Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Republican also-rans: four mules fighting over a turnip.

I did not have this on my fuck 2022 bingo card.

There’s always a light at the end of the frog.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

Donald Jessica Trump found guilty as fuck – May 30, 2024!

Never forget that he train is barreling down on Trump, even as he dances on the tracks.

Democrats are back in array!

I also would like a pony to improve my balloon juice experience.

I’m just a talker, trying to find a channel!

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

Fuck the extremist election deniers. What’s money for if not for keeping them out of office?

If you’re pissed about Biden’s speech, he was talking about you.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

I have other things to bitch about but those will have to wait.

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

President Biden is doing good where he can, and getting it done.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

The Giant Orange Man Baby is having a bad day.

He really is that stupid.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

Ah, the different things are different argument.

Today’s gop: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

I conferred with the team and they all agree – still not tired of winning!

You are here: Home / Pet Blogging / Dog Blogging / The Sun on Your Face, the Wind in Your…Ears

Reader Interactions

98Comments

  1. 1.

    lamh36

    Oh Good Lord, people, we do know that West Africa is no where near South America or Mexico right???

    NIH Official Dismisses Fox Host’s Question On Ebola As Bioterrorism @TPM http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/fox-fauci-ebola-terrorism-immigrants

    Also too, Ebola would NOT actually be a good agent of bioterror. First of all, you don’t instantly get sick. The virus would have to be aerosolized in a lab under acute conditions with state of the art equipment, just to minimize the infection rate of laboratory professionals. Unless I missed it, not many terror organizations have state of the art equipment needed to ensure that they don’t infect themselves?

  3. 3.

    schrodinger's cat

    @lamh36: According to some nativists, bar all non-citizens entry, problem solved. Yes, this was actually suggested in NYT’s Room for debate to contain Ebola, by one of their “experts”. Some woman called Jessica Vaughn of the Center For Immigration Studies or something similar.

  5. 5.

    Calouste

    @lamh36: Ebola is an excellent agent for bioterror. Terror, just like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. It isn’t a great agent for biowarfare, but if your aim is to scare your enemy shitless into doing great harm to themselves (i.e. waste billions more on security theatre) rather than kill them, Ebola is the best on the market at the moment.

  6. 6.

    Another Holocene Human

    Thought my wifi was being 0wned, reset the router, reset the SSID and password (twice), now it turns out it’s probably channel interference, trying a new channel now.

  7. 7.

    lamh36

    @Calouste: yeah, but we both know that Fox News watchers ain’t looking at the nuanced difference between biowarfare and bioterrorism.

    IDK, I’m just beginning to think that people have watched too many episodes of Walking Dead, or watched to many of them damn Resident Evil movies.

    Cause this Ebola scare bidness is just ridiculous.

    I’m truly finding that some people really do revel in their ignorance on the subject and some people enjoy instigating and spreading that ignorance and paranoia. I’m at the point now where every time someone post some crazy stuff about Ebola that I just want to tell em, well I hope they are the first to go.

    Then you have the ones like a friend of mine, who complained about a woman on her plane from Kenya who had her blanket over her head, even though this friend was NOT on an international flight, and she knows what Kenya IS NO WHERE NEAR West Africa…sigh.

  11. 11.

    Tone In DC

    @lamh36:

    Oh Good Lord, people, we do know that West Africa is no where near South America or Mexico right???

    You want folks in these here United States to know something about world geography (when they’re not watching Alex Trebek)?

    Uh, no.

    Most of these kids coming out of high school couldn’t find Iraq on a map/globe. Nor Libya, which isn’t too far from western Africa (never mind Iraq).

    Stands to reason these folks don’t know that western Africa is nowhere near Mexico. As sad as that is.

  12. 12.

    Calouste

    @schrodinger’s cat: Sounds like a great plan… to drive all the major airlines into immediate bankruptcy and kickstart the Great Recession Two.

    What she of course meant was to bar all non-white non-citizens. With non-white the deciding factor.

  14. 14.

    Another Holocene Human

    @lamh36: I

    ’m truly finding that some people really do revel in their ignorance on the subject and some people enjoy instigating and spreading that ignorance and paranoia. I’m at the point now where every time someone post some crazy stuff about Ebola that I just want to tell em, well I hope they are the first to go.

