Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Polls are now a reliable indicator of what corporate Republicans want us to think.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

Speaker Mike Johnson is a vile traitor to the House and the Constitution.

When you’re a Republican, they let you do it.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

Every one of the “Roberts Six” lied to get on the court.

A tremendous foreign policy asset… to all of our adversaries.

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

Dear Washington Post, you are the darkness now.

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

Dear media: perhaps we ought to let Donald Trump speak for himself!

Let’s bury these fuckers at the polls 2 years from now.

People really shouldn’t expect the government to help after they watched the GOP drown it in a bathtub.

You cannot shame the shameless.

Reality always gets a vote in the end.

There are no moderate republicans – only extremists and cowards.

No one could have predicted…

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

Giving in to doom is how we fail to fight for ourselves & one another.

You are so fucked. Still, I wish you the best of luck.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Every decision we make has lots of baggage with it, known or unknown.

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Archives for 2014

Open Thread, Everything Is Political Edition

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Well, it got noticed…

Hat tip to valued commentor LAMH36 for the second tweet. As the Washington Post explains it:

The St. Louis Rams made a silent statement about the decision by a Ferguson, Mo., grand jury not to indict police officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old, last August.

The decision has sparked protests around the country, but especially in Ferguson, which is just a few miles from the Rams’ Edward Jones Dome in downtown St. Louis. On Sunday, as they ran onto the field to play the Oakland Raiders, Rams players raised their arms in a “hands up, don’t shoot” gesture…

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Long Read: “Michele Roberts vs. the NBA”

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Old proverb: When somebody says ‘it’s not about the money’, you know it’s about the money. Will Leitch, at NYMag, explains “Why the New Head of the Players Union Is a Hero for Progressive Sports Fans“:

My past is littered with the bones of men who were foolish enough to think I was someone they could sleep on.

Man, what a quote that is. Wouldn’t it feel fantastic to be enough of a badass to say that with a straight face?

The person who actually did? An incredible woman named Michele Roberts, a longtime attorney called, by Washingtonian magazine, “the finest pure trial lawyer in Washington.” Now she is setting her sights on the insular, complacent, owner-friendly world of sports as the new head of the National Basketball Players Association. If you’re looking for the one person most likely to alter the world of sports most dramatically over the next decade, it’s not LeBron James or Roger Goodell. It’s this 58-year-old woman sitting in her office in Harlem, ready to watch the sports world burn.

We’re more than three years away from the earliest point the current NBA collective-bargaining agreement could end, so it was surprising to see the new NBA commissioner, Adam Silver, still with a bit of a halo from the way he handled Donald Sterling, release an angry statement on November 13 about a players-union chief. He had to punch back, fast, because Roberts had come out and, in one of her first interviews since getting the job (with ESPN’s Pablo S. Torre), exploded some of the primary myths surrounding the economics of professional sports — the ones that shield owners from public scrutiny as they extract as much value from the fragile bodies of the athletes they employ before those bodies break down…

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Sunday Evening Douchecanoe Open Thread

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When you want wrong, you can count on Bill Kristol to bring it.

Speaking of Twitter’s ability to showcase small-minded wrong people in their full idiocy, from the Atlantic, on Friday:

Earlier today, it seemed like #BlackStormtrooper might actually eclipse #BlackFriday as a trending topic. That’s because the official trailer that aired Friday for the next film in the Star Wars saga—The Force Awakens, directed by J.J. Abrams and scheduled for release in December 2015—opens on a black man wearing a stormtrooper’s uniform.

The man, who is played by John Boyega (of Attack the Block), pops into view perspiring and panting hard. He is surrounded by desert: in all likelihood the rolling dunes of Tatooine, the homeworld of both Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. And he appears to be in trouble.

Maybe the only people more alarmed than Boyega by his circumstances were commenters surprised by the sight of a black man’s head emerging from the white plate armor of an Imperial stormtrooper. People on Reddit compared the trailer to a scene from the 1987 Mel Brooks spoof Space Balls, a gag that plays up a black stormtrooper as jive talkin’. In other threads and on Twitter, some people registered mere racist shock. But a few corners of the Internet turned to the internal logic of the Star Wars universe to appeal the presence of a black stormtrooper. Didn’t the prequels reveal that all stormtroopers were white clones?

No, they didn’t. In Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, the Jedi Knight Obi-Wan Kenobi travels to the secretive planet of Kamino, where he discovers the existence of a clone army that would feed the so-called Clone Wars and eventually serve as the model for the evil Galactic Empire’s stormtrooper infantry. (Spoiler alert: Don’t watch the prequels.) Those clones weren’t white in any sense of the word. Jango Fett, the bounty hunter who served as the genetic template, was culturally (and perhaps ethnically) a Mandalorian. And the actor who portrays him, Temuera Derek Morrison, is a New Zealand-born person of brown skin and partial Maori descent…

I only ever saw two of the Star Wars movies, but even *I* know Darth Vader is James Earl Jones. (insert winking emoticon here)
***********
Apart from mocking the douchecanoes, what’s on the agenda as we wrap up the weekend?

