Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Democrats are back in array!

No Justins, No Peace

Ron DeSantis, the grand wizard, oops, governor of FL.

Live so that if you miss a day of work people aren’t hoping you’re dead.

Since we are repeating ourselves, let me just say fuck that.

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

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

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

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires Republicans to act in good faith.

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

Every day Vance writes another chapter in the book called “Worst VP Pick Ever”.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

Second rate reporter says what?

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

Israel is using food as a weapon of war. Unforgivable.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

The Giant Orange Man Baby is having a bad day.

Dead end MAGA boomers crying about Talyor Swift being a Dem is my kind of music. Turn it up.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

The Supreme Court is corrupt. Democrats must win in November and force court reform.

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51Comments

  4. 4.

    muddy

    @efgoldman: No, no, it totally has! My neighbor told me Obama was a socialist dictator. Or something something along those lines, I wasn’t paying close attention.

  5. 5.

    Gin & Tonic

    But Ronald Reagan is dead, and I’m not. I think that’s a net positive. At least for me.

  6. 6.

    cathyx

    I love it when someone is really sick and we have bake sales and auctions to make money to help pay their medical bills. They can make up to a couple thousand dollars that way! Even though it’s about a fraction of what they owe, that’s the American way. I love America.

  7. 7.

    joel hanes

    Ronald Reagan is dead

    Generalissimo Franco too.

    Let us hope that Rupert Murdoch and (the bad) Roger Ailes have the grace to follow shortly in their footsteps.

  8. 8.

    Poopyman

    One thing conservatives sure like to conserve is arguments.

    That’s recycling, not conserving.

  9. 9.

    NotMax

    re: Reagan –

    He was paid quite well by the American Medical Association to propagandize and read scripts entirely prepared by them as a part of their ongoing push against proposals like or for Medicare. Operation Coffee Cup existed and had been ongoing and generously funded from several years prior; it was not some dreamed-up conspiracy.

    re: CPAC –

    Tempting as it is to mock, was taught that it is rude to make fun of the handicapped.

  10. 10.

    terraformer

    My grandmother recently passed and I came into possession of probably 60 old vinyl records. Some real gems among them, all the way back to the late 40s or so.

    One of them is FDR’s fireside chat on Social Security. It’s really a good listen, and today even more so: to hear a passionate speech about something that helps most people, and from a politician no less, is quite rare these days.

  11. 11.

    Baud

    Medicare will lead to a socialist dictatorship.

    It also caused Putin to invade Ukraine.

  12. 12.

    Higgs Boson's Mate

    Q: Why do CPAC attendees put their badges on the dashboard when they go out for lunch?

    A: So that they can park in the handicapped spots.

  13. 13.

    WereBear

    @NotMax: He was paid quite well by the American Medical Association to propagandize and read scripts entirely prepared by them as a part of their ongoing push against proposals like or for Medicare.

    The irony now is that where would a lot of doctors and hospitals BE without Medicare? That’s a substantial portion of their income.

    If doctors relied on people who could pay full freight…

  16. 16.

    Bonnie

    I wonder what Ronnie would think about the same people who thought he was a god also are in love with Putin.

  17. 17.

    Tenzil Kem

    I noticed a few weeks ago that passthedamnbill.com now directs you to healthcare.gov. It may have gotten a bit dusty in my office for a moment there.

  19. 19.

    a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)

    @Baud: Well, duh. We all saw that one coming, even if we don’t live in Alaska.

    ::ducks and runs::

  20. 20.

    Mike in NC

    Hand it to Reagan, though. He started grifting for wingnut causes way back in the mid 1950s.

  21. 21.

    Cervantes

    @efgoldman:

    There weren’t any vinyl records before the late 40s.

    Not for sale to consumers, you’re right — but radio stations, archivists, and others were already using them in the ’30s.

  22. 22.

    Dexter's new approach

    The AMA was a big problem, but with stronger union support, especially when they had real power, we may have had national healthcare a long time ago

  24. 24.

    mclaren

    @Dexter’s new approach:

    The AMA was a big problem, but with stronger union support, especially when they had real power, we may have had national healthcare a long time ago

    Harry Truman almost passed universal health care in 1948 but it was shot down by the AMA in a massive propaganda campaign.

    Truman’s plan for national health insurance in 1945 was different than FDR’s plan in 1938 because Truman was strongly committed to a single universal comprehensive health insurance plan. Whereas FDR’s 1938 program had a separate proposal for medical care of the needy, it was Truman who proposed a single egalitarian system that included all classes of society, not just the working class. He emphasized that this was not “socialized medicine.” He also dropped the funeral benefit that contributed to the defeat of national insurance in the Progressive Era. Congress had mixed reactions to Truman’s proposal. The chairman of the House Committee was an anti-union conservative and refused to hold hearings. Senior Republican Senator Taft declared, “I consider it socialism. It is to my mind the most socialistic measure this Congress has ever had before it.” Taft suggested that compulsory health insurance, like the Full Unemployment Act, came right out of the Soviet constitution and walked out of the hearings. The AMA, the American Hospital Association, the American Bar Association, and most of then nation’s press had no mixed feelings; they hated the plan. The AMA claimed it would make doctors slaves, even though Truman emphasized that doctors would be able to choose their method of payment.

