Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The way to stop violence is to stop manufacturing the hatred that fuels it.

We need to vote them all out and restore sane Democratic government.

Stay strong, because they are weak.

“Can i answer the question? No you can not!”

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

Dear Washington Post, you are the darkness now.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

The unpunished coup was a training exercise.

There is no right way to do the wrong thing.

These are not very smart people, and things got out of hand.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

I might just take the rest of the day off and do even more nothing than usual.

We will not go quietly into the night; we will not vanish without a fight.

Giving up is unforgivable.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

“Facilitate” is an active verb, not a weasel word.

Not all heroes wear capes.

“Alexa, change the president.”

We can show the world that autocracy can be defeated.

“Until such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on.”

There are no moderate republicans – only extremists and cowards.

Nothing says ‘pro-life’ like letting children go hungry.

Republicans cannot even be trusted with their own money.

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Sunday Morning Garden Chat: Wildlife Watching

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ndfg beesOnGoldenrod

More from commentor NewDealFarmGrrl:

I joined Bumblebeewatch.org this year. My native plant rain garden (17 species) was a big hit with the bees, I tentatively identified six of thirteen species of bumblebees native to Minnesota. For bumblebee watch, a bee must be photographed, tentatively identified, then emailed to bumblebeewatch.org for verification by experts. I was at my wit’s end trying to get pics of bumblebees, it was heading toward massive FAIL. My grandson thought it was hilarious, seeing me chasing around the yard and talking to the bees. “Hold still sweetie, that’s it, NOOOOOO COME BACK HERE”. I finally wised up and took videos with my phone, then used an app called stillShot to extract a good frame or two. That was how I ended up with one of my favorite pics, “hoveringBee.” Total beginner’s luck!

ndfg hoveringBee

ndfg monarch_onBeebalm

ndfg monarchCaterpillar

As i tell people in regard to critters and my native species, “If you plant it, they will come!”
ndfg raccoon

As for pets – I have three cats, all siblings from a litter of my niece’s cat. One male and two females, Meeko, Lynxie, and Queenie (left to right).
ndfg threeSleepingCats

ndfg Meeko&Gigi

The dog is my beloved grandoggie GigiBears who loves to visit and play with Teh Kittehs.

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Quite possibly the last Garden Chat of the season, unless somebody sends me more harvest pics (or you Left Coasters step up)…

What’s going on in your gardens this week?

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That Torture Inquiry: Blame Anyone But the Persons Responsible

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The topic deserves more attention than a Saturday-night drive-by, but I wanted to share my irk. As the McClatchy news bureau sees it:

A soon-to-be released Senate report on the CIA doesn’t assess the responsibility of former President George W. Bush or his top aides for any of the abuses of the agency’s detention and interrogation program, avoiding a full public accounting of one of the darkest chapters of the war on terror.

“This report is not about the White House. It’s not about the president. It’s not about criminal liability. It’s about the CIA’s actions or inactions,” said a person familiar with the document, who asked not to be further identified because the executive summary – the only part to that will be made public – still is in the final stages of declassification.

The Senate Intelligence Committee report also didn’t examine the responsibility of top Bush administration lawyers in crafting the legal framework that permitted the CIA to use simulated drowning called waterboarding and other interrogation methods widely described as torture, McClatchy has learned…

As a result, the $40 million, five-year inquiry passed up what may be the final opportunity to render an official verdict on the culpability of Bush, former Vice President Dick Cheney and other senior officials for the program, in which suspected terrorists were abducted, sent to secret overseas prisons, and subjected to the harsh interrogation techniques.

“If it’s the case that the report doesn’t really delve into the White House role, then that’s a pretty serious indictment of the report,” said Elizabeth Goitein, the co-director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program at the New York University Law School. “Ideally it should come to some sort of conclusions on whether there were legal violations and if so, who was responsible.”

