Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

Conservatism: there are people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

Republican speaker of the house Mike Johnson is the bland and smiling face of evil.

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

“They all knew.”

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

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

Marge, god is saying you’re stupid.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

Republican also-rans: four mules fighting over a turnip.

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

Not rolling over. fuck you, make me.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

Many life forms that would benefit from greater intelligence, sadly, do not have it.

There are more Russians standing up to Putin than Republicans.

You know it’s bad when the Project 2025 people have to create training videos on “How To Be Normal”.

All hail the time of the bunny!

The republican speaker is a slippery little devil.

Jesus watching the most hateful people claiming to be his followers

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

Celebrate the fucking wins.

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74Comments

  2. 2.

    srv

    Only if your relatives or acolytes are foreigners:

    JP Chenet is the most popular French wine in the UK

    I drink very classy reds.

  3. 3.

    Origuy

    Now that the Valley Fire in Lake County is just about out (97% contained), the area is starting to rebuild. One way to help is by buying wine from one of the fine Lake County wineries. Steele and Moore Family are two of my favorites. The vineyards in the wine growing region are largely unaffected, but operations were interrupted and many winery employees will have lost their homes.

  4. 4.

    beltane

    Maybe Trump’s acolytes drink that but the Donald would never consume such an inexpensive bottle of wine.

  5. 5.

    Yatsuno

    @beltane: Heh. Wine price is one of the biggest jokes in the world. Price often doesn’t denote either quality or rarity, unless the wine is antique.

  6. 6.

    srv

    Clinton, Petaeus, Panetta… how many clues does it take?

    “I can’t sit here and tell you that if we had done what I and General Petraeus and Secretary Panetta and others had recommended, we would have made more progress on the ground,” Clinton said. “I obviously thought so at the time, because as we look back, the people who were fighting Assad were, you know, they were businesspeople. They were students. They were professionals who had risen up against his tyrannical rule that had really kept so much of Syria under his thumb, and before him, his father’s thumb.”

    “If we had been able to move in, to help organize and support those people on the ground, maybe we could’ve made a difference.” Clinton said. “Well, we’ve got to deal with where we are right now. It’s obviously now a different set of circumstances. And what the Pentagon has been doing hasn’t worked.”

  7. 7.

    Brachiator

    a wine for the wingnut in your family

    Wingnuts probably don’t even drink cheap wine. They think it’s elitist.

    Funny sign, though. I would love to visit that liquor store.

  10. 10.

    srv

    China is in your base with your SF171 & SF86:

    The U.S. suspects that Chinese hackers were behind the breach at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, which exposed the fingerprints of 5.6 million government employees.

    Because the stolen data includes records on State Department employees, the hackers could, by process of elimination, identify embassy personnel who are actually intelligence agents.

    Employees of the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency and Defense Intelligence Agency assigned to China are at risk of being exposed, U.S. intelligence officials determined in recent months. The Washington Post reported Tuesday that the CIA has pulled a number of officers from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.

    You have zero spies.

  13. 13.

    Arclite

    “Bitter clown tears with a hint of suspicion.”

    I assumed Chenet was an alternate spelling of Cheney.

  14. 14.

    Brachiator

    JP Chenet is the most popular French wine in the UK

    Two controversies in France (courtesy of BBC news).

    Them dirty French socia lists, backed by their culture minister, are trying to enforce a regulation that says that 40% of music on the radio must be French. This kinda worked back in 1986, when the rules were first proposed, but now the dumb ass requirement is driving more listeners to Spotify and other streaming services. This should tell them something about the futility of protectionism when alternatives are easy, but they would just give you a Gallic shrug.

    theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2015/sep/30/french-radio-song-quotas-dj-boycott-playlists

    I feel a little more sympathy for the dames pipi, female toilet attendants.

    The ladies – some of whom have been cleaning Paris toilets for more than 30 years – were dismissed after a Dutch “toilet concept” company won the contract to manage the city’s last “manned” loos.

    But now a Paris labour court has said there are no grounds to grant the ladies an immediate hearing – meaning that the case risks dragging on for months without the prospect of reinstatement.