    I grew up on the East Coast where at least once a month that snot nosed kid who was just asking for a punch in his smart face would run around saying today was the end of the world, you know basically repeating Harold Camping (sp?) paranoia. I only recently learned he was broadcasting on the West Coast. People have this endless appetite for paranoid, paranormal, impossible fantasy. And YOU are the jerk for pointing out why it couldn’t possibly be true.

  16. 16.

    schrodinger's cat

    @Calouste: I wonder what she plans to do with people with valid student and work visas and/or permanent residents, who are returning after a trip. What about ports of entry at the southern and northern borders?

  17. 17.

    mdblanche

    I had a “holy shit” moment last night when I realized that I went to high school with the NBC cameraman who has Ebola.

  19. 19.

    cckids

    @lamh36:

    Why is Ronan Farrow, STILL a thing on MSNBC?

    I’ve got no earthly idea. He is better than he was, but that is a low, low, LOW bar. I’ve never understood how he got the show to start with.

  20. 20.

    Calouste

    @Another Holocene Human:

    Well, there’s also that Ebola has a 50%+ fatality rate and Enterovirus 68 doesn’t sound like it has been proven to kill anyone on its own (although it might be a contributing factor).

  21. 21.

    schrodinger's cat

    @Cervantes: Krikorian is frequently a guest on the Newshour when they discuss immigration. You know what is their latest cause for concern? The number of Americans who speak a language other than English at home.

  22. 22.

    PaulW

    for Gators alums, news just in that frosh QB Theon Greyjoy Treon Harris is under investigation for sexual battery late Saturday night.

    While this is a serious issue of off-field violence involving athletes, we have a serious nationwide problem with sexual assaults on campus involving non-athletes.

  23. 23.

    Another Holocene Human

    @Cervantes: Based on the wiki article his early work looks semi-interesting but his late career seems like a German-speaking Norman Mailer or something.

    Actually, I really haven’t read any Schweitzers. I’m still fascinated by the German-born.

  24. 24.

    Cervantes

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    The number of Americans who speak a language other than English at home.

    That concerns me, too — except that Krikorian and company are thinking about immigrants and I’m not.

  25. 25.

    cckids

    @Another Holocene Human: Yep. And since that article was written (Sept 25), the spread of enterovirus has grown from 38 states to 43. One child, a 4-year-old, has died.

    Talk to parents/grandparents who remember polio if you want to know realistic fear about a disease.

  26. 26.

    cckids

    @Calouste:

    Well, there’s also that Ebola has a 50%+ fatality rate and Enterovirus 68 doesn’t sound like it has been proven to kill anyone on its own (although it might be a contributing factor).

    Not to make light of Ebola, but much of the fatality rate has to do with lack of treatment, especially timely treatment. Putting a patient on a saline drip alone cuts mortality rate by 50%.

    And Enterovirus D68 is no joke. The child in New Jersey who died was asymptomatic & died in his sleep. As a parent who’s seen how bad respiratory viruses can get, this one is very scary. link: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/preschool-enterovirus-victim-died-sleep/story?id=25996482

    edit to change links

  27. 27.

    Calouste

    @schrodinger’s cat: That’s fairly obvious. Just as Obama can’t possibly have been legally elected President on account of his melamine surplus in her eyes, non-white visa holders must have obtained their visa fraudulently and should be denied entry.

    The only difference between white supremacists and nativist is whether they put their emphasis inside the country or on its borders.

  28. 28.

    Another Holocene Human

    @PaulW:
    http://www.alligator.org/sports/columns/article_f255f44a-d7d5-11e2-93e8-0019bb2963f4.html

    Can’t find the link to the Meyer years where a Gator football player was pulled over DUI and pulled “Do you know who I am?” with GPD, probably because it had worked before … with GPD.

    Then there was the basketball player who was stealing tacos. The best part about that story was the fact that the vendor ran him down. Cut the baller and bring the vendor onto the team!

  32. 32.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @schrodinger’s cat: I have great grandparents who spoke German in the home until the 1950s.* They were fourth generation US residents. They just lived most of their lives in a small community with many other ex-Prussians. They both spoke English, but it was their second language.

    *My great grandmother lived until 1986 and frequently used German to talk to her daughters up until her death.

  37. 37.

    lamh36

    @TriniPrincess
    Geoffrey Holder, Dancer, Actor, Artist and Much More, Dies at 84 http://nyti.ms/1na1aYx

    I know the role as Punjab in Annie was a big ole stereotype, but I did love him in that role as a child. As and adult, I recognize the tropes, but as a kid you don’t really notice those things.

