Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Text STOP to opt out of updates on war plans.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

“In this country American means white. everybody else has to hyphenate.”

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

Mediocre white men think RFK Jr’s pathetic midlife crisis is inspirational. The bar is set so low for them, it’s subterranean.

I would gladly pay you tuesday for a hamburger today.

Everybody saw this coming.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

Many life forms that would benefit from greater intelligence, sadly, do not have it.

Reality always gets a vote in the end.

I’m starting to think Jesus may have made a mistake saving people with no questions asked.

The press swings at every pitch, we don’t have to.

Weird. Rome has an American Pope and America has a Russian President.

Dumb motherfuckers cannot understand a consequence that most 4 year olds have fully sorted out.

If you cannot answer whether trump lost the 2020 election, you are unfit for office.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

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

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

He really is that stupid.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

They are not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

If rights aren’t universal, they are privilege, not rights.

SCOTUS: It’s not “bribery” unless it comes from the Bribery region of France. Otherwise, it’s merely “sparkling malfeasance”.

When we show up, we win.

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Archives for 2014

Monday Morning Open Thread: The People’s Climate March

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(via NYMag)

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From commentor Skerry, participant:

The People’s Climate March was an astounding success! Estimated 400,000 in NYC marched. So many that they had to start diverting people off the route before the end because the permit was going to expire. We had planned for 200,000. Tremendous!

Also, marches around the globe in Melbourne (30,000), Nepal, Papau New Guinea, Barcelona (2000), Rome, London (40,000), Paris (1,000), Berlin (4000), Rio (5000), Stockholm, Amsterdam, Toronto. A total of 168 “sister” marches. I don’t know the numbers for all the cities. Information is still coming in.

Headlines on some of the major media. Top of the homepage for NYTimes. No mention on Sunday talk shows, Fox, CNN (shocking). Lots of foreign press coverage.

The plan [for Monday] is to “flood” Wall Street. I have no idea how many will participate. This action is a off-shoot from Occupy. I won’t be there, but will be watching closely.

The UN meets Tuesday to discuss and plan for the next big summit in Paris in 2015.

Pictures can be found at peoplesclimate.com and on Flickr.

Oh, and my daughter got a selfie with Al Gore. She was delighted. She marched with the student/youth section. They estimated over 50,000 students covering 10 blocks. We had anticipated 4 blocks. Just a delightful day.


Gillis describes himself as “Reporter for The New York Times, covering the science of climate change and the policy implications of that science”

The AP figures this must be serious — the Rockefellers have announced they’re getting out of the oil business.
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Apart from trying to save the planet, what’s on the agenda for the start of another week?

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Go Piss Up a Rope

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The Arizona Republic editorial staff is very mad at Gabby Giffords for an ad about gun violence:

Do you know what you’re doing?

That’s our question to the Americans for Responsible Solutions PAC after it aired a 30-second ad attacking Martha McSally, GOP candidate for Congress in District 2.

The ad is a nasty piece of work. Demagoguery in heart-rending tones.

A mother with sorrowful eyes appears on screen and tells the real-life story of a family horror. “My daughter was just 19 when she told her boyfriend their relationship was over. And he got a gun and shot her and my husband.”

Portraits emerge of the two victims — a pretty young girl and her father in military dress. The mother tears up. Her voice cracks. “He (the stalker) had threatened her before, and I knew, I just knew.”

Then appears the face of Martha McSally, with words both spoken and superimposed on screen: “Martha McSally opposes making it harder for stalkers to get a gun.”

The ad waves the bloody shirt. Takes the tragic killing of two innocents and drops it at McSally’s feet, as if she were responsible. A murder indictment implied.

But, of course, McSally had nothing to do with these deaths.

The ad is meant to help Democratic incumbent Ron Barber in his bid for re-election. It is emblematic of a wave of tough new advertising the gun-control lobby pushed out after the slaughter of children and teachers at Newtown, Conn. did not result in meaningful gun-control legislation.

The anti-McSally ad is more than hardball politics. It is base and vile. It exploits a family’s tragedy to score cheap political points.

And when the ad makes news because it goes too far, Gabrielle Giffords makes news with it. Because it’s her group.

It’s not demagoguing an issue to point out what happens with easy access to guns. Guns that McSally wants to keep easy to access.