  15. 15.

    trollhattan

    @Yatsuno:
    It’s one of those “well yes, but….” propositions. REALLY expensive wine generally gets there by being good to begin with but then develops a cult and/or reputation and then rich people drive up the price far beyond fair value. That 2010 Ch. Petrus is a damn good wine (do cellar it a decade or two first before drinking) but at $4k it’s not orders of magnitude better than a nice forty-buck Russian River merlot. Conversely, that forty-buck merlot really is at least ten times better than some miserable four-buck merlot made from Central Valley mass-produced grapes at an industrial-scale winery in Ripon. In a proper blind tasting, even a wine noob will be able to tell the difference. Their preference is less predictable.

  19. 19.

    Germy Shoemangler

    @Mustang Bobby: A great recipe for making “foodstamp wine” (as its creator calls it):
    youtube.com/watch?v=3L_JT6GSInw

    Fruit juice, yeast, and a rubber glove on top of the bottle. When the glove is fat (“Like a Mickey Mouse glove”) it’s fermenting. When the glove deflates, it’s ready to serve.

    The guy in the video takes one sip, okay a big gulp actually, and proclaims his faith in human kind is restored.

    Now THAT’S a buzz.

  20. 20.

    M. Bouffant

    Taste guide: Trouser Jazz

    I’m not sure I want to know.

    Oh, turns out it’s a recording:

    The mix of jazz, trip-hop, funk, rap and classical work well together and Mr. Scruff does it all with flawless precision. Songs of note on “Trouser Jazz” are …

  29. 29.

    Brachiator

    @Yatsuno:

    Wine price is one of the biggest jokes in the world. Price often doesn’t denote either quality or rarity

    Such is the case with many things, from wines to Eliot Spitzer’s $3,100 7-diamond escorts.

  30. 30.

    Matt McIrvin

    @burnspbesq: I think they got the idea from an episode of Community. (A very similar app called MeowMeowBeenz transforms the campus into a dystopian hellscape.)

  31. 31.

    Roger Moore

    @beltane:

    Yes, but conspicuous consumption requires that money be pissed away on overrated products.

    It would be nice if rich people spent more of their money on taxes, but at least conspicuous consumption gets it back in circulation. It’s much better than bidding up prices on things that ordinary people actually need, or creating asset bubbles that will pop and destroy the economy.

  34. 34.

    Cervantes

    @burnspbesq:

    “what fcuking moron came up with this idea,

    Two people: a concerned parent and a marketing genius.

    and where to I sign up to get a chance to kick him in the nuts?”

    The two people are both female.

  35. 35.

    Roger Moore

    @burnspbesq:

    “what fcuking moron came up with this idea, and where to I sign up to get a chance to kick him in the nuts?”

    I think you’re supposed to respond by giving him a one star rating. My prediction is that it makes a bit of money as a gag, but doesn’t go anywhere.

  36. 36.

    Helmut Monotreme

    @burnspbesq:

    Note: that’s a semi-rhetorical question, that should really be read as “what fcuking moron came up with this idea, and where to I sign up to get a chance to kick him in the nuts?”

    That’s going to hurt your score, I’m docking you a star for that.

  37. 37.

    Peale

    @burnspbesq: In the long run, it will be better not to know anyone. The internet of things will take over for friends and families understanding what we might need or want and simply just provide for us without ever forcing us to laugh at a bad joke. It’s a win-win all around.

  38. 38.

    Hungry Joe

    The Taliban on the move again in Afghanistan. Does anyone actually believe that we’ll train enough loyal Afghani troops that a stable government can survive when (if we ever) leave? All those Iraqi soldiers just melt away when confronted by what has to be mostly ragtag ISIS fighters, and the same seems to be happening in Afghanistan.

    Does the word “Vietnamization” ring any bells? Our plan was to train/supply the South Vietnamese so that they could stand on their own against the North and the Viet Cong. They, too, melted away.

    When we leave, the rickety structure collapses. Every time. Maybe we should just get the hell out now and let it happen sooner (fewer Americans dead and wounded, for nothing) than later (more Americans dead and wounded, for nothing).

  39. 39.

    Yatsuno

    @trollhattan: I was trying to omit the boxed wine example, mostly because even small wineries are putting some REALLY good wine in boxes today. I was erring more towards your first point than your second. Truly cheap wine is pretty much swill to most folks, but even then it can be passable. Getting above $100 a bottle pushes credulity with me mostly because there really is no process that would be THAT expensive that would justify that cost. And if your grapes are that vintage, you probably should be trying to keep the rare line intact rather than squeezing the fruits and disposing of the seeds.

    And I have had $10 that were sublime and $80 that were total crap. As with all things YMMV.