    Still though, the dancing and choreography was effortles.

    RIP Mr Holder!

    We Got Annie

  39. 39.

    Another Holocene Human

    @Omnes Omnibus: What state? My low german speaking predecessors quit the habit as a result of the wars. WWI anti-German sentiment was bad but I think the males born between the wars still spoke German a bit because Dad’s English was pretty limited. Grandma learned high German at school, which of course is a different language. Her mother was a former English teacher who insisted on English in the home. So they didn’t speak another language in the home, just out in the fields.

    Probably WWII and post war economy scattered everyone because they lived in a tiny Kansas agricultural community (village is wrong word because they actually lived out on the homestead) with a lot of inbred German families from the same tiny Franconian district via OH and PA.

    As I’ve said before here, it was the stage for horrific family abuse. I don’t trust small, closed, patriarchal communities. I don’t care what supposed code you follow.

  40. 40.

    catclub

    @lamh36:

    Cause this Ebola scare bidness is just ridiculous.

    I want to bet someone that in 1 year there will be less than N cases of Ebola in the US. They can take the over.

    (N to be adjusted based on how terrified the sucker is.)

  42. 42.

    Mnemosyne

    @Calouste:

    cckids beat me to it but, from everything I’ve read, people who die of Ebola die of massive fluid loss (mostly dehydration) that leads to organ failure, not from the virus itself. Somebody posted a really interesting story from a doctor in Nigeria who survived Ebola and she said it was partly because she was drinking the hydration drink they gave her 24/7 to try and replace her fluids as fast as they went out.

  43. 43.

    cckids

    @Another Holocene Human: Oh yes. Speaking of Ronan Farrow, he had a segment on today bashing anti-vaxxers, in no uncertain terms, so a minor Yay for him. He noted that in some private schools in the Hollywood area, vaccination rates are as low as 2%. TWO PERCENT.

    Years ago, I knew 2 families whose children had been dramatically, tragically hurt by reactions to vaccines, leaving a previously normal baby mentally & physically handicapped.

    It was scary as hell to get my younger kids vaccinated, but I let my doctor talk me down & got it done. And that was back in the day when the preservative used in vaccines was thimerosal, which I am allergic to (so there was a possibility my kids would be as well)

    Having a family member who is a polio survivor helps as well. Jenny McCarthy & the other anti-science anti-vax people need to rot in hell.

  47. 47.

    Roger Moore

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    Some woman called Jessica Vaughn of the Center For Immigration Studies or something similar.

    That sounds right: there is a person by that name at that institution. Their basic purpose is to oppose immigration, both legal and illegal, so it’s no surprise that they’re using Ebola as an excuse to shut the borders.

  48. 48.

    mdblanche

    @schrodinger’s cat: Has anyone told him that in parts of the Southwest there are Americans speaking some language called Navajo at home?

    @Omnes Omnibus: On my father’s side of the family I’m part of the first generation brought up with English as a first language. I’m not part of the first generation born in the US.

  49. 49.

    Another Holocene Human

    @Omnes Omnibus: Kinda figured. There are still Wisconsin villages that are bilingual. Also, wasn’t that the state all the radicals went to in ’48? My great-great-greats were kinda radicals in that they married secretly across class lines but AFAIK they weren’t actually plugged into the Revolutionary thing.

    http://www.news.wisc.edu/15801

    Religious life was still being carried out German (baptism, etc) into the 20th century.

  51. 51.

    scav

    @Another Holocene Human: No, we just rented for a decade or so and then sold our family farm to some. And, given the family we sold it to plus their related incomer families versus the inbred small town inhabitants that line of our family had been living near since about 1835 — the freaking townies were comparatively scarier. In spades, in this instance. They’re as varied as any other group.

  52. 52.

    Trollhattan

    @cckids: Smallpox would do the job nicely, should one care to experience an actual versus an all-in-your-head public health Crisis. Short of that, a full generation of unvaccinated kids being exposed to measles (incredibly contageous) as adults.

  53. 53.

    lamh36

    SATSQ, Has Elizabeth Hasselbeck gotten dumber since leaving The View? She’s certainly looking less fresh than she used to, wonder if the bitterness and lies over at FoxNews is messing up her beauty regime.

