Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

Cancel the cowardly Times and Post and set up an equivalent monthly donation to ProPublica.

Giving up is unforgivable.

Sometimes the world just tells you your cat is here.

This year has been the longest three days of putin’s life.

Republicans: The threats are dire, but my tickets are non-refundable!

We know you aren’t a Democrat but since you seem confused let me help you.

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

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

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

“The defense has a certain level of trust in defendant that the government does not.”

This blog will pay for itself.

If you are still in the gop, you are either an extremist yourself, or in bed with those who are.

People are weird.

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

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

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

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

I desperately hope that, yet again, i am wrong.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

Let me file that under fuck it.

Beware of advice from anyone for whom Democrats are “they” and not “we.”

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Open Thread: Dance of the Sugarplum Patsies

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Under the “I read these idiots so you don’t have to” rubric, Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg View:

The Republican presidential field just gets bigger and bigger. Three early-look lists last week — compiled by Karl Rove, by Politico’s Mike Allen and by conservative talk-show host Steve Deace — identified 26 candidates in total. Yikes!…

Early in 2015, which will be about a year away from the Iowa caucuses, candidates must start establishing campaign organizations, nationally and in the early states. Stronger candidates don’t have to declare formally too soon. But it’s already late for any candidate to begin to campaign.…

Even given the obvious beat-sweetner, count-padding candidates (George Pataki, Carly Fiorina, John Bolton, Peter King — none of them are running, but they can probably offer a reporter a nice lunch and some useful quotes), that’s a lot of bad meat on the hoof.

In the spirit of the holiday season, I’m imagining a GOP Nutcracker Ballet — plenty of marauding mice, toy soldiers, random blossoms, naughty lambies, Engelkinder, and a complete dessert buffet of exotic dancers. With Karl Rove as Herr Drosselmeyer, and the Koch brothers alternating performances as Mother Gingerbread…

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Ohh, the Humanity

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So the FDA is finalizing rules on calorie counts for foods contained in vending machines, movie theatres, etc., which I think most people would consider either a good thing or no big deal. This, however, has deeply upset the glibertarian sect, and you can read their extended plaintive wail here, but what made me laugh out loud was the closing line:

And one final indignity: Every menu must also include this verbiage: “2,000 calories a day is used for general nutrition advice, but calorie needs vary.”

FSM spare us all from this evil.

BTW, a bonus middle finger to the folks at the NY Times for this headline: “F.D.A. to Require Calorie Count, Even for Popcorn at the Movies.”

Do you have any idea how many calories are in a serving of movie popcorn? I’ll tell you. A shitload:

When we microwave a bag of popcorn at home, calorie counts seem generally reasonable, so we assume that the same deal applies in the theater.

Not so.

We took a look at some of the calorie counts from movie-theater popcorn sold at national theater chains via MyFitnessPal, and the results are pretty shocking. For example, a small popcorn, without butter, from AMC weighs in at 225 calories and 11 grams of fat. Crank it up to a medium and you’re up to about 430 calories and 20 grams of fat. A large AMC popcorn, without butter, contains 1,030 calories and 41 grams of fat.

And you shouldn’t be eating microwave popcorn at home, as many of you informed me last year.

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I’ll Tell You Why

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Apparently there is very clear video of the police shooting of the 12 year old in Cleveland over the week-end which is not yet available to the public (nor do I know if it ever will be), but the USA Today write-up contains the following:

Deputy Chief Ed Tomba said the officer, one of two who responded to a dispatcher’s call, was less than 10 feet from Tamir under a gazebo when the confrontation took place He declined to say if the video matches the officer’s description of events, saying a full interview of the officer has not been conducted.

Neither he nor Chief Calvin Williams explained why police have not obtained a full statement from the officer.

I can tell you why- this appears to be the new standard operating procedure within police departments whenever there is a shooting. Remember this:

10 days in which the Ferguson PD Chief COULD have told the nation that St. Louis County was doing the investigation and that Officer Wilson had filed a report, but that it was up to St Louis County PD to release that Incident Report, as they were the investigating police department.