    Source: “A brief history: universal health care efforts in the United States.”

    Notice that Ronald Reagan’s talking points in the 1960s come straight out of Taft’s mouth in the 1940s. Reagan’s 1960s speeches were Taft Republican copy-pasta 20 years after their sell-by date.

  25. 25.

    Cervantes

    @Mike in NC:

    Hand it to Reagan, though. He started grifting for wingnut causes way back in the mid 1950s.

    In the ’40s, while he was president of the Screen Actors Guild, he was an FBI informant more or less enthusiastically ratting out communists in Hollywood. Was that a “wingnut cause”? His HUAC testimony (1947) is available.

  26. 26.

    Cervantes

    @NotMax:

    Also too, the bulk of V-Discs sent out to troops during WW2 were vinyl.

    Yes, those were light and yet not as fragile as the alternatives.

  28. 28.

    Villago Delenda Est

    The AMA is the sort of cabal of merchants that Adam Smith decried in The Wealth of Nations.

    They’re still fucking things up by restricting admissions to medical schools to control the supply of physicians.

    Wipe them out. All of them.

  31. 31.

    chrome agnomen

    @NotMax:

    quite the entry in wiki. i believe without a shred of doubt that he would zoom to numero uno in the republican candidacy ratings.

  32. 32.

    Cervantes

    @NotMax:

    Speaking of HUAC, someone like General George Moseley, whose testimony was deemed so egregious, so bilious, that it was ordered stricken from the record would today probably have his own regular right-wing media slot assured.

    George Moseley! He had an assistant with him at the hearing table who was so concerned about poison that he insisted the general’s glass be replaced — and then insisted again that the general not use the replacement glass, either. “The Jews” were trying to kill them, you see (not to mention overthrow the government). Nazis, the pair of them.

  33. 33.

    Mike G

    WTF is up with Reagan’s bizarre slanted posture and oversized head on that album cover?
    The image bears as little resemblance to reality as his arguments.

  34. 34.

    Ruckus

    @WereBear:
    What would life be like for people with rayguns disease, Alzheimer’s, without medicare/medicaid? The incident rate of Alzheimer’s is expected to go up as us boomers get to the age where it starts to affect a pretty good portion of us. It takes lots of money or government assistance to take care of an Alzheimer’s patient.
    In so many ways an evil, evil little man. And his disciples are even worse, we have the evidence of how destructive the policies he advanced are.

  36. 36.

    Schlemizel

    Since this is the closest to an open thread tonight I really want to highlight this tweet from state senator Pat Garofalo of Farmington,MN

    Drink the the love

    Let’s be honest, 70% of teams in NBA could fold tomorrow + nobody would notice a difference w/ possible exception of increase in streetcrime

    He is upset that anyone might think that racist

  37. 37.

    Violet

    @Schlemizel: Isn’t that charming. Who, exactly is going to be committing said “streetcrime”? I’m sure it’s all the white basketball fans who would be so despondent at the lack of their favorite game that they’d turn to crime. That’s got to be what he meant.

  38. 38.

    NotMax

    @Violet

    There was occasional mention on an old radio show of the “Missouri State Home for the Tall” as a gag reference. (one such)

    Perhaps the state senator believes such an institution existed.

  40. 40.

    mai naem

    I understood Reagan was actually considered a way out commie pinko when he was the SAG president and he became a snitch to save his own ass.
    I always remember when he was elected Jane Fonda said something to the effect of “He’s was a B movie second rate actor and he’s going to be a second rate president.” LOL

    Also, I had a client whose husband was a doctor in the midwest during the Depression. She said his patients would being in all kinds of stuff for in kind payments – chickens/eggs/produce/cheese etc. You just had to do whatever to make it.

  41. 41.

    mai naem

    I understood Reagan was actually considered a way out commie pinko when he was the SAG president and he became a snitch to save his own ass.
    I always remember when he was elected Jane Fonda said something to the effect of “He’s was a B movie second rate actor and he’s going to be a second rate president.” LOL

    Also, I had a client whose husband was a doctor in the midwest during the Depression. She said his patients would being in all kinds of stuff for in kind payments – chickens/eggs/produce/cheese etc. You just had to do whatever to make it.

  42. 42.

