.

    Original Lee

    @Litlebritdifrnt: About 10 years ago, a friend was severely injured during a sporting event and had to be medevac’d to the regional trauma center straight from the field. Severely injured means, almost every bone on the right side of the body and some bones on the left side were broken, plus a concussion. The insurance company challenged the necessity of the medevac and refused to pay for any of it for TWO YEARS – they kept insisting that because the accident occurred on a Saturday and because the medevac unit and the hospital were not in network, my friend was responsible for 2/3 the cost.

    Still a ridiculous amount of money if you compare it to a charter flight for the same distance, though.

  18. 18.

    SiubhanDuinne

    Thanks for the open thread. I posted in an old dead one, and will repeat here, that I am saddened today to read that the great Irish poet (one of the best poets of the twentieth century, period), Seamus Heaney, has died at age 74. R.I.P. Yeats, Shaw, Joyce, Beckett, Heaney — quite the green pantheon.

  19. 19.

    Tom Levenson

    I would not wish to be cavalier about your analysis, but it is clear even before our first session that your mind does not derive from the common clay.

  20. 20.

    Amir Khalid

    Saw Kick Ass 2 today. I saw that Kick Ass still wears yellow work boots with his rather dorky outfit. Then I remembered, I happened to be wearing a very similar pair of yellow work boots myself. A somewhat uncomfortable moment.

    As for the movie, it’s way better than the 29% critics’ rating it got on Rotten Tomatoes. The worst you could say about it is that the story beats are predictable and the visuals rather bloody. But hey, this is a comic book movie, and they don’t all have to be as gloomy and self-serious as the Dark Knight Trilogy. This is perfectly good successor to the first one, which I liked better than the Thor movie.

    @Litlebritdifrnt:
    Glad to hear you won’t be on the hook for all of that US$34k.

  21. 21.

    Ben Cisco

    @Litlebritdifrnt: Ugh. Sorry to hear that.

    What kills me about it is that when the “conservatives” are challenged about this, their responses range from:

    “Maybe they WERE the best qualified!” – at 24, haven’t been on the planet long enough for this to be true.

    “Democrats did the same thing!” – clearly a lie, but even if true, would’ve been something they would have SCREAMED about; now…crickets.

    “The Republicans are doing what WE THE MAJORITY sent them there to do!” – again, clearly garbage, but they run with this b/c Tribe Uber Alles.

  22. 22.

    Crashman06

    I had a dream I was being electrocuted last night. I woke up moaning, though thankfully I didn’t wake up the 3 month old. I much prefer your dream.

  24. 24.

    MikeJ

    @Litlebritdifrnt: $33k for an airlift? When my dad had a heart attack, the hospital lost power in the middle of the cardiac catch procedure. The ground based ambulance ride five miles to another hospital was $15,000.

  26. 26.

    catclub

    @SiubhanDuinne: Ireland and Mississippi have about the same population and economic size. They also both have outsized literary contributions to the world.

    Also, remember all the upset about Libya? It has 6 Million people, not as many as North Carolina (9 million).
    Greece, destroyer of the European Economy? 11 Million.

  28. 28.

    danielx

    Could be worse….when we brought the daughter unit home from the hospital, she was on a heart/respiration monitor with the little adhesive patches attached to her chest. Now, those monitors are 1) VERY sensitive and 2) have an alarm sound that would raise a dead person out of a coffin; that’s their purpose. They also have an off button to silence the alarm and a battery backup so that if the power fails the monitor will still work for some hours. We discovered that (unfortunately for us) the unit sent home with us had a defective off button…the alarm sounds at 2 am (and it goes off like a goddamn tornado siren), and the off button does not work.

    Pitch dark, the alarm is screaming, the kidlet is screaming, the wife is screaming, I’m trying to first find the light switch, hitting the off button (total fail), yanking the plug…and then trying to find a screwdriver and unscrew this little plastic plate so I can pull the backup battery, which was the only way to silence that fucking alarm without smashing the unit with a hammer or hurling it through the window. All while emitting a stream of blasphemy and obscenity that would have impressed a Marine sergeant, naturally. No more sleep that night for anyone except the baby, and we couldn’t get a new monitor for two days.

    Good times.

  32. 32.

    JGabriel

    New York Times:

    Seamus Heaney, a widely celebrated Irish poet who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995, died at a hospital in Dublin on Friday after a short illness, according to a statement issued on behalf of his family. He was 74.

    Excerpts from W.H Auden’s In Memory of William Butler Yeats

    I.

    … Far from his illness
    The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
    The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
    By mourning tongues
    The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

    But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
    An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
    The provinces of his body revolted,
    The squares of his mind were empty,
    Silence invaded the suburbs,
    The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

    Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
    And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
    To find his happiness in another kind of wood
    And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
    The words of a dead man
    Are modified in the guts of the living.

    But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
    When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
    And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
    And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
    A few thousand will think of this day
    As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual. …

    II.

    … Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
    Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
    For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
    In the valley of its making where executives
    Would never want to tamper, flows on south
    From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
    Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
    A way of happening, a mouth

    III.

    … In the nightmare of the dark
    All the dogs of Europe bark,
    And the living nations wait,
    Each sequestered in its hate;

    Intellectual disgrace
    Stares from every human face,
    And the seas of pity lie
    Locked and frozen in each eye.

    Follow, poet, follow right
    To the bottom of the night,
    With your unconstraining voice
    Still persuade us to rejoice.

    With the farming of a verse
    Make a vineyard of the curse,
    Sing of human unsuccess
    In a rapture of distress.

    In the deserts of the heart
    Let the healing fountains start,
    In the prison of his days
    Teach the free man how to praise.

    Rest in peace, Seamus Heaney (April 13, 1939 – August 30, 2013).

    .

  40. 40.

    Scamp Dog

    @SiubhanDuinne: I’ve read his translation of Beowulf, the edition with his translation on the right page and the original Old English on the left page. Cool stuff, I never made it through any of the other translations. I later bought the trade paperback version that had pictures of artifacts from that era, scenery from the areas (or nearby) of the action, artwork from various eras on the left pages instead of the Old English. I’ll have to re-read it again, to commemorate the man.

  41. 41.

    Birthmarker

    With my younger one I had a difficult delivery during a bitter cold spell. (6 degrees is cold in Bama.). My mother who came to help had serious health problems of her own, and the 6 day old baby had chronic diarrhea.

    The older child had been playing with the flashlight earlier in the day, then after dark the power went out. We lived in a rural area and it was like a blanket had been thrown over the house. I crawled around on the floor (did I mention the new baby weighed almost 10 pounds at birth?) found the flash light parts, put it together, and it emitted a weak light. There we sat til my husband came home and decided the flashlight needed a good slap into the palm of his hand. That killed the flashlight.

    I came unglued. i mean I am talking exorcist with my head spinning around. This was witnessed by a neighbor who had wandered over to see if we were ok.

    Somehow all of us, sick baby, sick older lady, a toddler, and a husband I wasn’t speaking to, made it to the La Quinta. We stayed up all night with the sick child and the main thing I remember was that the carpet in the hotel seemed to be a plastic astroturf type material and was green.

    I carry a prejudice toward La Quinta to this day.

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