Hey, remember this guy?
'I really believe we are in a great position right now," says Michael Needham, 31-yr-old president of Heritage Action http://t.co/owQf25HXoU
— billmon (@billmon1) October 12, 2013
@billmon1 Says guy who's not running for anything.
— David Waldman (@KagroX) October 12, 2013
If the Teahadists must have a human sacrifice for their obscene rites, much better Michael Needham than all the innocent citizens currently suffering because of the shutdown…
lamh36
Yatsuno
Ahem.
QUACK!!!
That is all.
And fuck the Republicans.
MikeJ
@lamh36: At least Obama’s got enough in the bank to weather the storm.
MikeJ
@Yatsuno: When I remembered it was on, I flipped over and saw 21-14. “Oh, that’s not too bad.” Before I could hit last channel on the remote, 65 yard TD.
Happily, that isn’t the game I care about today. Red Sox start at 4.
raven
My brother is fallin out over this dodger game.
Robert Sneddon
Another bit of the shutdown you don’t see mentioned in the nooz:
A friend who works in the aircraft finance business mentioned that several US carriers have brand-new aircraft sitting in the parking lots of Boeing and Airbus waiting for the FAA to certify them for passenger and freight operations in the US. The planes are bought and paid for, the leases are signed and the monthly payments are coming due and the carriers can’t fly these planes and earn revenue because the FAA inspectors and office staff who would normally certify them are furloughed as “non-essential”.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I think we’ve solved the old riddle, are they crazier than they are stupid, or stoopiter than they are crazy. VA Congressdimwit Morgan Griffith:
From this lackwit to Tom Coburn cutting up a giant cardboard credit card, these morans really have no understanding of economics. They think the world economy is just like the small chain of dry cleaners they inherited from their dad.
raven
@Robert Sneddon: There are three C-!30’s sitting on the runway at Dobbins that belong to Iran. They’ve been there since the Shah was overthrown.
lamh36
@Robert Sneddon: Damnit. I just bought my plane tics to go back and visit my friends in DFW. This darn shutdown betta be over before the first of Nov!!!
raven
@lamh36:
“People get ready
there’s a train a comin. . “
jeffreyw
Next up a message recorded by the NRC, already in progress:
raven
@jeffreyw: Chieu Hoi!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Think when John McCain is Very Seriously scolding Obama tomorrow on one or more Sunday shows, anyone will remember that John Sidney McCain III once publicly declared this man to be his “hero” and his “role model”?
dmsilev
@jeffreyw: I’d love to believe that, but it requires that there’s someone today with the same stature for the GOP that Hirohito had back in 1945. I’m dubious. Rush Limbaugh, perhaps?
raven
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I want to see what he says to Gomert!
gogol's wife
Okay, these NewsMax headlines have to be written by The Onion. “Jack Welch Says President Has Too Much Power.”
Yatsuno
@efgoldman: The Dawgs just have to lose. The actual score isn’t that relevant to me.
@gogol’s wife: Well yeah. Duh. He’s one of THOSE you know. Giving THEM any sort of power is too much.
dmsilev
@gogol’s wife: My current favorite has to be ‘Michael Douglas Lied about Throat Cancer’. Even if that’s true, why exactly should anyone care one way or the other? I’m sure there’s some reason why the lunatics care, but seriously.
MikeJ
@gogol’s wife: CNBC has the same hed. Neutron Jack is quoted as saying “He put Congress in. He did a whole series of things,”
Dee Loralei
I don’t usually watch horror movies but damned if I could turn my head away today as my beloved Sooners were trounced by Texas. Ugggghhhh.
scav
@jeffreyw: That is magnificently, grandiloquently, polysyllabically and absolutely vague. <crackling static> Dooooooooomed by shadowy international and nefarious forces, our heroes . . . .
Yatsuno
@MikeJ: Mizzou won. Your college football interest is about over with I should expect.
KG
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: for the record, I am not related to that congressdimwit, and if I was, I’d have kicked him in the balls at the last family gathering.
raven
@Yatsuno: He’s not talking about the real dawgs.
Sly
@Robert Sneddon:
Meanwhile, my cousin who works for HHS to ensure that Maryland’s SCHIP program is in compliance with the ACA’s expansion (i.e. one of the many things the goal of the shutdown is to destroy), has been busily at work and collecting a paycheck all throughout the shutdown because the money that pays her salary was already appropriated well ahead of time.