    Mnemosyne

    @mai naem:

    I went to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library (had to for work) and got a very strong vibe that Nancy was the one who turned him to the dark side. He had been a Roosevelt New Dealer up until he met her.

  43. 43.

    cmorenc

    @cathyx:

    I love it when someone is really sick and we have bake sales and auctions to make money to help pay their medical bills. They can make up to a couple thousand dollars that way! Even though it’s about a fraction of what they owe, that’s the American way. I love America.

    Or, all the combo small grocery/cafe/gas stations all across America where there sits a jar near the cash register with a picture of some desperately ill child or person, soliciting donations to help pay for their medical care, and there will be maybe $25-$30 in the jar in ones and change with maybe a five or two in there somewhere, but the fraction of their expenses collected is a walk around the block compared to a light-year’s distance short of covering the necessary expense.

    And yet, many of these same people dropping ones and twos into the jar are the ones the Tea Party and GOP have convinced that Obamacare is destroying theirs and the person pictured on the jar’s chance to get decent health care. Go figure.

  44. 44.

    Hal

    Oh Ronnie Raygun. When I first started using Facebook and old friend of mine wrote some ridiculous post about how when he was a kid Reagan was President and he had hope, but now there is Obama and no hope at all. I thought it was hysterical because he was 6 years old when Reagan first became President, but I was once again struck by what a myth of a man some people have made of Ronnie.

    Shrunk Government, never raised taxes, no debt increase, and single-handedly ended communism.

  45. 45.

    mai naem

    @Mnemosyne: I might be wrong but I think Nancy’s stepdad was active in Arizona Republican politics. Jane Wyman was supposed to have been a republican as well. I do remember hearing that when the Reagans would come visit her mother in Phoenix, 2 whole floors of the Arizona Biltmore would be rented by the secret service and the entourage. At that time, the Arizona Biltmore was probably the most expensive hotel/resort in Phoenix. I never understood why the government either didn’t rent or buy a large home in the Biltmore for the Reagans being that it seemed like they came at least 3 times annually. I only bring it up because of how Obama is criticized for everytime they go abroad and OMG! the secret service rented out a whole floor of some hotel at $XXX!!!

  47. 47.

    Cervantes

    @mai naem:

    I might be wrong but I think Nancy’s stepdad was active in Arizona Republican politics.

    After he retired to Scottsdale, yes.

    It’s impossible to say exactly what made Reagan switch sides, of course. Loyal Davis was conservative but Reagan was a Cold War anti-communist before he met Nancy. In 1948 he campaigned for Truman — and afterwards remained a New Dealer, despite Nancy’s presence.

    Nixon had something to do with it. He was rising in California politics in the mid ’40s and he was a polarizer. Nancy was friends with some right-wingers: Zasu Pitts, a staunch Nixonite, comes to mind. Reagan was himself friends with other Nixon fans. In 1950, having supported Democrat Helen Gahagan Douglas in her US Senate campaign, Reagan switched sides and endorsed Nixon — I would say this was largely on anti-communist grounds. (A young Congressman from Massachusetts also supported Nixon, ten years before defeating him for the Presidency.)

    To my eye, Reagan’s transformation was not complete until the mid-fifties when he finally abandoned the New Deal and what it stood for. This change co-incided with his shilling for the likes of General Electric — so that may have been an influence also.

    PS: That Senate campaign in 1950 was among the worst I’ve ever seen. Douglas was criticized by the Nixon side as being “pink right down to her underwear” — and also for having “slept with a Jew” (her husband). If you ask me, it’s not possible to be anything but overjoyed that Richard Milhous Nixon is still dead.

  48. 48.

    jake the snake

    Interest that one of the key positions of the education “reform” movement is to destroy the NEA and the other teachers organizations. Wonder if a key to healthcare reform shouldn’t be to destroy the AMA.

    ;-)

  50. 50.

    Cervantes

    @Mnemosyne:

    There was a whole book written about Nixon vs. Douglas: Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady.

    Yes, by Greg Mitchell, former editor of Crawdaddy!, former editor of Editor & Publisher, and now columnist for The Nation.

    Also, people tend to forget that the John Birch Society was born right here in Southern California, so California Republicans were wingnuts long before the infection spread to the rest of the country.

    Maybe people “tend to forget” that because it’s not true.

    The Society was formed during a brief meeting in Indianapolis and its “Home Office” was set up in the Boston area — Belmont — where Bob Welch, one of the founders, lived. Another founder was the father of the Koch Brothers (who have spent a lot of money at MIT). The Society’s Home Office was later moved to Wisconsin.

    Incidentally, I’m sure, Belmont is also where Mitt Romney and his family lived while he was a student at Harvard; and through his term as governor of Massachusetts; the Romneys still have property here. Also incidentally, I’m sure, Belmont is where a Mormon temple was constructed in the late ’90s (before Romney became governor).

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