    Anyway…

    Infectious disease doctor is having none of Elisabeth Hasselbeck’s Ebola border lunacy

    Fauci: A closing of our borders? I’m sorry, I don’t know what you mean by that…

    I’m sorry, but that doesn’t work. If you look at the newspapers, if you look at the TV coverage, you think that West Africa is this nation of the people that you see on the front page of the New York Times sick in Ebola treatment units.

    It’s a much much larger—this is a nation of millions and millions of people—multiplenations, not one. You have Americans there, you have businesspeople there, people of dual citizenship, who have to go back and forth. It’s completely impractical, and from a public health standpoint, not helpful, to [shut down borders]. And I think every public health official feels that way.

  54. 54.

    Trollhattan

    @cckids:
    Two percent?!? What, are they vaxxoshaming that minority to boot? Morans with money are still morans.

    Am so trademarking Vaxxoshaming.

  58. 58.

    Betty Cracker

    @PaulW: I saw that. Good god. The university suspended him immediately while it’s being investigated. From having seen how serious crimes are handled (not just at UF, at other programs too), I wonder what they know.

  59. 59.

    Peter Moore

    Does anyone know of a good group to donate to to support Democratic efforts to keep control of the Senate? Perhaps some Act Blue group being run by someone who might have good ideas on which races to focus on?

  61. 61.

    Trollhattan

    @Another Holocene Human: My mother grew up in a German-speaking household, in Illinois. Both grandfathers who had emigrated lived there and the kids attended German school and German Lutheran church.

    Family legend has it that the grandfathers were split on the rise of Herr Hitler to the point of a huge row over the topic, and my grandfather reached the “Nein!” point and forbade any more German, and that was that. Mom didn’t retain the language but her older sisters did.

  62. 62.

    Steeplejack

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    Jeez, another sign that the Gray Lady is slipping beneath the waves of the Internet Age. Do they not vet their panelists at all?! I looked up the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), thinking that it is probably a right-wing propaganda machine, and two minutes on the Google revealed that it’s worse than that. The Wikipedia entry, which appears to be largely self-written, says that the group “advocates immigration reduction in the United States” in the very first sentence. So much for the “studies” part. The next sentence says that it is a spinoff of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has called a hate group. And, indeed, the third item that comes up on the Google for CIS, after its own site and the Wikipedia entry, is an article from the SPLC detailing the CIS’s history.

    [CIS Executive Director Mark] Krikorian has had considerable success in giving CIS the look of a reputable commentator on immigration. CIS regularly sends experts to testify to Congress and is frequently quoted by the mainstream media. But every now and then, the mask slips.

    In 2007 [. . .] Krikorian accepted an invitation to speak at the Michigan State University chapter of Young Americans for Freedom. It apparently didn’t bother him that MSU-YAF had been widely covered in the media for a series of nasty stunts—staging a “Catch an Illegal Immigrant Day,” holding a “Koran Desecration” competition, and posting “Gays Spread AIDS” fliers across campus. He also didn’t seem to mind being part of the same speakers series that included Nick Griffin, a Holocaust denier who heads the extremist British National Party, and Jared Taylor, who says blacks are incapable of civilization.

    The SPLC article is not too long but very informative.

  64. 64.

    Another Holocene Human

    @Betty Cracker: They’ve had all the evidence in the world on other cases.

    There is a major mobilization on campus because of this guy (white male) who was sexually assaulting women after home football games (still haven’t caught him).

    But that still wouldn’t explain all of the response. I’m guessing the victim has parents who donate a lot to SAA.

  65. 65.

    Another Holocene Human

    @Steeplejack: Didn’t NPR have these assholes on as well?

    The only refreshing thing was that unlike AEI goons, they didn’t really hide where they were coming from or try to put a “reasonable” gloss on their hate.

  66. 66.

    Another Holocene Human

    @Trollhattan: I found out that in one village in Germany (in Pfalz) where some of my ancestors are from they had the same whiny litany (in German) about how they were the real victims of the Holocaust/Nazizeit as my American family had (in English).

  70. 70.

    Cervantes

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    @Cervantes: I asked you, because you said that you were concerned.

    Yes, and you weren’t the only one to have missed my joke.

    When I said:

    That concerns me, too — except that Krikorian and company are thinking about immigrants and I’m not.

    I meant that Krikorian and his ilk bravely criticize others but they themselves don’t speak English nearly as well as they think they do — and it’s their abuse of the language that bothers me.

  71. 71.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @raven: You could have told him I once had a blond Cocker spaniel. I am sure that would have been enough to identify me.