Which leads me to…
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
They’re certainly crazy – either clinically or functionally – but they’ll always be more stupid than crazy.
Corner Stone
I love Phineas & Ferb, and that is just that.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
I put a DVR alert up on my blog for a NON Pre-Code movie, but it’s one of my favorites — Val Lewton’s “I Walked With A Zombie,” airing in the early hours of Friday morning.
It kinda-sorta fits my themes because if you watch carefully, you can’t help but notice that the horror underneath the film’s plot is the lingering aftereffects of slavery.
jeffreyw
@dmsilev: I was thinking Obvious Anagram, but Jim DeMented could do it.
Belafon
Has anyone ever heard of hawks flying south as a group (officially known as a cast)? I was outside a store and saw 30-40 together flying together. They are birds, so I wouldn’t put it past them, but I had never seen so many together or flying in one direction.
lamh36
ok, so I’m watching The Matrix Reloaded (i.e. #2) and I gotta say, I could watch the first Matrix film anytime and still be engrossed into the story and be fine. The next 2 movies in the trilogy though, I swear outside of the fight scenes (and they are still bleh compared to the first film) the next 2 films are REALLY boring!
Keith P.
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I love it when people have a sermon running through their head that gets crazier and crazier the more they tell it to themselves, and then actually put it to paper for other people to read it.
MikeJ
@Yatsuno:
Even they don’t really mean much since they started that “border war” nonsense with the KU game.
raven
@Belafon: Like most birds, the hawk migrates in the fall and the spring seasons. Different types of hawks choose separate times in both of the seasons to migrate north or south.
raven
@MikeJ: And ended the one against Illinois.
jacy
@dmsilev:
I’m not 100% positive, but I think it’s due to the fact that Douglas says he developed cancer via performing oral sex on women and contracting HPV. Since HPV can now be prevented by vaccine, you could logically follow that it would also benefit men that everyone be inoculated, and not just slutty women who can’t keep an aspirin between their knees. If men can sexually benefit from the HPV vaccine, then they’d have to change their previous stance on the vaccine, and we all know that’s not going to happen. QED: Michael Douglas is a big fat liberal liar.
Cacti
Michael Wacha is a f**king stud.
Future staff ace, and he was the compensation pick the Cards got after Anaheim signed Pujols to that albatross of a free agent deal.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Yatsuno: You’ll get yours Coug.
ETA: Not a good day for dawgs on either coast.
Hal
@Belafon: Michelle bachmann says the end times are near sooooo
Mark S.
@jacy:
I was gonna guess they confused him with Alec Baldwin or Martin Sheen. But your theory makes more sense.
Belafon
@raven: Thanks. I probably should have looked that up, but I had never seen a migration before, and neither had anyone I mentioned it to.. And I have been around the sun a few times.
@Hal: LOL. Exactly.
jeffreyw
I love the internets.
geg6
Fuck these assholes. Seriously. I’m gonna sit back, watch the Pens and eat crab cakes and drink some lovely wine. Pretend they don’t exist and that they aren’t trying to drown my country in a bathtub. I just can’t take them any more. I will, however, recommend checking out Booman’s fine work today over at Kilgore’s place. He did some good work over there today and I’m not always his biggest fan.
WereBear
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): A good one!
JPL
@Hal: She must be excited about going to meet here maker.
MikeJ
@JPL: I think most end times enthusiasts are most excited about getting to see their enemies suffering. “I TOLD YOU GOD LOVED YOU AND NOW YOU’LL PAY FOR IGNORING ME!”
fuckwit
So let’s think about this.
Rethugs shut down the government temporarily, to hold us hostage.
Their demands: TO SHUT DOWN THE GOVERNMENT PERMANENTLY!
So if we give in to their demands, we get MORE of the pain and suffering we have now. If we don’t give in to their demands, we get MORE of the pain and suffering we have now.
Isn’t this fucking perfect? How is this not genius, crystalline, pure. To have the will… to do THAT.
gelfling545
@Hal: I’m beginning to believe that her decision to retire may have been brought on by pressure from family who may have begun to finally realize that she is really not well, mentally speaking (as she obviously is not). Too bad it didn’t take effect before the last election.
