Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The republican ‘Pastor’ of the House is an odious authoritarian little creep.

Our messy unity will be our strength.

šŸŽ¶ Those boots were made for mockinā€™ šŸŽµ

When youā€™re a Republican, they let you do it.

Second rate reporter says what?

DeSantis transforming Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

This must be what justice looks like, not vengeful, just peaceful exuberance.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

Well, whatever it is, itā€™s better than being a Republican.

Republicans donā€™t lie to be believed, they lie to be repeated.

One of our two political parties is a cult whose leader admires Vladimir Putin.

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

ā€œThe difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.ā€

Republicans donā€™t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

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

Letā€™s not be the monsters we hate.

Trump should be leading, not lying.

T R E 4 5 O N

ā€œUntil such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on.ā€

A norm that restrains only one side really is not a norm ā€“ it’s a trap.

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

Tick tock motherfuckers!

Iā€™ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesnā€™t seem to do any good.

You are here: Home / Elections / Election 2016 / Late Night Open Thread: Hiding Out from the Tough Ones

Late Night Open Thread: Hiding Out from the Tough Ones

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I rag on New Hampshire — it’s a proud local tradition! — but this makes me Shake My Head. The current crop of GOP chickenhearts are avoiding the Granite State in order to tonguebathe Steve “Pig Muck” King and spread smarm like holy oil at the Dixie Church of the Whited Sepulcher, per the Washington Post:

… New Hampshire Republicans say they have not seen much of Walker ā€” or Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who skipped a candidate forum here on Monday night. Another forum-skipper was real estate magnate Donald Trump, who is leading in the polls and only recently started taking regular trips to the state.

Former Florida governor Jeb Bush is making a heavy push in New Hampshire [ed. note: it’s a convenient driving distance from the Bush Kennebunk summer compound], although some of the most frequent guests in the state are those in the GOP raceā€™s second tier ā€” including New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, former New York governor George Pataki, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) and former Hewlett-Packard executive Carly Fiorina…

Meanwhile, several Southern states are relishing early visits from a host of presidential contenders. These voters are much less accustomed to seeing presidential candidates stop by their favorite breakfast joints and much more likely to ask for photos or hugs than to press for pithy answers to nuanced policy questions. The region has many wealthy Republican donors, lawmakers are eager to help and liberal activists havenā€™t spent decades studying ways to capitalize on presidential candidate visits. Plus, the local media are more likely to devote entire articles or evening news segments to a candidateā€™s visit…

… In early July, Huckabee and Cruz were both at the same mega-church in Milner, a tiny town in middle-of-nowhere central Georgia. Soon after, Walker held a private fundraiser in Atlanta, where several attendees said they were looking forward to a series of such events this summer, including a visit from Bush. Many candidates will be in Atlanta this weekend for the RedState Gathering, sponsored by the popular conservative RedState Web site.

Cruz is focusing heavily on Iowa and the South, and on Friday, he will kick off a seven-day, 20-stop bus tour of eight Southern states aimed at galvanizing conservatives. A news release announcing his trip noted that the region is home to 356 of the 1,236 delegates who will decide the Republican nominee…

Independents are allowed to vote in the New Hampshire primary and the political mood is much more moderate, especially on social issues such as same-sex marriage and abortion rights, where Walker has been staking out very conservative positions. Voters here are known for being stubbornly opinionated and carry their first-in-the-nation primary responsibility with a regal air. So the chances of Walker getting tripped up here are higher…

If they can’t summon the fortitude to face down a couple of pranksters, how are any of these Repub cowards going to back up their brags about “bringing back respect for America on the global stage”?

Reader Interactions

75Comments

  1. 1.

    Kropadope

    I rag on New Hampshire ā€” itā€™s a proud local tradtion!

    The only New England state my Massholes associates and I tend to rag on is Connecticut.

  3. 3.

    Kropadope

    @Anne Laurie: That’s one of the main focuses of said ragging. Also, per Glen Close, “Where will no one notice a town full of robots? Connecticut!”