I guess Gabby Giffords is slightly miffed. Getting shot in the head can tend to be a clarifying moment and may make someone testy, you fucking assholes. It would be nice if you were as concerned about the victims of gun violence and those who want to keep flooding our country with easy to access guns as they were with decorum.

Florida, Texas, Arizona, Alabama- it has to be the heat that is making everyone down there nuts.

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Open Sports Thread: And Now for Something Completely Different….

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Via SB Nation. Speaking of which fine site, satirical favorite PFT Commenter now has an additional outlet at Strongtakes.com, where the latest dispatch explains that “Fleshlight should sponsor the NFL since Proctor and Gamble won’t”:

… Just yesterday Jasno La Canfora reported that Proctor and Gamble woudnt be making a bunch of pink stuff for the league to sell for profit’s while pretneding they care about women this year. While this is a huge blow for the NFL, the universe never closes a door without opening another fake entrence that feels just like the real thing.

What better way to make money while literally pretending you love women more then getting a sponsorship with Fleshlight?

Most importantly for the NFL, partnering with a company that is the worlds leading expert on pretending to have sex with fake vaginas would be probly there LEAST mysognistic current business partner. It would show the world that the League is serous about womens rights issues because theres literally no way to use a fleshlight unconsenually. The NFL wold be taking a brave stand in the world of violents against women and it would be a literally stroke of genius…

Warning, NSFW, in case that hadn’t occurred to you.
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Apart from lecturing me about not taking Serious Subjects Seriously, what’s on the agenda as we wrap up the weekend?

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This Will Make Your Blood Boil

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These people need to be fired pronto and never allowed near children again:

It’s an unimaginable horror. A 14-year-old girl with special needs allegedly was raped at school after a teacher’s aide persuaded her to act as bait to catch an accused sexual predator, a fellow student.

“It has essentially devastated her life,” attorney Eric Artrip — who represents the girl and her father — said of the alleged January 2010 incident.

The Department of Justice and U.S. Department of Education filed an amicus brief Wednesday supporting her family’s federal lawsuit against the Madison County School Board in Alabama.

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On January 22, 2010, the boy approached a 14-year-old girl with special needs who had already declined his “recent, repeated propositions” for sex, according to the brief.

“She was not physically or mentally handicapped, although she does qualify for special education classes,” Artrip told CNN.

When the girl told Simpson, she encouraged the girl to “meet (the boy) in the bathroom where teachers could be positioned to ‘catch him in the act’ before anything happened,” according to the brief.

The girl initially refused, but then agreed, according to Artrip.

Simpson and the girl went to Dunaway’s office to explain the plan. Dunaway “did not respond with any advice or directive,” according to the brief.

“If this was problematic for the administration it would have been better to express that on the front end instead of the back end,” said attorney McGriff Belser III, who represents Simpson.

The girl left Dunaway’s office, found the boy in the hallway, and “agreed to meet for sex,” according to the brief.

“Something went wrong,” said Artrip.

Instead of meeting in the boys’ bathroom on the special needs students’ corridor, the boy told the girl to meet him in the sixth-grade boys’ bathroom, in another part of the school, according to the brief.

“No teachers were in the bathroom to intervene,” the brief reads.

“She stalled for time. She continually tried to fight him off but ultimately was anally raped by this young man,” Artrip told CNN.

From my years of watching Law and Order: SVU, I can authoritatively state that the tv police were leery about letting Detective Benson act as bait for a rapist. Got it? It was deemed too risky and unbelievable for Law and Order writers. Not for school administrators in Alabama, who, as the article notes, are busy shredding the boy’s disciplinary files.

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He’s Back

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A very subdued Steve showed up in the garage (I left the garage and the back gate open so he could come home at leisure) as I as heading downstairs to do drive #25 around town with a bag of treats. Apparently the massive rainstorm did it’s magic and he decided to come home.

He is very subdued and hasn’t meowed once (unheard of for him- he never shuts up- he announces himself as he walks into every room normally), so hopefully he is traumatized enough to not pull this crap again.

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Ads

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While we wait for Steve’s return, I wanted to put up a post about something that a lot of people bitch about: ads. There’s not much to do about ads in general – they’re going to be with us in some form or other for the foreseeable future. But a lot of you complain about the creeper factor, since Google pushes out ads based on your browsing behavior.

If that bothers you, here’s a link that will let you opt out of targeted ads, and here’s Google’s explanation of the process.

Open thread.

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