Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
The Bucs are hanging in there vs. the Cam Newton-less Panthers. They need to roll over and piddle on their belly already. There’s fierce competition for last place-first draft pick, and if they aren’t careful, they’re going to blow it.
What’s the sporting news in your neck o’ the woods?
Star Wars 7 will feature an aging Luke Skywalker who rants about his right to own lightsabers & uses racial slurs to describe Ewoks
— Brian Gaar (@briangaar) December 11, 2014
.
‘Tis the season of embarrassing party incidents. Per the NY Post:
An event with Timothy Cardinal Dolan to preserve the art of St. Patrick’s Cathedral came to a crashing end Thursday when an important guest — Republican state chairman Ed Cox — accidentally knocked over a valuable antique vase, smashing it to pieces.
Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan hosted the breakfast for New York notables including Home Depot billionaire Ken Langone and Blackstone’s John Studzinski in the bank’s swanky, art-filled corporate offices at One Bryant Park on Sixth Avenue…
…[A] witness reports, “the peace was shattered when Ed Cox accidentally knocked over a 4-foot-tall antique vase in the center of the room. It fell to the floor and shattered with a terrible, piercing, sound which stopped the entire room.” The source added, “Ed nervously tried to edge away from the wreckage while the event staff looked mortified. One exclaimed, ‘Oh my God, that was a $70,000 vase!’ ”…
A spokesman for the not-usually clumsy Cox, the son-in-law of President Richard Nixon, told us, “I can confirm that it did happen. The vase was placed on a very small table, and after it broke, Bank of America officials apologized to Mr. Cox. They said this had happened before — other items that were placed on that table had previously been broken.
“No one is ever happy when a vase falls and breaks, especially a nice vase,” Cox’s rep added. “But they did not ask him to pay for the item. They acknowledged the placement of the vase was ill-advised.”
Somewhere in Hell, Tricky Dick is laughing. Guess making your victims apologize has become the new Repub normal.
Watching Up With Steve Kornacki because I refuse to watch the bobbleheads and the Cheney tonguebathing, so that means that MSNBC has two viewers this morning- me and Steve’s mom. Both of us want to tell him to comb his hair. At any rate, one large segment was devoted to how mad many Republicans are at Ted Cruz, and Steve repeatedly mentioned that Mitch McConnell, when asked about his caucus and whether he was mad at them, answered with a “wink and a smile.” This line of thinking tracks nicely with this TPM piece:
Other members of the Senate fumed Saturday over objections by Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Mike Lee (R-UT) that held up a $1.1 trillion omnibus bill meant to keep the government open. The objection was fueled by the two conservatives’ desire to fight President Barack Obama’s executive action on immigration.
The objections by Cruz and Lee mean that the Senate must slog through procedural votes Saturday on nominees and also vote to end a filibuster on the omnibus bill at 1 a.m. on Sunday.
It was too much for Democrats and even Republicans to bite their tongues over.
The TPM goes on to offer up several sternly worded tweets so as to prove how angry people are at Cruz and Lee and their antics.
It’s all bullocks. The Republicans love Cruz. Notice what really got no attention whatsoever in the Senate? Elizabeth Warren, and something really worth fighting for in the CROMNIBUS, the big giveaway to Citigroup and friends (for a primer on why this was so important to them besides oodles of money, read this– it’s all about the credit ratings). Instead of having a serious debate about that, the conversation tilted to the right on immigration, and the progressive concerns were squelched as the right and center right banded together to fend off the “lunatic right,” and CROMNIBUS was passed and everyone not named Jamie Dimon gets screwed.
Cruz gets attention because McConnell and company want him to get attention, as he shifts the conversation to the right, making the already unpalatable right wing position seem palatable by comparison. You’d think watching how the Republicans did the bait and switch during the ACA debate, always making more and more demands while never being able to find a way to vote for the bill they helped craft would have clued some of our media in.
It hasn’t.
We’ve lived through worse years, it seems.
What’s on the agenda for the day?