  4. 4.

    Kropadope

    If they canā€™t summon the fortitude to face down a couple of pranksters

    The bait-and-switch with that sign was so funny. One premise of the article was spot-on, first in the nation status has these states thinking very deeply about how to interact with the presidential candidates.

    Meanwhile, several Southern states are relishing early visits from a host of presidential contenders

    I like that they added a southern and a western state to the early bloc. Still, I’d rather the early voting status rotated. I’ve only ever had one contested presidential primary since I came of age.

  5. 5.

    Tom Q

    It’s interesting: the press, in its relentless search for a Not-Totally-Crazy Republican, will not penalize a GOPer (i.e., Jeb Bush) for essentially skipping Iowa, because of its far-right-Christian lean. But they’ll rag on candidates for skipping NH, which candidates do for the opposite reason — because the heavy independent vote means it will favor a closer-to-the-center winner than just about any other primary on the calendar.

    I’d say Bush pretty much HAS to win NH, or the rationale for his candidacy collapses. It makes sense for him to blanket the state. For candidates like Walker or Cruz, not winning there is a) likely and b) insignificant — they can head right to South Carolina, where the target is considerably easier to hit.

  6. 6.

    Kropadope

    @Tom Q:

    Itā€™s interesting: the press, in its relentless search for a Not-Totally-Crazy Republican,

    will manufacture one.

  7. 7.

    Origuy

    A couple of years before the Compaq-HP merger, Compaq bought out Digital Equipment Corporation. DEC had a big operation in New Hampshire as well as Massachusetts. I think there are a lot of people there who won’t remember Carly fondly.

  8. 8.

    Morzer

    Eh, it’s the New Hamsters running on their little crazy, grifter wheel.

    “Live fer free or die whining.”

  11. 11.

    J R in WV

    @Origuy:

    This is true, but, really, DEC committed suicide when Ken Olsen – founder and owner of DEC, said “Who would want a computer at home?” He was serious, not thinking of wider purposes for computers outside strictly commercial purposes.

    So DEC, while a leader in small commercial mini-computers (which were the first computers I used, keying commands into the machine in octal or hexadecimal, and loading programs from perforated tape) really missed the boat on personal computers running CP/M or DOS at home.

    I guess it did seem pretty unlikely that anyone could make computers do interesting things like games, which back in the beginning of personal computers were text based adventures, rather than real action shoot ’em up games with action on the screen.

    Hard to imagine today, but I remember getting game feedback like “You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike!” Thrilling action in the cave, where you could collect powerful objects, in text, with no figures moving on the screen at all, just texts telling a story and you, the player entering moves with text-based commands. like “Pick it up!” Riveting action in slow-mo text!

    So I don’t think you can blame Carly for that, although there’s plenty of damage at H-P AND Compaq, where my brother worked hard to make the merger smooth, and then got laid off for his hard work, after getting a personal pat on the back from Carly, patted bye-bye, a couple of weeks later. Totally incompetent bitch seems to be the general opinion of all her management decisions.

    Always glad to see late night B-J participants, ready to chat if you are at 1 or 2 or 3 am!

  13. 13.

    Tree With Water

    @Mike J: That’s an interesting map. Can anyone tell me where “upstate” New York begins? I’ve wondered about that for a long time. The term figures prominently in books, film, and politics, but it’s also inexact.

  14. 14.

    ruemara

    I’m about to retire to bed and either read more from the Blue Fairy book, the follow-up to the Last Policeman or the e-reader for Literature and the Metaphoric Universe in the Mind (sometimes I get scholarly up in this bitch). Wondering if I should stop for 15 minutes and start some beer bread overnight dough.

    @Tree With Water: It begins where civilization ends, somewhere around White Plains.

  15. 15.

    srv

    Give New Hampshire to Christie, they can punch each other in the face.

    @Origuy: I remember the day the Compaq-Gateway deal fell through, so King’s part of Iowa should be reminded of that.

  16. 16.