Ken
Says guy who’s not running for anything.
Well you have to admit, for anyone who makes their living by
grifting the rubesfundraising from real Americans appalled at our ongoing slide into a socialist hellhole, this is a great position right now. Hell, he’s probably hoping the Republicans have to cave – it’ll probably double his revenue stream and the mailers practically write themselves.fleeting expletive
Alec Baldwin’s new show on MSNBC, “Up Late” 10:00 p.m. on Fridays, premiered last night. It was really good, I thought. Substantive and thoughtful. He spent almost all the hour talking with Bill DeBlasio (sp?) and you could get a really good sense of what the candidate values and wants to do in office. The set is really nice too. It looks like a diner, just two people seated at a booth. The contrast with Bill Maher’s shoutyfest was quite distinct. I had to give up on Maher’s show with the two idiots on it.
BTW, HBO is running “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” at 8:00 Eastern tonight.
lamh36
One of my dream jobs was/is to work for CDC as a Microbiologist. I even applied a couple of times, I was rejected :-( But now with this shutdown mess, I’m kinda glad I never did get that job.
Snarki, child of Loki
I think that’s an unacceptable stretching of the definition of “human”. Otherwise, please proceed.
MikeJ
Aaaaargh!
Tim Fucking McCarver. It was bad enough to have to watch the Memphis Chicks in Tim McCarver Stadium. Why must he defile the Red Sox game?
Anoniminous
@Belafon:
Swainson’s Hawks migrate down the Rio Grande in groups called “kettles.” Pick the right spot at the right time and you’ll see hundreds in the air.
NotMax
Would like to be able to see the first through tenth drafts of Daniel Larison’s obviously toned down conservative excoriation of a certain Texas senator whose name rhymes with “Lose.”
joel hanes
@Belafon:
hawks flying south as a group (officially known as a cast)?
Interesting. I have always heard a group of migrating hawks called a “kettle”.
I’ve spent a couple glorious Indian-summer afternoons in southern Iowa watching kettles of Red-tailed Hawks migrate. (We were ostensibly duck-hunting, but when the weather’s fine, no ducks fly in the afternoon, and so “hunting” becomes an excuse to laze about in the outdoors swapping stories and bits of each other’s lunch, before napping in the warmth of the sun). Much of the action happens high high up in a blue sky, so if you’re not laying on your back looking at the sky, you’ll probably never notice it.
They arrive from the north in a long descending line, seeeking the base of a rising thermal column, maybe above a sun-warmed dark plowed field (or asphalt parking lot). When they hit the thermal, they circle inside the column of rising warm air, so that the line of hawks wraps in a rough ascending helix. When the leaders reach the top, a mile or two higher, they glide off five or ten miles southward to the next thermal. Raptors can travel hundreds of miles in a day in this fashion, with only the occasional wing flap after they hit the base of the first thermal.
The world is so full of a number of things
That I’m sure we all must be happy as kings
mainmati
Spouse works for the USFS International Programs and is furloughed. She supervises all of Asia and the Pacific and so this is a huge fk-up for foreign relations and previously programmed activities. There are a lot of frustrated, dedicated people doing good work that are being sidelined by idiots.
Steeplejack
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
Er, that’s actually going to be on at 2:15 a.m. EDT Saturday the 19th. The TCM schedule is a little weird in that the “day” starts at 6:00 a.m.
That said, that is one of my favorite movies! Slightly dopey title, but well worth watching. And not only Val Lewton but Jacques Tourneur directing. He is my favorite second-tier director, I think. He also did Out of the Past, my all-time favorite film noir.
mdblanche
I somehow doubt that the GOP can successfully persuade anybody outside their bubble that a junior think tank staffer with 0% name recognition is the official scapegoat for almost (fingers crossed) destroying the economy. I’m not saying they wouldn’t try, I’m just saying they wouldn’t succeed.
Scott S.
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): As far as I’m concerned, there are no bad Val Lewton movies.
raven
@joel hanes: We saw a huge bunch of birds circling up on the Blue Ridge Parkway last weekend but I’m pretty sure they were buzzards.
joel hanes
@gelfling545:
Michele has always said stuff as crazy as that. The press didn’t used to notice.
