Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Everybody saw this coming.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

Roe isn’t about choice, it’s about freedom.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

Innocent people don’t delay justice.

Bark louder, little dog.

The GOP couldn’t organize an orgy in a whorehouse with a fist full of 50s.

Republicans don’t trust women.

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

Come on, man.

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

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

This year has been the longest three days of putin’s life.

He really is that stupid.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

Consistently wrong since 2002

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

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

Take your GOP plan out of the witness protection program.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

White supremacy is terrorism.

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47Comments

  4. 4.

    rikyrah

    Black voters were a big reason McAuliffe won in Virginia

    By NBC’s Domenico Montanaro

    Democrat Terry McAuliffe lost white voters to Republican Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli by 20 points in the Virginia governor’s race, 56-36 percent.

    But McAuliffe still won the election by 3 points, 48-45 percent. How is that possible when more than seven-in-10 (72 percent) of Virginia voters Tuesday were white?

    Simple: Black voters.

    McAuliffe won black voters by a 90-8 percent margin, a similar spread to the 93-6 percent President Barack Obama ran up in the 2012 presidential election in the Old Dominion.

    Black voters also voted at a similar clip to the 2012 election. They made up 20 percent of voters, or one of every five people who went to the polls. That’s exactly the percentage of the electorate black voters made up for Obama in 2012 in Virginia.

    What’s more, for all the discussion of women, the gender gap, and the millions of dollars in ads McAuliffe ran in Northern Virginia targeting women on the issue of abortion, it was really black women specifically that fueled that gap.

    McAuliffe won women overall by a 51-42 percent margin. But he lost white women by 16 points (54-38 percent) and won black women by an astonishing 91-7 percent spread. They made up 11 percent of all Virginia voters. Black men voted at a similar margin as women, 90-9 percent, and made up a similar percentage of the electorate, 9 percent.

    http://firstread.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/11/06/21335555-black-voters-were-a-big-reason-mcauliffe-won-in-virginia

  5. 5.

    Aji

    ShelterBox.

    After the Haiti quake, I and a bunch of other folks at the GOS raised a ton of $$ for them. They provide, in one box and tailored specifically for the area/culture/catastrophic need, weatherproof shelter for a large family, a way to make existing water potable, means for preparing hot meals in these kinds of conditions, and comfort toys for kids, among a whole bunch of other necessary items. I don’t recommend very many large orgs like this because IME too many of them are about the org and not the people they’re allegedly trying to help, but from what I’ve seen, this one does it right, all over the world.

  6. 6.

    sparrow

    @rikyrah: This is not to counter your point about black women, which is very interesting. But yesterday I was in a coffeeshop and overheard three young black women in line discussing politics, and all of them expressed favorable opinions of Chris Christie (!!) of all people. “Oh he puts people over politics”, “He doesn’t go with the party line”… these comments made me think they were not terribly informed of Christie’s actual politics, but I couldn’t help wondering if I found some of the 9% black women that voted for the Repub.

  7. 7.

    gene108

    Does anyone have suggestions for donations?

    International Red Cross?

    Direct Relief International?

    I’ve given to these groups before and assume they do good work with the money.

    @rikyrah:

    OMG! How much free stuff is T-Mac going to have to give away to keep those black voters happy? /wing-nut

  8. 8.

    Botsplainer

    Clearly, we should donate to the Koch brothers family of wingnut think tanks because global warning is a myth.

  9. 9.

    PsiFighter37

    I haven’t read much commentary, but apparently the storm moved so fast that it did less damage than it would have if it were slower-moving. That said…that’s an awful lot of lost life and destruction. I can’t fathom something like that happening here, but with climate change, I suppose it’s not out of the realm of possibility anymore.

  10. 10.

    sparrow

    @Aji: THank you for the link. I am thinking about starting a page to share with my fellow post-docs to see if we can get one or more boxes donated. Do you know how much a shelterbox costs? I need to figure out what kind of donations we need per person to see if this is a reasonable goal or not.

