Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

This really is a full service blog.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

Why did Dr. Oz lose? well, according to the exit polls, it’s because Fetterman won.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

The willow is too close to the house.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

Infrastructure week. at last.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

“More of this”, i said to the dog.

Today’s GOP: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

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

You are here: Home / Past Elections / Election 2016 / She’s Got the Electrolytes We Need

Reader Interactions

93Comments

  1. 1.

    SiubhanDuinne

    I honestly didn’t think I’d ever see anything that would tempt me to take Renée Elmers’ side.

  2. 2.

    Villago Delenda Est

    As I mentioned over at Wonkette, it seems tea bagger women are as concerned about their small dicks as the men are.

  3. 3.

    catclub

    The irony is that she is running against Renee Ellmers, who was already a wacky far right loon. But not loony enough.

  9. 9.

    gogol's wife

    My employer just sent out an e-mail suggesting we watch a video about what to do in an “active-shooter” situation. RUN — HIDE — FIGHT is the answer. Great.

  11. 11.

    Mnemosyne (iPhone)

    I’m going to treat this as an open thread for a minute:

    I think most of us are horrified by the bombing of the MSF hospital in Afghanistan. I can donate $100 when I get paid tomorrow. Anyone else?

    Also, do we want to do it as an “in honor of” donation to group them together?

  14. 14.

    David Koch

    “RINO Renee” Ellmers is really right wing. Her sin was she thought rape victims should have reproductive rights. She was all for a House ban on abortions after 20 weeks (which is radical and reactionary by itself), but she wouldn’t go along with the Teabag Taliban effort to eliminate the rape exception, which made her a heretic.

  16. 16.

    Mnemosyne (iPhone)

    @David Koch:

    Well, if you allow women a rape exception, then they’ll just be cryin rape all the time to get those sweet, sweet abortions. And we all know women can’t get pregnant from a real rape, because their bodies can shut that down. A Republican congressman told me so.
    /snark, in case I wasn’t clear enough

  17. 17.

    MattF

    Daly puts her fingers into an electrical socket every morning and has a chat with God! And His messenger Ted!

  20. 20.

    Amir Khalid

    I know jack squat about firearms. Could you really bring down a rhino with that rifle?

  21. 21.

    JasonF

    That’s … that’s like a parody or something, right? I mean it just hits so many right-wing kook talking points that it’s got to be a wacky lampoon, not a sincere statement.

  22. 22.

    karen marie

    @David Koch: No, what made her a heretic was stepping out of line so the public got an idea of what total shitweasels the teabaggers in congress are.

  23. 23.

    Eric S.

    @gogol’s wife: My employer had classes just about a year ago. Same thing: run, hide, fight. They did it right after they moved us to a new, open-format office where there are very, very few doors and all the conference rooms have glass walls. There’s no hiding and even if you can secure a conference room door the shooter has a gun and you’re behind a glass wall.

  25. 25.

    dedc79

    “And voted to let homosexuals pretend they’re married…”

    This is something I’ve been wondering about, because she’s far from the only republican to have said something along those lines. If they think it’s all just pretend, then why do they care?

  28. 28.

    Elizabelle

    Memo to self: never live in a district where someone like Kay Daly is a viable candidate.

  29. 29.

    Sophist

    @catclub:

    The irony is that she is running against Renee Ellmers, who was already a wacky far right loon. But not loony enough.

    That’s not irony, that’s karma.

  34. 34.

    MomSense

    @Iowa Old Lady:

    I have a friend in law enforcement, and she basically said the same thing. Run like hell.

    Our kids are supposed to hide. Does anyone know of any good research/advice about what to do if there is an active shooter?

  35. 35.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @dedc79:
    Part of it is what @Amir Khalid said, and part of it is the all too common (and crucial to most wingnut philosophy) belief that life is a zero-sum game. If anybody else gets something good, what you have is worth less. Part of it is that they’ve been told they can’t be bigoted against *so* many groups now, they’re really getting pissed off. All various flavors of being a mean-spirited asshole. The best you can say is that some are just parroting what they’ve been told, which is still pretty bad.