Sunday Morning Open Thread: Life During WartimePost + Comments (88)
This year’s Satan Sandwich moves down the conveyor belt. Per the Washington Post, industry paper for the company town where politics is their manufactured good:
The Senate approved a sweeping $1.1 trillion spending bill Saturday night to fund most of the federal government through the next fiscal year.
A small group of conservatives, led by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), had sought to slow debate on the bill by raising concerns with Obama’s immigration policy, forcing a marathon weekend session. The move infuriated their colleagues, particularly Republicans who complained that forcing senators to stay in session produced nothing positive for the GOP and only helped Democrats in their bid to approve a final batch of Obama’s nominees for government posts.
For several hours Saturday, senators held procedural votes to begin the process of confirming dozens of Obama’s nominees for federal judgeships and top positions at the State Department and other agencies…
Prolonged debate on the spending bill came after Cruz and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) late Friday night derailed a carefully crafted plan between party leaders to allow senators to go home for the weekend and return Monday to approve the spending agreement. The pair had sought to force a vote that essentially would block federal agencies from implementing the immigration policy changes ordered by Obama last month.
But Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) blocked their request and angrily clashed with them on the Senate floor, ensuring that debate on the spending bill would spill into Saturday.
Democrats said the setback was an especially embarrassing blow to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who is slated to lead the chamber next year and has sought to complete unfinished business before GOP control begins. Confident that he had a deal with Reid, McConnell left the Capitol before 9:30 p.m. Friday, telling reporters as he stepped into an elevator: “See you Monday.”…
Republicans later consented to allowing up-or-down votes on 24 nominees, including Antony Blinken to serve as a deputy secretary of state and Vivek Murthy to serve as surgeon general. The votes are scheduled to begin Monday morning.
If the Senate had voted Monday on the spending bill under the original agreement, Reid would have had to wait until Monday evening to start processing nominees, and Democrats feared that as the holidays drew closer, more of their ranks would have left town before confirming all the nominees. But with Cruz and Lee’s actions, Democrats were able to accelerate the confirmation process and made it far more likely they could approve every contentious nominee that GOP senators had been blocking…
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) called her colleagues’ tactics “unfortunate” and “counterproductive.”
“This reminds me very much of the shutdown last year, where the strategy made absolutely no sense,” she said, adding that until Saturday, liberals were being faulted for holding up the spending bill. “Now, I guess the blame will be shared,” she said…
The 1,603-page spending agreement will fund most of the federal government until the end of the fiscal year in September. But it funds the Department of Homeland Security only until the end of February, setting up a fight with the Obama administration in the coming weeks over the future of the nation’s immigration policy.
In addition to authorizing $1.1 trillion in federal spending, the bill includes restrictions on the District of Columbia as it attempts to legalize the possession of marijuana. The legislation also weakens some Wall Street regulations and loosens campaign donation limits so that wealthy couples could give three times the maximum to the national political parties…
Ugh ugh UGH. Speaking of small consolations, I guess we’ll have to settle for (further) embarrassing McConnell, and also giving Tailgunner Ted Cruz one more chance to make even the people who should be on his side hate him a little more.
Open Thread: The ‘Cromnibus’ Has Passed Another HurdlePost + Comments (70)
(Arlo & Janis via GoComics.com)
‘Tis the season, when in the spirit of love & connection we prepare to share time with friends and family and experience the true meaning of the holidays. Which may turn out to be “Someday, I’ll be able to share this as a funny story.”
My personal go-to is the Xmas eve when, during the Chinese-restaurant dinner that had become a tradition with my dad after the divorce, Number One Son made a feint on Number Two Son’s portion of sea bass and got forked in the back of the hand. The wound puffed up so alarmingly that it was decided Number One needed a tetanus shot. Bad enough to spend Xmas eve at the emergency room, but my old man was so pissed at all of us that he almost got himself committed to the psych ward because when asked for “cause of injury” he kept yelling “TINY TWIN VAMPIRES!” Remember, folks, an ER orderly will have no sense of humor on Xmas eve…
(h/t commentor Tommy)
Go Army! Beat Navy!
Oh, btw, for those of you who have Showitallthetime, there is going to be a documentary on the making of Illmatic tonight at 7:45. Very much looking forward to it.