  11. 11.

    Aji

    @sparrow: I’ll dig around and find out for you. One thing I like about them – if it’s still the same, anyway – is that a group, business, blog, etc.., can specify where their donation goes, and effectively pool their funds to “buy” one or more boxes. Eventually, when you get your thank-you, they tell which # box your donations went to, if you haven’t specified, IIRC.

    Off to look for your answer . . . .

  13. 13.

    ruemara

    @sparrow: I listen to KTLK and at least one of the pundits and the sole black female with a show on during the week, has been in a bleeding Christie love orgy. This, however and neither does your story, have much to do with McAuliffe. And yeah, they don’t know much about Chris Christie. Neither do the people who voted for him in a landslide in NJ and they live there.

  15. 15.

    Aji

    @sparrow: Okay, it looks like the current box for this crisis is expected to $1,000 per box, and each will cover a family of 10. That’s $100 per person, which looks to me like a pretty good ROI for these kinds of disaster conditions. Oh, and just FTR: Not involved with them in any way, other than having kicked in a few bucks when we could, and, as I said, choosing to raise funds for them for their work in Haiti and after the 2010 Pakistan floods.

    Here’s the link on their site for getting involved – whether via donating or sharing on social media or in other way: .

  16. 16.

    SarahT

    Donate to MercyCorps, International Rescue Committee, Oxfam. But whatever charity you choose, just check CharityNavigator first.

  17. 17.

    gene108

    @sparrow:

    My mom – reliable Democratic vote – was under the opinion Christie has been doing a good job as NJ governor, when she came to visit last month.

    Christie has Reaganesque qualities. He can get people to support him, while otherwise doing very little for their practical self-interest.

    The real issue with Christie is if the Republican base, by 2016, will be happy with the wink-and-nod Reagan and the Bushes gave them about implementing a conservative agenda, or if they want a more full on Rafael Cruz style nullification crisis over laws they do not like.

    If the right-wing base, in three years, can deal with a wink-and-a-nod in the primaries, because even a “centrist” like Christie would be better than President I-Murdered-Vince-Foster (aka Hilary Clinton), than Christie could be a formidable candidate in the primaries; he’d able to keep up his media produced image of “straight talker” with enough people to get a real shot at being the national candidate.

    It’s not the media’s job to do opposition research and talk about things that would make Christie look bad like corruption-ey type issues that are there regarding the pay-to-play culture in New Jersey, as well as his rather ineffective first term as governor and questionable accounting to paper over the state’s budget problems, so I do not expect any of those issues to become public unless his challengers have their stuff together to push him on those issues. Based on 2012, none of the GOP clown car of Presidential hopeful failures could actually put together any kind of actual campaign infrastructure to really sustain a campaign, so I’m not holding my breath there for 2016.

    On the other hand, if the right-wing base decides all the winking-and-nodding they let McCain and Romney get away with is what cost them in 2008 and 2012 or they would rather lose everything than nominate the most electable candidate – as it happened in Delaware and Nevada and few other races – Christie is toast in the primaries.

  18. 18.

    gene108

    @PsiFighter37:

    I can’t fathom something like that happening here

    The continental U.S. is not a low lying island chain. With enough warning, people have the ability to move inland and out of the worst of any storms path.

    I really shudder, when I hear about hurricanes hitting the Caribbean before making land fall in the U.S., because those guys are on islands, so there’s nowhere to go. I can’t imagine being in a hurricane on an island.

  19. 19.

    gene108

    @ruemara:

    Neither do the people who voted for him in a landslide in NJ and they live there.

    We had a spate of Democratic governors from 2001 to 2009, who weren’t all that.

    The bar for good governors is pretty damn low in NJ, from what I’ve seen in the 17 years I’ve lived here, and Christie managed to get his fat ass over it, which isn’t saying much about the state of statewide government in NJ over the years.

