Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.

Dear elected officials: Trump is temporary, dishonor is forever.

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

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

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. keep building.

I am pretty sure these ‘journalists’ were not always such a bootlicking sycophants.

Democracy is not a spectator sport.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Republicans firmly believe having an abortion is a very personal, very private decision between a woman and J.D. Vance.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

There are some who say that there are too many strawmen arguments on this blog.

In my day, never was longer.

Baby steps, because the Republican Party is full of angry babies.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

T R E 4 5 O N

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

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

Well, whatever it is, it’s better than being a Republican.

Narcissists are always shocked to discover other people have agency.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

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

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Open Thread: Nice Try, Dude

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From the Tribune article:

Mayor Rahm Emanuel backed off Thursday from naming a new elite high school after President Barack Obama amid ongoing criticism from African-Americans who felt the honor inappropriate for a school slated for a wealthy, predominantly white part of the Near North Side…

The flap over Barack Obama College Preparatory High School illustrates a tendency by Emanuel to make splashy announcements before working out the details and getting buy-in from other interested parties.

In this instance, criticism began almost as soon as Emanuel unveiled the plan for the new high school and its name with much fanfare in April. Many in the neighborhood where the school was to be built opposed the site because it would have eaten up part of a park and was close to an elementary school where parking was scarce…

What’s more, families living in the swaths of Chicago where students don’t reside near elite high schools chafed at the fact the new school would be built little more than a mile from the top-tier Walter Payton College Preparatory High School. In September 2013, Emanuel announced a $17 million addition at Payton to increase capacity…

Given Mayor Rahm’s current popularity (“A Tribune poll in August found nearly 6 in 10 black voters disapprove of the mayor’s performance, while only about 1 in 4 approve of it”), he’ll probably suggest naming the school to honor Chicago legend Ah-goh Phuck Yusef.

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Parenthood

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I don’t know if I agree with the third stanza of this poem by Philip Larkin, but if there are four lines that contain any more truth about the human condition than this first stanza, I don’t know them:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
    They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
    And add some extra, just for you.

If you don’t think those lines are true, then perhaps you are the kind of person who would beat your kid because your parents did the same to you.

I don’t think my parents are much worse than average, but I spent a lot of time as a parent trying to avoid making some of their same mistakes. I hope my child, nieces and nephews will all do the same if any of them decide to have children. I won’t be offended if they do, because any honest parent acknowledges that being a parent involves making a lot of mistakes.

But don’t let me stop anyone from discussing this ad infinitum and ad nauseum because some ignorant football player is too dumb to understand that some of the parenting he got was a shitty mistake.

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For The Love of God, Don Lemon. Please Stop Talking.

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Don Lemon has stepped in it yet again. This time he has equated disciplining children with disciplining his dog: “You have to teach who’s in control. It doesn’t matter whether it’s fear or what have you, I’m saying this, because it stops you from doing it,” he added. And then he threw in some slavery mentions for good measure.

Please, CNN. Please stop letting this man have a platform. We’d suggest a muzzle, but we realize that people and animals aren’t the same.

Team Blackness also discussed how much a woman’s virginity is worth, the charitable natures of millenials, and Miss America versus conservatives.

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Tree of Liberty Devours Six More Kids

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A convicted felon who was almost certainly not eligible to own a firearm shot and killed his 28-year-old daughter and her six children (ages ranging from three months to 11-years-old) in Bell, Florida yesterday before eating a gun himself. The convicted felon had spent time in jail more than a decade ago for killing his eight-year-old son in a “hunting accident.”

I found it mildly surprising that the latest mass-murdering lunatic spent time in jail for that “hunting accident.” Usually parents who accidentally blow their children away or enable kids to get their hands on guns and kill themselves or others are deemed to have suffered enough.

But this guy was already a felon when he killed his boy, so he went to jail on illegal gun possession charges. How was he able to obtain the guns and ammo necessary to slaughter three generations of his family yesterday? Easy. He lived in Florida. Here’s a roadside sign in Bell:

cycle&gun

I know the area well because I have relatives nearby, and I happen to have that crappy picture (sorry) of the sign on my phone because my sister and I make a game of texting photos of signs with incongruous product groupings (“Bible & Tire,” “Real Estate & Lawnmower Repair,” etc.) for our amusement. Gun dealing seems to be a popular sideline.

Anyway, if this sad incident proves anything, it’s that gun laws are ineffective and should therefore be abolished. Or else only the ones currently on the books should be enforced. Or more good guys should have guns — even baby good guys. A crib-mounted rifle could have stopped this monster.

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That’s it?

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That’s it?  That is all the Senate will do with Obamacare?  Give money to an industry that contributes pretty much to everyone and then continue to fuck the IRS chicken? 

The medical device tax was put in place to raise revenue to cover premium subsidies.  If there is a 1:1 revenue replacement and not a benefit cut or subsidy cut, I would be shocked if this did not pass the Senate with 85 votes.  If there was no replacement, I think it would pass the Senate with 72 or more votes. 

From a system point of view, it is a “So what” symbolic attack on Obamacare that does almost nothing besides deliver either no net stimulus if there are offsets to a zero-rate bound economy or inefficiently delivers a small stimulus to the economy if there are no offsets. 

 

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Friday Morning Open Thread: Bootless

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mccain boots on the ground sargent

(Ben Sargent via GoComics.com)

.

If only. The NYTimes reports:

The Senate gave overwhelming approval on Thursday to the training and arming of Syrian rebels, then fled the Capitol with the House for the fall campaign, sidestepping the debate over the extent of American military action until the lame-duck session of Congress later this year.

The training measure was pushed hard by President Obama, who will now sign it into law. It was tucked into a larger Senate bill to keep the government funded past Sept. 30, a maneuver that leaders of both parties favored to ensure as few defections as possible. The Senate’s 78-to-22 vote, a day after the House passed the measure, masked the serious doubts that some senators had.

The broader debate over Congress’s role in blessing or expanding a new military campaign in the Middle East was one that few on Capitol Hill wanted six weeks before the midterm elections. With memories of the 2002 vote to authorize force in Iraq still haunting Congress, members of both parties — especially those with their eyes on the White House — tried to find a position they would not regret…

After days of often-heated debate, lawmakers approved the ultimate punt for a Congress that has avoided difficult tasks for years. The new authorization to train the moderate Free Syrian Army expires Dec. 11.

In a statement from the White House after the Senate vote, Mr. Obama praised members of both parties. “We are strongest as a nation when the president and Congress work together,” he said, calling it a “hallmark of American foreign policy at its best.”…

In the proud Masshole Commonwealth tradition, both Senators Warren and Markey voted no [warning: autoplay video], as did my House rep.

The generals, of course, are being as reasonable and responsive as they usually are to President Obama’s initiatives…

For the record, I’m willing to accept that President Obama is making the best of a very bad bargain, but I still deplore the whole fustercluck.
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Apart from predicting the worst/making fun of us cynics who always predict the worst (and predicting one of the all-time Friday doc dumps, now that the guilty parties have awarded themselves early recess), what’s on the agenda for the day?

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