    Morzer

    @Tree With Water:

    Can anyone tell me where ā€œupstateā€ New York begins?

    Turn right when you get to the large pile of bones that was the reasonable Republican demographic.

  17. 17.

    Amir Khalid

    @Tree With Water:
    Never been there but once, but I’ve always understood the term “upstate” to mean all points north of New York City — there being, of course, nothing farther “downstate” than (i.e. to the south of) NYC.

  18. 18.

    Anne Laurie

    @Tree With Water: Ruemara’s right, of course; ‘Upstate New York’ is everything beyond the NYC exurbs, where (according to the NYCers I grew up among) the appleknockers eke out a living fornicating their cows, their daughters, and the taxpayers of NYC.

    The only thing more entertaining (if you have an NYC sensibility) than watching a LunGuylander and a Joiseyite competing for Urban Style Points is watching both of them turn on an Albany/Buffalo/Syracuse inhabitant who tries to pretend to be a “New Yorker”…

  25. 25.

    Origuy

    @J R in WV: Certainly DEC missed the personal computer market, but I don’t think they had a shot at it. I worked on PDP-11s at the Psych department at Illinois. PDPs and Vaxes were all over the campus in the mid 70s, and VMS had a loyal following right up into the 2000s. I was at Compaq when DEC was acquired; I came from Tandem. The Bay Area is full of ex-HPers, Carly didn’t have a chance there.

  28. 28.

    daverave

    In high school in NJ, upstate meant crossing the line into Rockland County to avail ourselves of the 18 y.o. drinking age with our bogus IDs back when NJ still required that I be a 21 y.o. Would probably be frowned upon these days, and for good reason.

    Needless to say, when I went to college, it was yet another trip upstate, albeit to the armpit of the nation, Troy.

  29. 29.

    J R in WV

    @Origuy:

    I think their whole industrial design concept was such that microcomputers were somehow impossible for them to think about correctly.

    I started out running 2 PDP/11s with a common backplane (if I remember 40-odd year old technology nomenclature correctly) and then used a VAX star some as a CS student at University. Mostly, though, we used an Amdahl emulating an IBM mainframe, since that was a very common business environment.

    I agree that DEC just wasn’t built to get int a completely different environment, and that there wasn’t much in common with what they did and the PC world at the time. Did you ever read “Birth of a New Machine” by Tracy Kidder, about a crash project to complete a new computer architecture on a very competitive schedule. Interesting book about high pressure work environments, really.

    Well, gonna go back to bed, have a early (for me) day tomorrow with Dr appt in the AM and physical therapy in the afternoon. Just hoping they don’t interfere with each other much. The Dr is inclined to give everyone all the time they need, and thus is always behind schedule. That’s a good thing, of course, as I will get all the time I need, too. But then I also need the therapy for my new shoulder…

  30. 30.

    Origuy

    @J R in WV: Yes, I read Soul of a New Machine. Data General, not DEC, but I think the corporate culture was the same. I interviewed with Digital my senior year, 1978. They flew me out to Boston and had me drive to Maynard and Nashua. I also interviewed in Rochester, MN with IBM, but I ended up with Control Data in Sunnyvale.

    Good luck with the PT.

  32. 32.

    Anne Laurie

    @Origuy:

    Does Long Island count as upstate? I suspect not.

    At least to the Long Islanders it doesn’t!

    Amir’s right about the map; if you look at the shape of NY state, everything but Long Island is “up” from NYC.

  33. 33.

    Steeplejack

    @Morzer:

    Everybody has gone tone-deaf around here lately. Major^4 was asking last night if he was ā€œthe only one who remembers the ā€˜you know who elseā€™ formulation.ā€ And we can barely get through a single thread, much less a day, without one of those.

    I liked ā€œBuffalovian,ā€ by the way. But thatā€™s because it hits my ā€œShavianā€ hot button. I have waited years to reference (Shawā€™s) Shavian wit and have never had the chance. (This doesnā€™t count.)

