Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

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

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

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

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

Americans barely caring about Afghanistan is so last month.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

Conservatism: there are some people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

In my day, never was longer.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

This really is a full service blog.

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

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

Why did Dr. Oz lose? well, according to the exit polls, it’s because Fetterman won.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

A Senator Walker would also be an insult to reason, rationality, and decency.

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Archives for May 2014

Ahhh…..TEACHOUT!

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As long as I live in Nixonland, I expect to have to vote for centrist triangutards in presidential elections. But I will be damned if I have to vote for Andrew Cuomo as governor of New York State. He’s slashed support for education, helped Republicans keep control of the State Senate, and, well, I just think he’s an asshole.

So I’m exited about the possibility that the Working Families Party will put a serious third-party candidate to oppose him. I will vote for that candidate, as long as it’s not Ralph Nader or someone like that, and probably do some volunteer work as well.

Right now, the candidate they’re talking about is someone named Zephyr Teachout. I don’t know that much about her. Kos doesn’t like her, albeit partly for Inside Baseball Judean People’s Front type reasons. I’m iffy on her as well and you may not like the reason: the name Zephyr Teachout sounds too much like a stereotype of a candidate crazy hippies would vote for (and I will vote for her if she’s the WFP candidate). I mean, it’d be a great name for someone mistermix discovered on that music blog he reads, but not for a politician.

Running against Cuomo is a great opportunity for the WFP. It’s a perfect storm — a very shitty Republican candidate and a right-wing Democratic candidate. The WFP candidate could easily finish second. They won’t get many opportunities like this. There’s no reason to think Democrats will nominate someone as conservative as Cuomo again and the Republican party suffering from Teamentia right now, but they could easily get their shit togetherish (as least to the point of breaking 40% in state-wide elections).

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Vape it to Me Gently

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vape I was at a festival last weekend and saw my first custom / hacked vaporizer, similar to the one at right (click to embiggen). The hack is putting in a coil with less resistance that heats the liquid faster. The other part of vaping culture is the creation of different liquids, some of which have gotten vaporists in trouble with organizations like the Girl Scouts (because of Thin Mint vaping liquid).

Related to that, I thought this response to the World Health Organization’s call to regulate vaporizers was interesting:

“For the WHO to suggest that e-cigarettes are as risky as other tobacco products would send an erroneous and bleak message to the millions of current e-cigarette users who have used them to quit smoking,” Robert West, a University College London researcher and a signatory of the letter, says in a statement. “It would discourage smokers from trying them and we would miss out on a major opportunity to reduce smoke-related deaths globally.”

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Guns Don’t Kill People, Gays Kill People

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Hey, did you know that gays were responsible for the UCSB shooter, a frustrated heterosexual obsessed with hetero pick up culture?

[…] [Ken] Blackwell blamed the shooting on “the crumbling of the moral foundation of the country” and “the attack on natural marriage and the family.”

“When these fundamental institutions are attacked and destroyed and weakened and abandoned, you get what we are now seeing,” Blackwell said, arguing that people who are “blaming the Second Amendment” are “avoiding talking about what is at the root cause of the problem.”

Ken Blackwell, a “senior fellow” at the hate group called the Family Research Council, used to be the Attorney General of Ohio, so he ought to know.

This guy is a professional hater, unlike, say, that Duck Dynasty guy or Cliven Bundy. Since he’s paid to hate, I don’t think criticizing him will turn him into a “hate martyr”, which is Josh Marshall’s term for those other two.

(via)

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Open Thread: The NFL’s Various Medical Issues, Continued

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nfl painkillers brainkillers sheneman
(Drew Sheneman via GoComics.com)

In the Washington Post, “Ex-NFL linemen discover that weighing 300 pounds or more is no asset in life after football“:

Roger Brown was made to go to the train station back then, standing where they weighed logs and iron. The Detroit Lions’ scale didn’t reach such ungodly measures…

In the early 1960s, Brown was the biggest man in football — and, as the NFL’s first regular player to weigh 300 pounds, something of an oddity. These days, there’s nothing unusual about a player that size. Three weeks ago, when 256 players entered the league via the NFL draft, 57 were listed at weights of at least 300 pounds.

But what happens when the games end and a man no longer needs to be so big to earn his living?… After years of having their sizes carefully managed and strength coaches and nutritionists keeping close tabs on their weights, some ex-players feel abandoned…

Also in the Washington Post, “First-ever summit on sports concussions held at the White House”:

… Thursday’s conference featured a panel discussion by experts and new financial commitments by the federal government and private sector to fund research into concussions. The pledges included a $10 million grant by Steve Tisch, co-owner of the New York Giants, to UCLA School of Medicine’s neurosurgery department, to train pediatric neurologists specializing in sports concussions and research how to prevent, diagnose and treat the injuries among young athletes…

In his remarks Thursday, Obama said that when he “was young and played football briefly” he might have had a mild concussion “a couple of times” that went undiagnosed.

“We have to change a culture that says, ‘You’ve got to suck it up,’” he said…

The concussion-conference article was careful to spell out that every contact sport carries a risk, and “young players” are more vulnerable, and these days plenty of girls get concussions playing soccer. But as many have said, NFL football is the Money Sport here… and if seven-year-olds aren’t enrolled in Pop Warner leagues and high schoolers don’t try out because their parents won’t sign the permission slips, the NFL is going to have to find or invent another feeder system.

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This Is Good For John McCain

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Let us never forget who injected Sam (not Joe) Wurzlebacher (not actually a plumber) into our civic discourse:

Guns are mostly for hunting down politicians who would actively seek to take your freedoms and liberty away from you. Google “Hitler, Mao, Kim Jung Il, Castro, Stalin” just for starters.

37.884

So, according to the former Republican Presidential nominee’s go-to guy for “real world” insight, it’s open season on politicians (and presumably the rest of us) who think the words “well regulated” mean something…not to mention those who notice that when societies don’t masturbate 9mm at time, a lot fewer people get shot.

I’ve been noticing a lot of “both sides do it” stuff lately, so let me offer this one anecdote as evidence that while many of us left of center regard most of Republican political posturing and policy with loathing, we don’t generally call for folks to put their cross hairs on GOP leaders.  The two sides are not the same.

Image: Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Death of Caesar, betw. 1859 and 1867.

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