    @burnspbesq: As a lawyer friend of mine said, o hai der lawsuit!

  40. 40.

    srv

    The Guardian says Roberts will come out swinging in 2016

    After a spate liberal decisions on gay marriage and Obamacare, experts predict the court’s conservative majority will reassert itself ahead of the 2016 election
    …
    if pundits are correct in their interpretation of the 34 cases already on the docket this coming season, then the court’s conservative majority may soon prove itself better at playing the long game than its critics on the right acknowledge.
    …
    Perhaps the strongest example of the right’s careful choice of targets this year is the return of a lawsuit seeking to clip the wings of American labor unions by removing their ability to collect dues from employees, where workplaces have voted in favour of collective bargaining.
    …
    “It seems to me as if this is one where the writing is on the wall,” agrees Kannon Shanmugam, a top supreme court lawyer originally from Kansas who once clerked for conservative hero Justice Antonin Scalia.

    “If I had to guess I would say the court essentially invited a test case,” he adds. “And I tend to think the court already has a pretty good idea of what it is going to do on this issue.”

    Same for Affirmative Action, Voting Rights, Class Action limits and Capital Punishment.

    Roberts may not need Trump to take this country back.

  42. 42.

    Helmut Monotreme

    From now on every interaction with another human being, no matter how trivial will be followed by an email request to go to a third party analytics website to rate your satisfaction with the experience.

  43. 43.

    shell

    With thankks to Monty Python

    ‘This is a bottle with a message in, and the message is BEWARE!. This is not a wine for drinking — this is a wine for laying down and avoiding.’

  44. 44.

    goblue72

    @trollhattan: Agreed. Further, anyone can pick out some anecdotal example of some cheap wine that tasted way better than most cheap wines, or $50 bottle of wine that tastes like Gallo jug wine. None of which disproves general trends which is your average bottles of $9.99 wine just doesn’t taste as good as your average bottle of $49.99 wine. The nose is less pronounced, the fruit will taste more muddied, the terroir will be more non-specific, the oak if present will be more clunky, the finish will be shorter, and the tannins if present will be likely be too sharp.

    Upper end of the range when you get to the luxury bottles, yes indeed gets hard to justify. But if you are the kind of person who can afford to buy a case from Lalou Bize-Leroy, you probably aren’t the kind of person for whom price actually matters all that much. None of which is to say I wouldn’t stab someone in the face to have a chance to taste one of her grand crus from Musigny.

  45. 45.

    Brachiator

    @Hungry Joe:

    The Taliban on the move again in Afghanistan. Does anyone actually believe that we’ll train enough loyal Afghani troops that a stable government can survive when (if we ever) leave?

    No.

    Does the word “Vietnamization” ring any bells? Our plan was to train/supply the South Vietnamese so that they could stand on their own against the North and the Viet Cong. They, too, melted away.

    Vietnam was a little more complex. The ARVN often fought well and overall suffered over 1 million dead and wounded. That ain’t just melting away.

  46. 46.

    goblue72

    @Brachiator: Exactly – the ARVN were an actual military (as successor to the AVN), having been trained by the French like an expeditionary force with cavalry, airborne, a coastal navy, and air force.

    As opposed to whatever it is we’ve “organized” and “trained” the Afghans into. Heavily armed goatherds?

  47. 47.

    trollhattan

    @Yatsuno:
    When I began learning about wine it was possible–not easy but possible–to keep track of the whole shebang though reading and talking to shop owners and restaurateurs. Plus going to wineries. California had a few hundred, there were a few hundred more scattered around the country and my good friend Hugh Johnson kept track of Europe from vintage to vintage.

    Here are the 2014 estimates for California and the US: 4,285 10,417.

    Nobody can keep track of that; it’s quite impossible and I gave up many moons ago. I’m probably within a reasonable drive of two-thirds of the California four-thousand. Would have been a fun challenge at twenty-five.

  48. 48.

    Tim C.

    @Brachiator: Gotta agree and back that up. Vietnam was a two state nation with a coherent national identity. One of the reasons things calmed down within a few decades with the former die-hard communists relaxing into a more China-like “socialist-but-with-heavy-doses-of-capitalism” state is that sense of shared identity. From what I’ve seen, I don’t think that exists in Afgansitan. That said, the result is still the same. Probably all the good that could have been done by US military forces was done by the end of 2002.

  50. 50.