    I don’t know, if that sort of statewide antipathy towards Democratic executive leadership will spill over across the nation, but given how terrible Bush, Jr. was and how not terrible Obama’s been, I can see Christie’s NJ miracle not repeating nationally.

  20. 20.

    low-tech cyclist

    @SarahT:

    But whatever charity you choose, just check CharityNavigator first.

    No harm in checking them, just note that their ratings of a charity’s financial side are rather opaque.

    I just compared World Vision with Oxfam America, and though WV has an 85-15 split between program expenses and admin/fundraising, and Oxfam’s split is 80-20, Oxfam scores about 10 points better (out of 70) on Charity Navigator’s financial ratings.

    I couldn’t find an explanation on their website for how they come up with their financial score, just an explanation of how they come up with their overall rating once they’ve calculated their financial and accountability/transparency scores.

  21. 21.

    Cassidy

    Whoa, whoa, whoa….I thought we needed to wait for 90K more people and some chemical weapons before we got upset? Did I miss a memo?

  23. 23.

    mai naem

    @sparrow: I don’t know if your black women were low info voters but I wonder if this didn’t have something to do with Shaq’s ad for Christie. Also, maybe I’m wrong but wasn’t Shaq a Clinton supporter and if he was it’s going to be interesting to see what happens if it ends up being Hillary vs. Christie. I do think Shaq’s ad about bringing jobs back was effective, regardless of whether Christie is actually doing it or not. .

  25. 25.

    Yatsuno

    A friend of mine has distant relatives in Hue, and Hue is right in the path next. He says all is well so far but I’ll give updates as they come in.

  26. 26.

    NotMax

    Operation USA

    A miniscule sliver of donations goes to salary and overhead; the vast, vast bulk of any money is used for food, shelter, first aid and transport/distribution of same to disaster survivors.

  27. 27.

    CaseyL

    If BJ can set up a fundraiser for one or more of those $1K boxes, I can kick in towards it.

    One of the strange things about these storms – strange because they wreck such devastation and death – is their staggering beauty. I remember seeing photos of the skies around Katrina, and the cloud formations’ shapes and even colors were eerie, alien, gorgeous. Like being on a different planet. Here are some of them:

    http://www.rense.com/general90/sky.htm

  29. 29.

    Lyrebird

    @SarahT: Yes yes yes… I’ll also say that Heifer Project did a ton of rebuilding in the Phil. after the previous awful typhoon.

  31. 31.

    Betty Cracker

    @CaseyL: Incredible pictures. The sky really is amazing anywhere near a hurricane. I remember sitting back and watching the racing bands of clouds back in 2004, when all those hurricanes hit Florida.

  32. 32.

    Aji

    @CaseyL: Those images are so beautiful. And so terrifying. We live in an area that gets extreme weather, although not of the hurricane variety, and the skies right outside our door (we’re at the base of the mountains) can be just other-worldly. and they can do some serious damage, too.

    As to the box, yeah, us too. I don’t know how much we can kick in this time around, since winter is the lean season for us and it’s already here, but something. And I can promote the BJ box[es] at the GOS and on FB and to our customers, too.

  33. 33.

    Mayim

    My standard organizations to donate to for disaster relief are Shelterbox and Doctors without Borders (while the Heifer Project gets donations for on-going/long-term projects).

    Shelterbox and Heifer Project because they are smaller scale ways to make a difference ~ with the added bonus of somewhat more quirky ways to help. Doctors without Borders has people already in place where many disasters happen, and is big enough to have the resources to mobilize quickly.

  34. 34.

    Betty Cracker

    Quote from a NYT account of the typhoon aftermath in the Philippines:

    Mr. Aquino arrived on Sunday in Tacloban to meet with victims of the storm and to coordinate rescue and cleanup efforts. His defense secretary, Voltaire Gazmin, described a chaotic scene there.