At the same time, she said, the report still is critically important because it will give “the public facts even if it doesn’t come to these conclusions. The reason we have this factual accounting is not for prurient interest. It’s so we can avoid something like this ever happening again in the future.”…

“As an oversight document the main premise is about whether Congress was accurately and appropriately informed by the CIA,” said the person familiar with the report, one of several knowledgable sources who spoke to McClatchy. “The report will show that the CIA did not provide accurate information, and in some cases provided misleading information.”

The narrow parameters of the inquiry apparently were structured to secure the support of the committee’s minority Republicans. But the Republicans withdrew only months into the inquiry, and several experts said that the parameters were sufficiently flexible to have allowed an examination of the roles Bush, Cheney and other top administration officials played in a top-secret program that could only have been ordered by the president…

As Andrew Sullivan chooses to interpret McClatchey:

… We don’t have merely passive indifference to the CIA’s record on torture, we have active opposition to the entire inquiry from the very beginning of Obama’s term in office. If you want to know why we are still waiting for the report almost two years since it was finished, and if you want to know why the White House refused to provide mountains of internal documents that would have added to the report’s factual inquiries, just absorb the anecdote above. And if you want to know why the White House did nothing to discipline the CIA after it hacked into the Senate Committee’s own computers, ditto. It’s impossible not to conclude that Obama wants as little of this material made public as possible. His pledge for the most transparent administration in history ends, it seems, at Langley…

Yesterday’s McClatchy story leads with the notion that the report does not follow the trail of responsibility up to Bush, Cheney, Tenet, Rumsfeld et al, and is thereby somehow toothless. But the committee was an investigation specifically into the CIA’s records on the program, to get a full accounting of what happened within that agency. It was not tasked with the essentially political job of holding the White House responsible. And it may be, in fact, that even some of the most powerful individuals in the Bush administration were actually unaware of what was really going on, or that they were merely repeating what the CIA was telling them, and the CIA was lying to cover its ass. That does not minimize the political responsibility of president Bush and others for presiding over such a grotesque torture program; but it’s essential context for understanding what actually happened…

Sully — it’s an active verb!

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Open Thread: Where’s Our SG?

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Yeah, let’s shame the ammosexual enablers in public… if there’s any good to come out of the current Ebola Panic, this may be it. From Politico:

More than two dozen House Democrats are calling on the Senate to swiftly approve Vivek Murthy’s nomination to serve as surgeon general to help combat the spread of the deadly Ebola virus in the U.S.

Murthy’s nomination got sidelined after Republicans and vulnerable Senate Democrats voiced reservations about the Harvard Medical School physician’s outspoken views on gun violence and public health. But the House Democrats, in a letter set to be released next week, argue that the Obama administration needs a top official in place to help with the Ebola response.

“The American public would benefit from having a Surgeon General to disseminate information that is desperately needed,” the Democrats wrote. “The Surgeon General can also work to amplify the Center for Disease Control’s actions, reassure the American people, and combat misinformation here at home.”…

Obama announced on Friday that Ron Klain, a former senior staffer to Vice President Joe Biden, would serve as the administration’s chief coordinator for the Ebola crisis. A surgeon general would be a senior official in any White House response under Klain’s management.

The 29 House Democrats, led by California Reps. Barbara Lee, Judy Chu and Ami Bera, voice support for Murthy’s nomination in the letter.

“Given the public’s increasing fears regarding the spread of the disease, it is imperative that we confirm a Surgeon General who will play a significant role in educating the American public about the disease and how to best protect their health,” states the letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

Even with growing pressure on politicians to show progress in the fight against Ebola, there is little time on the calendar to approve a surgeon general after senators return from their recess in November. Lawmakers have to approve a budget and have other high-profile posts like the attorney general and Secret Service director to potentially fill. There is also a chance that party control of the Senate isn’t decided until January because of run-off elections — a likely complication in scheduling a vote on Murthy.

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College Football Open thread

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Just checked FB and my timeline is full of people tailgating at 9 am, and all I can think is “man, I don’t miss that shit at all.” A whole day, just lost. Although considering what Baylor is going to do to WVU, maybe some drinking is in order.