Bachmann retired under the pressure of ethics investigations. The chair of her Iowa election committee has just been booted from the Iowa Senate, and may face felony charges. Similar actions are or were pending in Washington DC and in Minnesota.
Like so many Republicans, she and part of her staff seem to have felt that the rules didn’t apply to them because her cause was just.
JPL
@mainmati: Cruz feels your pain.
joel hanes
@raven:
I’m pretty sure they were buzzards.
Dad taught me the heuristic to tell the difference at long distances:
To a first approximation, vultures and condors (which Americans tend to call buzzards) soar with wings in a shallow V, with the tips of the wings noticeably higher than the body. Sometimes you can see that the head is the lowest part. Buteos and eagles soar “flat”, with wings, head, and body all in a plane.
Roger Moore
@joel hanes:
Her retirement might also have something to do with her barely winning the last election. Retiring now lets her pretend she’s leaving of her own will rather than being publicly rejected in 2014.
WereBear
@Steeplejack: Out of the Past is a keeper.
For sheer wildness, the semi-noir His Kind of Woman has, well, everything. It does not take itself seriously, but has an awesome cast, fun story, and turns up on TCM now and again.
PsiFighter37
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Any bets on how much drool accumulated on the floor while he wrote this?
schrodinger's cat
More than the true believers its the both sides do it mediabots and the idiots who take them at face value that make me mad.
Frankensteinbeck
@Ken:
Note that the rubes in this case are the Koch Brothers, the biggest marks in the con artist field.
Rob
It’s nice to read about the migrating hawks. On a nice day last month I went to a site where a hawk migration count is done every fall and saw a thousand Broad-winged Hawks stream by in an hour. I’ve never managed to catch such a large aggregation before.
It’s been too wet here recently to do any bird-watching, though I did see a vulture over the interstate today during a lull in the rain. I suspect that it hadn’t flown since Wednesday or even Tuesday, as the clouds and rain moved in on the former day.
I’m on a government contract (working from home) and was assigned two weeks of work on the day of the shutdown. I have no idea when I will be paid for that work, or for my work in the last half of September. Fortunately my partner works for the private sector and makes more than I do; still, we are tightening our belts. The Republican intransigence doesn’t look set to end any time soon so I am going to look at other jobs soon. It is very upsetting, putting it mildly.
Liberty60
@mdblanche:
Yeah, I don’t think so either- once the GOP collapses and ends up funding Obamacare and the rest of government, will begin the Redstate “Stabbed In The Back!!1!” meme.
I put my money on Boehner of course, but McConnell, McCain and Graham are on the short list.
cckids
@NotMax:
Probably went something like “fuck you, you fucking fuck.”
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@jeffreyw: Wow. That just sucked up an hour of my life. Philosophy cartoons. Who knew?
? Martin
Heritage is in a great position. They’re raising millions. Needham is probably siphoning off a good percentage.
magurakurin
@fuckwit:
“give me 60 men like that in the Senate…and our troubles here would be over very quickly…”
Pete
Who is billmon? And why does AL quote him/her in every other post? Just wondering..
dmbeaster
@Pete:
Famous blogger from the early days. Was at Kos and had his own blog. Then retired for a while, but now writes more frequently — particularly tweets.
andy
@Belafon: I don’t think hawks are social more than they just happen to be going the same way at the same time. There are certain areas where they like to pick up thermals (like Hawk Ridge in Duluth MN), so naturally they would tend to bunch up.
http://samcook.areavoices.com/2010/09/09/broadwings-beginning-to-build-at-hawk-ridge/
http://www.hawkridge.org/visit/visit.html
barbequebob
@Anoniminous:
ditto broad-winged hawks on the east coast
Pete
@dmbeaster:
Thanks
chopper
as a Jew, I inherently distrust anyone whose last name is “Need Ham”. that is all.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Steeplejack:
Thanks, corrected. That’s what I get for posting from my iPhone in an airport.
@Scott S.:
“The Ghost Ship” probably comes closest to being bad, but even that has its moments.
Tourneur fans should catch “Night of the Demon” (aka “Curse of the Demon”), which is Tourneur’s post-RKO homage to Lewton. And anyone who hasn’t seen Robert Wise’s “The Haunting” is dead to me.
Lurker
@Hal:
Yeah! HER endtime.