  36. 36.

    RSA

    @Elizabelle:

    Memo to self: never live in a district where someone like Kay Daly is a viable candidate.

    The easternmost border of NC-2 is about ten minutes from my house. It’s R+11; it includes Fayetteville, with Fort Bragg, and it looks pretty rural otherwise (I think), even though it stretches all with way up to Raleigh. Daly would stand a good chance in the general, if she wins the primary.

  37. 37.

    rikyrah

    This is what you get with SMALL GOVERNMENT

    …………………

    Floods, rain expose SC’s flawed dam safety program
    October 7, 2015

    COLUMBIA, SC – Recent heavy rains and floods across South Carolina that broke multiple dams and destroyed hundreds — if not thousands — of homes have turned a spotlight on the state’s dam safety program.

    South Carolina has for years had one of the nation’s weakest dam safety programs, consistently ranking near the bottom of rankings in federal and state government reports.

    In 2013, the state spent less than $200,000 on its dam safety program, employing a handful of people devoted specifically to inspecting and regulating the structures. That’s roughly the same amount the state spent on the program in 2010, when a national report rated South Carolina 45th nationally in financial resources committed to dam safety.

    Lori Spragens, executive director of the national Association of State Dam Safety Officials, said resources for inspecting the state’s dams remain low in South Carolina. All told, South Carolina has 2,300 dams, most of them privately owned and made of earth.

    http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/article38056332.html

  40. 40.

    Mike in NC

    @RSA: The way this state is trending I wouldn’t be surprised to see this crackpot do very well running against the incumbent.

  41. 41.

    Elizabelle

    @RSA: Ah yes. Fayetteville.

    Our landmarks for our DC to Myrtle Beach summer car trips were the South of the Border signs, and the “Your local Klan welcomes you to Fayetteville.” Which was shocking. I think it came down in the early 70s.

    ETA: This is not the image I remember. From 1973.
    linky: http://i.imgur.com/UJ4EDlI.jpg

  43. 43.

    SiubhanDuinne

    Again, absolutely no love for the incumbent here, but that commercial strikes me as skating very very close to being an immediate threat/incitement directed specifically against Renée Elmers. Maybe Kay Daly isn’t literally planning to take out the “RINO” — although the ad certainly strongly implies that she is — but some of Daly’s supporters may not be as restrained. If this ad were against the President, I’m pretty sure the SS would be calling on Ms. Daly, and not in a friendly way. Do sitting members of Congress get similar protection? Or can they request extra protection? If I were Elmers, I sure as hell would be asking for it.

  46. 46.

    logan brown

    @RSA: I actually worked in Education in Elmer’s district for a while and crazy doesn’t begin to describe the Republicans there. A good friend of mine was basically driven out of education for not teaching civics with a Scalia like slant and was written up for being “too political” because he taught the students about the Constitution and would not let them use Fox News as a resource.

    You can’t get too crazy there. Period.

  47. 47.

    Mike in NC

    @rikyrah: Chickens coming home to roost, since SC has a notoriously poor record on infrastructure maintenance. Once a road gets built, that’s it. I-95 running through SC is mile after mile of dangerous potholes.

    It’s all about the tax cuts…

  49. 49.

    Elizabelle

    A comment on the thread with that Klan billboard sign:

    I remember that sign. When our family would travel from New York to Florida in the 70’s that sign would stand as a reminder that there was some dangerously deep ignorance along the route. We wouldn’t stop for gas or to eat anywhere near that sign, it must have done real damage to the local economy. That sign was scary and helped me realize how vulnerable local minorities must have felt.
    The last we saw it, it was a mess. It looked like someone had taken a sledge hammer to it. It was a relief to see that not everyone approved of it and whoever put it up didn’t have enough support to fix it.