  72. 72.

    Steeplejack

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Hey, I was in the CIS in high school. It was the Cultural Intellectual Society, and basically it was a front for senior class members to raise money for a trip to Japan (from Okinawa) during spring break.

  74. 74.

    JoyfulA

    @Another Holocene Human: My grandparents stopped speaking German with their children because of the World War I hysteria, despite ancestors being in this country since 1720, DAR, Civil War dead, etc.

    My mother learned it anyway and would still speak it if she had anyone to speak it with beyond the occasional Amish farmer.

  77. 77.

    IdahoFlaneuse

    @Trollhattan: My dad was raised in a German neighborhood in New York in the 1930s. When it came time for him to enroll in school he wasn’t accepted because he only spoke German. My grandparents boarded him with a Jewish family so he could learn English. According to my Dad my grandfather forbid speaking German in the house when WWII started.

  81. 81.

    Hungry Joe

    My father-in-law grew up in a Mennonite community in Kansas and spoke only German until kindergarten. He told me that as a very young man he tried to figure out how anyone could possibly vote for Roosevelt, and the only answer that made sense to him was “Satan.”

    Later he went to college and decided that the whole God thing was hooey. He became an English professor, civil rights activist, and anti-war protestor. One of the most impressive — not to mention kindest — men I’ve ever known.

  83. 83.

    Roger Moore

    @cckids:

    Jenny McCarthy & the other anti-science anti-vax people need to rot in hell.

    What they really need to do is to spend as much time and effort issuing mea culpas and encouraging people to vaccinate their kids as they did spreading misinformation. Make that twice as much time.

  86. 86.

    Origuy

    Do these people ever travel anywhere? I bet in my neighborhood (East San Jose, CA), languages other than English are spoken at home in more than half the houses.. Spanish, of course, but also Vietnamese, Mandarin, Russian, Filipino, Hindi, Punjabi, Japanese, and Korean that I’m pretty sure of. Do they have a conniption fit when they go to Walgreen’s and see the signs listing all of the languages for which translation services are available?

  87. 87.

    Roger Moore

    @Origuy:

    Do these people ever travel anywhere?

    Probably not. They don’t want to expose themselves to weird Others, which might happen if they left their sheltered suburban enclave. I have almost the exact opposite feeling; it seems weird when I’m surrounded by too many people who look like me and not enough who are different.

  88. 88.

    brettvk

    @Another Holocene Human: Crime flourishes in authoritarian closed communities. I get a sour sort of amusement when I see the Amish genre of christian-fiction romance novels. They sell really well here in a bible-ridden town but they’re as much a fantasy as True Blood.

  90. 90.

    WereBear

    @brettvk: According to an excellent book (Breaking Their Will: Shedding Light on Religious Child Maltreatment by Janet Heimlich) the Amish could beat a child to death and they just vanish. No one speaks of them again… and that is that.

  91. 91.

    schrodinger's cat

    @Origuy: I sometimes wonder whether these hacks believe the BS they spout or if it is all an elaborate con. CIS is DC based think tank, so they must encounter people who speak more than one language and non-native speakers of English, its not like they are based in rural Alaska.

  93. 93.

    scav

    @Another Holocene Human: The German set of granparents and back went to one of those German-language German Evangelical churches outside Chicago as well. Most seem to have about three extra middle names: Father Dreusicke got very enthusiastic at the font. Anyone know if that was common to the breed or just a personal whim?

  94. 94.

    Cervantes

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    Got it, after reading Vaughn’s comments my snark detector malfunctioned.

    No, the humor was (at best) too obscure. Hardly the fault of your snark detector.

    @Roger Moore:

    rural Alaska is not necessarily the best choice of a place where everyone speaks English.

    Take the former mayor of Wasilla, for example.

    (On second thought, I guess Wasilla can’t be called rural.)

  96. 96.

    PurpleGirl

    @Omnes Omnibus: Did you know that many Lutheran congregations recited the mass and sermons in German and used German for much of their business. That is until World War I and the federal government assigned FBI to attend those churches to listen for anything treasonous and/or secret being said. As late as 1985 when I last attended a Lutheran Church, many of older congregants looked forward to special services conducted in German.

  98. 98.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @PurpleGirl: Yes, when my great grandparents lost their farm during the depression and then moved into town, they found a church that had a German service. It is the church that my mom still attends.

Comments are closed.