No information as to why a serving Officer in his department was involved in an incident in which he discharged his firearm in the line of Duty and then failed to report the details of the event to anyone.

You wait til your friends collect the evidence, you and your lawyer examine your options, and THEN you issue your statements. Reminds me of the line that I loved in Breakin Bad when they were introducing Saul Goodman to the show:

We don’t know if it was a legit shoot, and it may well have been and the kid was acting threateningly and they legitimately felt in danger, but why take chances? Officer Darren Wilson is a free man, after all.

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Tuesday Evening Open Thread

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Here’s another recent local landscape:

IMG_3405.JPG

It’s been raining all day. The entire Balloon Juice community is lucky I’m otherwise distracted or I’d be going all bitch-kitty on random innocent posters because I’m just generally irritated and disgruntled.

I’ll snap out of it, hopefully before Thursday so I don’t throttle ignorant wingnut relatives who express moronic political opinions while using my awesome homemade rolls to sop up my excellent turkey gravy. Pricks. Open thread.

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Long Watch: The Dingo Really Did Take Her Baby

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Because neither lazy media or hateful mobs are a recent or American-only invention. I never did understand how that line became an all-purpose funny…

…[T]here is nothing laughable about the dingo, Australia’s native wild dog and a predator capable of inflicting considerable harm. Certainly, nothing was funny about the most famous episode involving that animal: the 1980 disappearance of 9-week-old Azaria Chamberlain while her family was camping in the Australian outback. Her mother, Lindy Chamberlain, said that a dingo had entered a tent where the baby lay, and made off with her; the body was never found. An initial inquiry supported her account. But then another inquest was held, and soon Ms. Chamberlain stood accused of having slit Azaria’s throat. Found guilty of murder in 1982, she was sentenced to life in prison, only to be released three years later when new evidence surfaced that absolved both her and her husband, Michael Chamberlain, who had been convicted as an accessory after the fact. Even so, it took nearly three more decades before a coroner, in 2012, finally issued what the now-divorced parents had long sought: full vindication in the form of a death certificate formally ascribing Azaria’s fate to a dingo attack…

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Last season quarterbacking

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Chuck Schumer  via TPM is trying to be a last season quarterback on healthcare reform.

“Unfortunately, Democrats lost the opportunity the American people gave them. We took their mandate and put all of our focus on the wrong problem — health care reform,” the No. 3 Democratic senator, a leader on messaging and policy, told reporters in a speech at the National Press Club in Washington.

Schumer said Obamacare, enacted in March 2010, was a “good bill” that he’s “proud” to have voted for, but he said it “should have come later” after Democrats had adequately addressed the woes of the middle class.

“The plight of uninsured Americans and the hardships caused by unfair insurance company practices certainly needed to be addressed, but it was not the change we were hired to make,” he said. “Americans were crying out for the end to the recession, for better wages and more jobs, not changes in health care….”

 

This argument only makes sense if the choices in the summer of 2009 was healthcare reform or another 2 trillion dollar demand side stimulus package that put massive amounts of money into the hands of people who would quickly spend it.

Is Schumer saying there were votes 60 votes in the Senate and 218 votes in the House for Stimulus Part 2 in July/August 2009? Anything less than that like tweaking the tax code or twerking off for corporate cash repatriations would be neither necessary nor sufficient.

If he is, then the trade-off is worth discussing as there would be a legitimate trade-off of getting the economy growing and presumably trying to save a Democatratic majority in 2010 by having 3.5% to 4% GDP growth and 250,000 jobs/month coming back after a helicopter drop and then attempting healthcare reform or doing healthcare reform and seeing a still lousy economy.

But that was not the reality I remember living in at the time. By mid-summer 2009, stimulus was seen as a one shot deal where most if not all of the Blue Dog caucus could be counted on to vote against anything that helped anyone making under $100,000 a year as that would be “fiscally repsonsible.”  “Debt” was becoming the problem as our entire political structure decided to forget the last eighty years of useful zero-bound macro-economics.
So Chuck, shut the fuck up. Be proud that PPACA is working and it actually is structural reform that changes structures of cost instead of telling people poorer than you that they have had it too easy.

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