Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

Their shamelessness is their super power.

Prediction: the gop will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

Human rights are not a matter of opinion!

I would try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

Most of you should go to bed and try to be better Jackals in the morning.

the 10% who apparently lack object permanence

Let the trolls come, and then ignore them. that’s the worst thing you can do to a troll.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

She burned that motherfucker down, and I am so here for it. Thank you, Caroline Kennedy.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

One of our two political parties is a cult whose leader admires Vladimir Putin.

The snowflake in chief appeared visibly frustrated when questioned by a reporter about egg prices.

If America since Jan 2025 hasn’t broken your heart, you haven’t loved her enough.

Sometimes the world just tells you your cat is here.

They were going to turn on one another at some point. It was inevitable.

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

Be a wild strawberry.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires.

Giving up is unforgivable.

Stop using mental illness to avoid talking about armed white supremacy.

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

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Archives for 2014

When They Wrote Exercise Your Right of Freedom of Speech, They Didn’t Mean Calisthenics While You Talked

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Glad to see this idiotic tactic has been pointed out to be nothing more than police harassment:

A federal judge ruled on Monday that the so-called five-second rule, a police tactic sporadically used in Ferguson, Mo., that required demonstrators to keep moving while they protested, is unconstitutional.

“The practice of requiring peaceful demonstrators and others to walk, rather than stand still, violates the Constitution,” Judge Catherine D. Perry of District Court wrote in the ruling.

The judge added that law enforcement “must be able to use the full range of lawful means to control crowds and to protect people and property from acts of violence and vandalism.”

Protests in Ferguson have persisted in smaller numbers since the death of Michael Brown, 18, on Aug. 9. Mr. Brown was shot by Darren Wilson, a Ferguson police officer, a killing that prompted weeks of demonstrations and a response from the police that included tear gas and rubber bullets.

Yelling “Keep moving! Not that way! Hold still! Keep moving!” while pointing semi-automatic weapons and aiming sniper rifles was pretty obviously a pretext for arrest and to end people’s rights to protest, or, if the cops got lucky, a chance to shoot someone and cash in on some of that sweet, sweet, racist wingnut money. It won’t be missed.

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An All In One Bleg

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First, for the love of everything holy, someone help Edroso find a job.

Second, Erik Loomis was robbed, and had all his computer equipment and research for his upcoming novels BOOKS YOU DAMNED PEDANTS stolen.

Third, my fraternity boys are running their annual Homecoming raffle. We need to raise money to pay for insurance and mandated travel to National’s conferences, and these kids quite simply don’t have the money. The days of fraternities being nothing but blue bloods are gone (thank goodness), but it means that finances are much more important. If you would like to purchase a chance to win some Omaha steaks, please click here. I’ll be eternally grateful (until next year’s Homecoming), and you might win some steaks, and I’ll post a group photo of the guys thanking you all.

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The Kerning Was a Clue

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This is rather funny. Someone at Vice pretended to post a piece of Lena Dunham’s new book, and Instapundit (but really, he’s a libertarian) and the twitchy wingnuts went postal:

Then a miracle happened: It got retweeted by Instapundit, a conservative blogger who is read by a lot of relatively respectable people. That led to syndicated radio host and frequent FOX News contributor Tammy Bruce picking it up. She has since deleted the post, but she sent my joke along and added one word: “OMG.” All of a sudden, my joke was hopping around the right-wing Twittersphere, only nobody knew I was joking. As far as my new audience was concerned, that Veblen quote was the work of 28-year-old comedy auteur Lena Dunham, a known liberal.

These FOX News viewers were instantly angry with the Not That Kind of Girl author—not that it takes that much to get conservatives pissed off at Dunahm. She needed an editor; she had the audacity to use the word “exigencies”; she just wrote the world’s worst term paper. It was time for her to go down. This was the last straw. Comments generally fell into four categories, all of them convinced of the quote’s veracity. (Note: I reorganized these tweets to aid smoother categorization. They don’t represent the actual timeline.)

They’ll fall for anything that can get them worked up into a lather.

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Stare Too Long Into the Media Funhouse Mirrors…

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… and you end up staring into Nietzsche’s abyss. Dave Weigel starts his new Bloomberg gig by spotlighting “Naomi Wolf and the Search for American Fascism“:

… Wolf didn’t play a huge role in post-Gore Democratic politics, but to my surprise, I met her in 2008 when she spoke at a shambolic, mid-July, brutally hot Ron Paul march in Washington. Wolf had published a treatise called The End of America, which argued that the United States was becoming a fascist state…

All of this is preamble to Wolf’s current obsession, which is coming as a surprise to the people who remembered her from the Clinton years or the Gore campaign. Over the weekend, Wolf took to Facebook to ask why the media was reporting on ISIS’s beheadings of prisoners without asking whether the acts were hoaxed. “It takes five people to stage an event like this,” Wolf wrote at one point. “Two to be ‘parents’ — two to pose for cameras … one in a ninja outfit … and one to contact the media.”…

Partisans no longer want Wolf on their side. On Twitter, the HuffPost Obama endorsement has been circulating to prove that Wolf’s obsessions do not come from the right. True, they don’t — they come from the fringe, which surrounds the right and left, and which is ready to believe that any crisis that spurs new military or government action may have been faked…

It’s best to understand Wolf in that context. She’s not the only person who sees the media hyperventilating about new threats and understands how that could build momentum for wars. She just chooses to fight this by tossing wild accusations and demanding that journalists debunk them. Wolf has been convinced, for at least seven years, that America is slipping into fascism. As an image consultant, she knows that reality can be manipulated to get a rise out of the electorate. She assumes the worst — and complicates the job of people who want to soberly assess the threats of ISIS and the American response.

Aaaand, coming into this discussion from the opposite direction, here’s Bill Maher in Salon defending his “contrarian” stance on Islam:

… I want to ask you how you felt the Ben Affleck/Sam Harris segment went. Did you feel frustrated as it was happening?

I think Sam and I and Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Salman Rushdie and everyone who is basically making the same point, I think we all feel frustrated because I think we feel like the people who are arguing with us are not listening.

We’re liberals! We’re liberals. We’re not crazy tea-baggers, y’know, and so it’s kind of hard to be making this case — based on facts, based on polling, I think based on what everybody really knows… I mean, do the people arguing with us, would they really open a lesbian art gallery in Ramallah? [Laughs] Or Karachi? Or Cairo? I don’t know if they would back up what they’re saying with actions…

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Fracking Idiot

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And Gov. Cuomo just keeps getting worse and worse:

A federal water study commissioned by the Cuomo administration as it weighed a key decision on fracking was edited and delayed by state officials before it was published, a Capital review has found.

The study, originally commissioned by the state in 2011, when the administration was reportedly considering approving fracking on a limited basis, was going to result in a number of politically inconvenient conclusions for Governor Andrew Cuomo, according to an early draft of the report by the U.S. Geological Survey obtained by Capital through a Freedom of Information Act request.

A comparison of the original draft of the study on naturally occurring methane in water wells across the gas-rich Southern Tier with the final version of the report, which came out after extensive communications between the federal agency and Cuomo administration officials, reveals that some of the authors’ original descriptions of environmental and health risks associated with fracking were played down or removed.

The final version of the report also excised a reference to risks associated with gas pipelines and underground storage—a reference which could have complicated the Cuomo administration’s potential support for a number of other controversial energy projects, including a proposed gas storage facility in the Finger Lakes region that local wine makers say could destroy their burgeoning industry.

Seriously, New York, you can do better than this little Nixon.

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