    “There is no power, no water, nothing,” Mr. Gazmin said. “People are desperate. They’re looting.”

    Emphasis mine. If they’re carrying off food, water, clothing or materials to make a shelter, it’s not looting; it’s surviving.

  35. 35.

    patrick II

    The philipines red cross has its own site, so you can assure the money goes to the philipines by donating there. Doctors witout borders is always good.

  36. 36.

    handsmile

    Catholic Relief Services would be another charity to consider for donations, particularly with the predominance of Roman Catholicism in the Philippines.

    http://crs.org/

    SarahT makes an really important point above (#16, #22) about the advisability of first checking with those organizations that monitor philanthropic performance before making any contribution. It’s a useful if not always comprehensive measure. Charity Navigator, for example, lists only two US chapters of CRS.

    @Betty Cracker:
    It would appear my comment yesterday about “Open Threads” has proved to be incorrect. :) (not that being incorrect is anything unusual)

  37. 37.

    Joy in FL

    I would help pay for a shelter box after I get paid on Friday.
    In the meantime, this thread reminded me to donate something through Mercy Corps.

  39. 39.

    rikyrah

    @sparrow: @Baud:

    Baud says:

    November 10, 2013 at 11:31 am
    .
    @rikyrah:

    But McAuliffe isn’t black!

    Unpossible, I say. Unpossible.

    Because, of course, Black people didn’t vote before 2008, and if they did, they left the ballots blank unless it was a Black candidate

    Uh Huh

  40. 40.

    handsmile

    @Mayim:

    A second for your recommendation of Doctors without Borders/Medicins sans Frontiers. One of the very best and bravest of international humanitarian organizations. It’s received an annual donation from the handsmile household for quite a few years.

    You might find of interest the recent book, Humanitarian Negotiations Revealed: The MSF Experience (2011), a frank and often self-critical group of essays, edited by three MSF staff members, that reveals/examines the history of the organization and similar humanitarian relief action. Bracing stuff.

    http://www.amazon.com/Humanitarian-Negotiations-Revealed-Experience-Columbia/dp/0231703155

  41. 41.

    Weasel Tracks

    Tzu Chi is a Taiwanese Buddhist organization that has helped with disasters around the world.

  44. 44.

    satby

    Save the Children is already in place and working right now in the Philippines and they rate pretty well on Charity Navigator. And always Drs Without Borders; both orgs did heroic work after the Haiti earthquake and are still there. After being a contractor to the American Red Cross (and a Katrina disaster ARC volunteer) I’m sorry to say they will never get another dime from me. EVER.

  45. 45.

    hamletta

    @hildebrand: I was going to suggest LDR, too. The denomination covers all their admin overhead, so 100% of donations go to actual relief work. They also lead lead a lot of interdenominational efforts, meaning other churches around the world (mostly mainline Protestant) trust them to do good work.

    For general information, I like this article about the Dos and Don’ts of Disaster Relief. The big one is to not earmark your donation for a specific disaster.

    When something this big and horrible hits the news, good people start throwing money at relief organizations. Often they wind up with more money than they can use on the current disaster, while ongoing efforts in other areas that have dropped off the radar go begging.

    A member of my church gave money to LDR and earmarked it for the floods here in Tennessee in 2010. She received a thank-you note saying they already had enough to cover TN, so her contribution had gone toward their work somewhere else. She got upset and said she’d never send them money again.

    She’s a smart lady, so I hope I can convince her that she wasn’t cheated or deceived, they just had other places to use the money; their Hurricane Katrina efforts didn’t wrap up until July, 2012.

    Shorter me: Don’t earmark your donations! If you trust an organization enough to give them your money, trust them to allocate it where it can do the most good.

  47. 47.

    Lizzy L

    Catholic Relief Services has been long established in the Philippines: they have a partnership with multiple local organizations across the islands, and are trusted and well-known. Google CRS, and look for their Emergencies page; they have a donation button set up.

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