    Brachiator

    @Yatsuno:

    And I have had $10 that were sublime and $80 that were total crap. As with all things YMMV.

    Careful, lest you pull us into another fruitless “wine snobbery, bad,” beer snobbery, good” debate.

  51. 51.

    bystander

    “I can’t sit here and tell you that if we had done what I and General Petraeus and Secretary Panetta and others had recommended, we would have made more progress on the ground,” Clinton said. “I obviously thought so at the time…”

    Clinton should shy away from lamenting the road not taken. Sounds too much like the Friedmanish “if only Bush had done what I said to do and everything would have come out perfectly.” Plus it smacks of disloyalty. And it reminds everyone of her poor judgment in voting for Bush’s debacle.

  52. 52.

    trollhattan

    @goblue72:
    I keep hoping for a better class of friends to share some of that magic stuff with me. Guess I first need to learn to be a friend, myself. :-)

    Know some folks who truly were crying in their beerwine after the Napa quake. Special bottles break as easily as plonk.

  55. 55.

    trollhattan

    Reason number the infinity to love Australia. (Makes up for letting that anti-vaxxer in the door awhile ago.)

    US anti-abortion campaigner Troy Newman has been stopped from flying to Australia after his visa for the country was revoked. He had already flown from Kansas to Colorado, but was denied boarding the next flight to Los Angeles, from where he would have flown to Melbourne.

    Mr Newman was due to speak at events promoted by the group Right to Life Australia.

    He has previously called for the execution of abortion doctors.

    Australian Labor MP Terri Butler, who wrote to Australia’s immigration minister to ask that Mr Newman’s visa be denied, called him an “anti-choice extremist”.

    The minister, Peter Dutton, confirmed to local media that he cancelled the visa amid concerns Mr Newman’s presence could incite violence against abortion doctors and the women using them.

    Mr Newman has called women who have abortions “murderers”.

    Altogether now: he sounds nice.

  56. 56.

    trollhattan

    @Betty Cracker:
    That’s in in a nutshell, isn’t it? Catch and dispatch at Tora Bora; let the Afghans have their country back. And what was it again that prevented us from finishing the job in 2002?

    My understanding is that pre-Soviet invasion, Afghanistan was a pretty nice place.

  57. 57.

    goblue72

    @trollhattan: Heh. Funny – had a little rumbler in the East Bay a month or so ago that woke me up (bed actually swayed a bit). First thought after I bolted up in bed was “shit, is the wine ok?”

  59. 59.

    Cervantes

    @trollhattan:

    My understanding is that pre-Soviet invasion, Afghanistan was a pretty nice place.

    Depends how far back you go. There was a coup in the early ’70s, then Islamist resistance to the new (modernizing) government, then the Soviet invasion.

    If you go back to before that coup, the place was a monarchy — which may have been “pretty nice” for some but perhaps not for others.

  60. 60.

    goblue72

    @trollhattan: Though in full fairness, the Soviets got involved AFTER there was a Socialist coup d’etat of the Afghan King (followed by another Socialist coup d’etat of the coup d’etat). Along with the usual meddling by the Pakistanis. Quite possible the whole country would be mess today even without the Soviet invasion – though probably more closely resembling a complete client-state of Pakistan.

  61. 61.

    Alex

    Today is another Hillary Clinton email day, which means the political twitters are full of screenshots.

    Maybe today will be the smoking gun on Benghazi!

  63. 63.

    Brachiator

    @trollhattan:

    My understanding is that pre-Soviet invasion, Afghanistan was a pretty nice place.

    Uh, not quite. Pre-1978, a significant portion of the country was peaceful and trying to modernize.

    And the Soviets did not exactly invade. The Afghanistan government was a Soviet puppet regime. The Soviets got sucked in when the Afghan government decided to go nuts and up the brutal repression of opponents. Perhaps a reasonable summary.

    In April 1978 Afghanistan’s centrist government, headed by Pres. Mohammad Daud Khan, was overthrown by left-wing military officers led by Nur Mohammad Taraki. Power was thereafter shared by two Marxist-Leninist political groups, the People’s (Khalq) Party and the Banner (Parcham) Party—which had earlier emerged from a single organization, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan—and had reunited in an uneasy coalition shortly before the coup. The new government, which had little popular support, forged close ties with the Soviet Union, launched ruthless purges of all domestic opposition, and began extensive land and social reforms that were bitterly resented by the devoutly Muslim and largely anticommunist population. Insurgencies arose against the government among both tribal and urban groups, and all of these—known collectively as the mujahideen (Arabic mujāhidūn, “those who engage in jihad”)—were Islamic in orientation.