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Taking the Money and Running

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Not surprising:

The white police officer a grand jury declined to indict last week in the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager has resigned from this city’s Police Department, his lawyer said on Saturday night.

The officer, Darren Wilson, who had worked in the department since 2011, submitted a resignation letter, said Neil J. Bruntrager, the lawyer. In the letter, first published in The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Mr. Wilson said: “It was my hope to continue in police work, but the safety of other police officers and the community are of paramount importance to me. It is my hope that my resignation will allow the community to heal.”

For months, some here had called for Mr. Wilson, 28, to step down or be fired following the killing of Michael Brown and the unrest that followed, in August and then again last Monday, after the grand jury decision was announced.

Killing a black teen, it turns out, is very financially lucrative. He made mid to high six figures for his ABC interview, so we’ll say a half million. He’s received about a half million in donations, and I am sure he will get more. The next logical step is a spot on Faux news and a book deal with Regnery that will probably garner a several million dollar signing bonus. The praise and accolades from scared white shut-ins across the country are free.

The only thing holding him back from really doing the wingnut grifting circuit is that he has to watch what he says until the civil suits and the civil rights suit are over, but I’m betting he can make it a year or two on the million he already has.

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Sunday Morning Garden Yard Chat

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max penelope

Not much (outdoor) gardening left for most of the country. Ever-helpful commentor Max steps into the breach:

It snowed on Wednesday, so Penelope the Demon Dog had to go out, because she likes the snow, even if the other dachshunds do not.

max penelope n cat

max bluejay

As it wasn’t snowing today everyone came out to eat (and maybe play some baseball). The bluejays…

max finch

The whatever it is…

max chickadee

The woodpecker….

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Saturday Night Music Open Thread

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One of the very few arena shows I ever attended was a Bob Seger “farewell” tour stop in Detroit, and I enjoyed myself just fine, even without the help of any chemicals, not even alcohol. (The opening show stunk, but the audience immediately realized the chorus ‘Keep yo’ hanns to yo’seff‘ worked even better as “Get the fvck off the stage!“) Glad to see the man’s still out there, doing his job. Via a Rolling Stone interview:

Bob Seger does things at his own pace. The Detroit icon’s new disc, Ride Out – a country-flavored collection that mixes originals with covers of songs by Steve Earle and John Hiatt – is only his second LP in nearly two decades. But it also includes his most politically outraged song ever, “It’s Your World,” marking Seger’s coming-out as a climate-change activist. “I’m sure this will alienate some fans,” says Seger, who’s about to launch an arena tour. “But I’m 69. What the heck can they do to me now?”…

What made you decide it was time to write about political issues?
There’s a [recent] U.N. report saying that climate change isn’t coming – it’s here right now. It stuns me that people like Marco Rubio, who seems fairly bright, would say climate change isn’t caused by humans.

A lot of your fans probably agree with Rubio.
I’ve been told a good deal of my fan base is Republican. But I don’t think they all deny global warming. I think with a lot of them, cash is king and they want the jobs. I can understand that, but not if it’s gonna wreck the future for our kids.

You cover Steve Earle’s “The Devil’s Right Hand” on this album. Do you see that as an anti-gun song?
I would say that it’s anti-violence. I’ve always liked that song. I saw Waylon Jennings play it at the end of that movie Betrayed. I thought, “Wow, does that ever sum up this movie?” It’s a movie with horrific violence. This extremely radical, anti-government groups are killing black people. It’s a tough movie to watch.

It’s not a country album, but there’s definitely elements of country music sprinkled in there.
Well, I listen to a lot of country music because my wife loves it. It’s permeating the house and there’s some really good songwriting in country. They really work hard at songwriting. If it’s a song you really like, I don’t want to change it. I don’t want to do “Adam and Eve” with an electric guitar. I wrote “Fireman’s Talkin’,” which is another one. You could say that’s country-sounding, but I just called it crazed-bluegrass myself…

How are you adjusting to your kids being out of the house?
They’re not quite out yet. They go to college near us. I’m happy as heck they’re still around because I adore them. I think my daughter is going to be the first to go. She’s 19 and wants to go to Nashville or New York next year for school. That’s going to kill me. She wants to be in music management. You know, I recently took her and her boyfriend to see Eminem and Rihanna. She got to meet a CAA agent there.

How did you enjoy the show?
It was sensational. Em is so good. The agent told us that Rihanna is even bigger than Beyoncé in Europe and Asia…

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