    There was a traffic-helicopter guy in Atlanta years ago who livened up his reports with funny demonyms, e.g., Snellvillains from Snellville and Villa Ricardos from Villa Rica (pronounced ā€œVill-uh Rick-uh,ā€ of course).

    Do any TV stations still do traffic helicopter stuff? I guess itā€™s all CCTV and computers now.

  34. 34.

    J R in WV

    @Origuy:

    I’ve been doing well, this is the second shoulder replacement, it’s harder than the first one which was less traumatic from the surgery. This one was harsh, more painkillers, swelling, etc.

    But the therapist is a good guy, sense of humor, he stretches my arm up slowly until I squeak, then I tell him something funny to make him take longer before the next stretch. Only been 2 weeks so far this time, long way to go!

    But the joint pain now is recovering from the surgery, nothing like as bad as the pain which caused the surgery, bone-on-bone with all the cartilage gone – really bad. Replacement surgeries like 2 miracles, so far.

    I’m retired now, just linux, no MS, no Apple. I like it better… like old unix with real windows on top.

  35. 35.

    Tissue Thin Pseudonym

    I thought that both the Democratic and Republican primaries in each state were held on the same day, but I just looked at the schedule. In New Hampshire, the Democratic primary is listed as being on 9 February, 2016, but the Republican one is listed for 9 Thermidor, Year II. What gives?

  39. 39.

    Tissue Thin Pseudonym

    So how about the news that Bill Clinton was egging Trump on to join the GOP race? Is it brilliant because Clinton lobbed an unpinned grenade into the primaries, or is it brilliant because Trump is in on the joke and playing double agent?

  44. 44.

    Steeplejack

    @Anne Laurie:

    I think thereā€™s a band of southern New York west of New York City thatā€™s not really ā€œupstate,ā€ at least to the people who live there. One of my college roommates was from Callicoon, right on the border with Pennsylvania, and he didnā€™t think of Callicoon (or Sullivan County) as ā€œupstate.ā€

    Maybe if you continue the straight line of the southern border of New York from the western end, at about Erie, PA, over to merge into the northern border of Connecticut with Massachusetts, cutting off the pouch that contains New York City and its exurbs, then you might have a good approximation of ā€œupstate.ā€ That would put Poughkeepsie below the line and Kingston, Saugerties and Woodstock right on the edge.

    There is a Wikipedia article on ā€œUpstate New York,ā€ but it seems, uh, not rigorous, letā€™s say.

    Edmund Wilson wrote a book called Upstate (1971), which might shed some light (I havenā€™t read it), but the subtitle, ā€œRecords and Recollections of Northern New York,ā€ is unpromising. His upstate home was in Talcottville, which is pretty far north (40 miles above Utica), so he might have had a strict view of what constitutes ā€œupstate.ā€

    Iā€™m not a native New Yorker and have never lived there, so Iā€™ll yield to any natives who weigh in. I think the New York City perspective has been well covered above. LOL.

  45. 45.

    Tissue Thin Pseudonym

    @Origuy: And the beginning of a whole new wave of executions, starting with Robespierre and Saint-Just.

  48. 48.

    Betty Cracker

    I’m finally watching PBO’s speech about the Iran deal. It’s good. He’s anticipating the GOP-Likud objections and pre-bunking them ably.

  53. 53.

    Tissue Thin Pseudonym

    It’s actually been a crappy day. Second, I found out that I fucked up an alarm last night. Fortunately, it wasn’t a fuck up in the sense that it caused a security problem, but it was a fuck up that indicated that I don’t know proper policies. It’s partially mitigated by the fact that the written post orders are way out of date, and I followed them. Only partially, though, because I’ve been told that they’re out of date and not to follow them.

    First, my car won’t start. I’m pretty sure it’s the alternator. It’s sitting in the parking lot of the Zantigo’s Fridley, which at least meant that my cab ride to and from work is only half as long and expensive as it would be if it hadn’t started at home. The upside is that I already have an appointment scheduled at Good Carma to have some other issues fixed. The downside is that the appointment isn’t until next Thursday, so I’m looking at the expense of renting a car for a week until they can look at it.