    These uprisings, along with internal fighting and coups within the government between the People’s and Banner factions, prompted the Soviets to invade the country on the night of Dec. 24, 1979, sending in some 30,000 troops and toppling the short-lived presidency of People’s leader Hafizullah Amin. The aim of the Soviet operation was to prop up their new but faltering client state, now headed by Banner leader Babrak Karmal, but Karmal was unable to attain significant popular support. Backed by the United States, the mujahideen rebellion grew, spreading to all parts of the country. The Soviets initially left the suppression of the rebellion to the Afghan army, but the latter was beset by mass desertions and remained largely ineffective throughout the war.

  64. 64.

    Peale

    @bystander: It also reminds me how poor she is at determining what U.S. interests are and makes me think that the best security person the White House had was Robert Gates.

    There were no allies willing to back a “forceful” US response. She’s coming off like someone who can be tricked into war rather easily. I don’t think she wants us to remind of of that. That said, the election is going to come down to “odious immediately” foreign policy and “odious reluctantly” foreign policy.

  66. 66.

    Gin & Tonic

    @srv: Like by targeting airstrikes at civilian populations in areas where ISIS isn’t today? A Russian blogger has geolocated the positions bombed, as according to the Russian Defense Ministry’s video. Results here. The red rectabgle is the ISIS-controlled area. The small black square is the location that the Defense Ministry’s video shows it bombed. I guess hitting anti-Assad rebels is just an unfortunate accident.

  68. 68.

    Brachiator

    @srv:

    Russia is always trying to prevent a mess or cleaning up our mess.

    Huh? Russia is and has been a nation with its own national interests, and often a nation with a chip on its shoulder. There was a time when Russian aristocrats spoke French and did everything they could not to be Russian, even as they flexed their muscles against Napoleon. Russia and Britain vied to impose their will in the Near East as they played their Great Game. The Russians got their ass handed to them by Japan in the Russo-Japanese War.

    As the Soviet Union, the US and the Soviet nation wreaked havoc all over the world in proxy wars. Soviet expansion post WWII had nothing to do with the US. The present mess in Ukraine seeks to re-establish the dominance of the former Russian empire.

    The Afghan invasion was a Russian mess.

    Or were you just being snarky?

  69. 69.

    srv

    @Gin & Tonic: Our bombs only hit bad people. You are beyone naive.

    airwars.org/civcas-2015/

    Well, baby killers like Obama need baby killer enablers like you.

    @Brachiator: Well, we certainly fixed Afghanistan in the last couple of decades… derp.

    proxy wars

    I suppose you’re one of those nuts who still thinks Uncle Ho was working for the Kremlin. protip: Putin is the only rational actor acting in western interests in Syria.

    Tell us about how you and Hillary are going to get rid of ISIS and Assad and it’s all going to be peaches and cream. The only person who can save Merkler from herself is Vlad.

  70. 70.

    Brachiator

    @srv:

    I suppose you’re one of those nuts who still thinks Uncle Ho was working for the Kremlin.

    No.

    protip: Putin is the only rational actor acting in western interests in Syria.

    I will assume that you are joking. Otherwise you are delusional.

    Tell us about how you and Hillary are going to get rid of ISIS and Assad and it’s all going to be peaches and cream.

    I didn’t know that we were supposed to be doing crystal ball gazing about uncertain futures. But this is not relevant to your bad history with respect to Russia and the former Soviet Union.

  73. 73.

    Mnemosyne (iPhone)

    @Brachiator:

    IIRC, occasional commenter dance around in your bones traveled in Afghanistan in the mid-70s during the modernization period and said it was really beautiful. Women mostly wore headscarves (or didn’t) without being hassled and had a lot more freedom to work, go to school, etc.

  74. 74.

    Bill Arnold

    @Mnemosyne (iPhone):
    I have a (field zoologist) cousin who did a wildlife survey in Afghanistan in the mid/late 1970s (with one other guy), and also extensive similar work more recently (including work towards Band-e Amir National Park). He had to worry about his safety a lot less then there, than post-2003.
    My wife has a cousin who traveled through Afghanistan, something to do with (members of) The Living Theatre, late 60s or maybe early 70s, and he has said similar good things about that time.

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