I felt the same way during homecoming last weekend. I never noticed how much time and effort goes into being a drunk until then. You have to make sure you have the booze, you have to deal with hauling around coolers and ice, you have to make sure you have a driver, and then you spend the whole time focusing on activities to get “fucked up,” then people spend the whole time talking about how “fucked up” they are, then you start to have no fun because your whole day was centered around getting “fucked up,” and now you are “fucked up” and having no fun because you’re “fucked up.” So then you go home and eat a bunch of crap and go to bed and pass out, and then wake up feeling like shit because you got so “fucked up” and you commiserate with others about how “fucked up” you all were and take your own personal remedy so you can feel better. And then, once you are feeling somewhat human again, you repeat the whole process to get “fucked up” again.

Something is “fucked up” here, no doubt. I don’t miss drinking or that crap at all. I wish I could go back 25 years and slap the shit out of younger me. I wonder how much money I would have if every dollar I spent on booze I had invested.

In fact, I think I am going to take a nap with the dogs while everyone else is standing outside in the cold and rain, wake up and watch the game while in my bathrobe (heaven is a thick terry cloth bathrobe), and then maybe go see Fury.

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Saturday Morning Funnies Open Thread

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From TPM:

The campaign manager for Republican congressional candidate Carl DeMaio (CA) once offered a set of tips for identifying opposition research trackers looking to catch DeMaio in a gaffe or compromising moment: if the person in question is young or black they could very well be a tracker…

The emails are the latest revelation in a campaign that has gotten national attention mostly for a former top staffer accusing DeMaio of sexual harassment and DeMaio’s staff, in response, accusing that staffer of breaking into a campaign office and also saying he was fired for a plagiarism scandal.

The email exchange reported by the Examiner on Friday started when DeMaio said he saw two trackers at an event…

Knepper has since apologized. Guess they did learn something from George Allen’s fate…

Of course, there’s still hope for 2016! [warning: Politico link]…

Sen. Rand Paul tells POLITICO that the Republican presidential candidate in 2016 could capture one-third or more of the African-American vote by pushing criminal-justice reform, school choice and economic empowerment…

Exit polls showed the GOP’s share of the African-American vote in the past six presidential elections ranged from 4 percent for John McCain in 2008 to 12 percent for Bob Dole in 1996, according to the Roper Center. Mitt Romney got 6 percent in 2012.

When pressed on his ambitious goal, Paul upped the ante: “I don’t want to limit it to that. I don’t want to say there’s only a third open. … The reason I use the number ‘a third,’ is that when you do surveys of African-American voters, a third of them are conservative on a preponderance of the issues. So, there is upside potential.”…

Pounding a message he has delivered in interview after interview, Paul said President Barack Obama and his administration have “underplayed the danger and transmissibility” of the Ebola virus and have had a “bossy, arrogant attitude.”

“Because they haven’t been really forthright about the disease, people suspect their leadership, their motives,” Paul said. “They … don’t feel like they’re being told the truth about this. … Because they so much don’t want to alarm people, I think they’ve … undersold the danger of this thing. … When you read their description [of how it is transmitted], it makes me think that they’re talking about AIDS.”…

“A month ago, I said that we should consider restricting commercial travel and visas to our country from West Africa,” Paul said.

“We should consider rescheduling international conclaves that include bringing leaders from West Africa until the contagion dies down. … Think about what happens if this gets into Third World countries in the Southern Hemisphere, it gets into countries that have no ability to stop this, how it could become a contagion in those countries.”

I do believe this falls under Mr. Pierce’s Five-Minute Rule, because I’m thinking that’s how long it took for Rand to pivot from counting up potential African-American votes to explaining that the first African-American president and his “bossy, arrogant attitude” is permitting leaders from West Africa to spread AIDS-like “contagion” in our personal hemisphere.

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Apart from being thankful (as always) that you’re not on Rand Paul’s team, what’s on the agenda for the day?

Saturday Morning Funnies Open ThreadPost + Comments (85)