  54. 54.

    Steeplejack

    @Tissue Thin Pseudonym:

    Bummer, dude. Sorry about the bad news. Don’t let it get you down, and don’t blame yourself too much. Outdated written policies and oral replacements aren’t a good combination.

  55. 55.

    Ian

    I rag on New Hampshire ā€” itā€™s a proud local tradition!

    So is the confederate flag. Get the fuck over your biases.

  57. 57.

    Mustang Bobby

    Enjoy the debate, everyone. I’m getting out of the country, heading for Canada for some real theatre at Stratford, Ontario. The first play I’m seeing is Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist where a bunch of con men rip off some greedy rich people. Hmmm.

    Canada is also in the throes of an election, but theirs will mercifully be over in October while ours is just getting started.

  59. 59.

    ThresherK (GPad)

    @Steeplejack: Lifelong Nutmegger here, and I went all the way to Topsfield to find my eventual wife, who turned out to be Worcester born ‘n raised.

    Some say the dividing line is the CT river. There are a few iterations of the Yankee v. Red Sox map going around, including one that goes to a town-by-town level at the NYT. (No link, sorry.)

    I am holding out for a zipcode level map.

    And all the folks in the Berkshires are inundated with way too many Yankee fans during the summer, they tell me.

  62. 62.

    Randy P

    @Steeplejack: You are correct. I grew up in Syracuse and we were alternately irritated and amused by the NYC view of “upstate” starting somewhere around the end of the subway lines.

    I don’t know that a defined mental border exists but to me it would be somewhere around 3 hours from NYC. The Erie Canal. The Adirondacks.

    Poughkeepsie is definitely downstate (a term City residents don’t use I think) and Albany is borderline.

  64. 64.

    Just One More Canuck

    @Mustang Bobby: Enjoy Stratford

    Yes our election will be over in October, but we’ve been suffering through attack ads for what seems like forever, especially the one that focusses on Justin Trudeau’s hair

  65. 65.

    Denali

    Even though Upstate seems to includes everything outside of greater metropolitan New York, there is a large area to the south generally known as a Southern Tier. And I lived in New York many years without knowing that it extended east of the Hudson River. To the north, one crosses the lake and lands in Vermont; seems only logical that crossing the river should put you in Massatusetts.

  69. 69.

    Cervantes

    @Randy P:

    I donā€™t know that a defined mental border exists but to me it would be somewhere around 3 hours from NYC. The Erie Canal. The Adirondacks. Poughkeepsie is definitely downstate [ā€¦] and Albany is borderline.

    Yes.

  70. 70.

    Another Holocene Human

    @Origuy: I remember. God. DEC was recruiting at my college campus just before ….

    (It wasn’t a direction I wanted to go but I did like their products. Still, kind of that someone walked over your grave feeling anyway.)

  72. 72.

    Another Holocene Human

    @FlyingToaster:

    and if you have a problem, hereā€™s a bus ticket to Boston, loser.

    And it has to be a bus ticket, because NH refuses to chuck even a few pennies towards bringing in commuter rail. Even tiny RI could manage that, but not NH.

    I never understood why MA paid all that money to fix up the state highway right up to the NH line to make it easier for those asshats to leach, though. Let them sit in traffic.

  73. 73.

    Another Holocene Human

    @daverave: Can’t resist telling this story. Back when my dad was in high school, one of his classmates’ mom was friends with his mom on the block. His classmate wrecked a car, so his mom bought him a Cadillac so at least he’d be safe. My grandmother asked “What about the rest of us?”

    So he had wrecked his car coming home from a trip to “the library”. The drinking age in IL was 21, but in Wisconsin it was 18. He had … you get the drift.

  74. 74.

    Another Holocene Human

    @Origuy: Damn, that went over my head. Good one, though. (For some reason I thought it was a reference to the GOP having taken the Senate in 2014.)

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