    I remember driving with a friend near Chambersburg, PA one weekend, and we got snarled in traffic near an anti-abortion protest. “Abortion kills business” he quipped. We never stopped there again.

  51. 51.

    Elizabelle

    @Mike in NC: I almost wanted to photograph the pavement condition change between I-95 South in NC and SC. It was that immediate. NC’s stretch is beautifully maintained.

  55. 55.

    Elizabelle

    @SiubhanDuinne: You got me to watch it.

    Almost as memorably bad as that demon sheep ad. It’s cartoonish, and it really might inspire people to stick with Ellmers.

  57. 57.

    Elizabelle

    North Carolina is a beautiful state, I love it. Would enjoy living near Asheville. I liked Raleigh too.

    Will not be a resident there, though, because who wants to give away your political voice? (Maybe a short term rental, for a while …)

  60. 60.

    Phylllis

    @rikyrah: I believe almost every dam that failed was an earthen dam for a man-made lake created for ‘lake living’ housing developments.

  61. 61.

    Roger Moore

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    Newton’s second law demands that a bullet stopping chair has to be heavy.

    Not really, since for its most common function it can count on having a person sitting in it to help absorb momentum. And most bullets have relatively little momentum to start with, so that isn’t the biggest design problem. The problem is that bullets are designed to be highly penetrating, so you need something really strong to resist them, and that generally involves quite a bit of weight if you’re protecting a large area.

  62. 62.

    Woodrowfan

    I saw that Hide, Run, Fight video at my school earlier this semester. My wife saw it at her workplace. Oddly enough we both saw the same video at our workplaces at the same time.

  64. 64.

    mai naem mobile

    My home office had a shooter in the building but not our office. It was a personal.situation.Where the guy was mentally unstable and killed a lawyer who had represented somebody in a lawsuit against him. I asked one of the office people what she would do if a shooter came in. She said she would break the window in front of her. I didn’t say anything but that window looks real thick. Not sure how she would break through it. We’ve had no training.

  67. 67.

    Paul in KY

    @MomSense: That’s what I would tell my kid to do. Get the fuck out of there by any way possible. Jump out the window, bust a door, etc. Don’t worry about ‘safety’ or property or whatever. Be like George Costanza when he thought the place was on fire.

  68. 68.

    Mike in NC

    @Elizabelle: And once you cross the Georgia state line, I-95 is drivable again. Funny how that works.

    Re: Klan billboard. My wife attended freshman year college in rural NC and vividly recalled driving past a similar (if not the very same) sign circa 1973. Her parents were not amused.

  70. 70.

    bystander

    @gene108: I wonder if Miguel is related to Guy.

    With any luck, none of us will encounter anyone more dangerous than a passive shooter. So far, with the two I’ve encountered, I just refused to take the gun and let them find some other schmoe to shoot them.

  71. 71.

    Gravenstone

    @gogol’s wife: Sounds like the same training we got, and will get refreshers on semi-annually. As I started yesterday, I can’t adequately express how angry it makes me that we (or anyone) has to undergo “active shooter” training.

  72. 72.

    benw

    @Eric S.:

    My employer had classes just about a year ago. Same thing: run, hide, fight. They did it right after they moved us to a new, open-format office where there are very, very few doors and all the conference rooms have glass walls. There’s no hiding and even if you can secure a conference room door the shooter has a gun and you’re behind a glass wall.

    Sounds like your option is “fight” then. Good luck!

  73. 73.

    bystander

    Run, hide, fight violates the Ben Carson rule: You turn to your fellow soon-to-be victims and say, “Let’s rush him, guys. He can’t take us all down.”

    Presumably, as the active shooter is spraying you with ammo and in fact, is taking everyone down.

    This method is especially effective when you’re in a room full of 6 year olds.

  74. 74.

    allium

    @SatanicPanic: (voiceover type person here) – Based on the hollow sound of the read, I’m guessing it was made in an untreated room (for a decent recording you need to keep the outside sound out and keep the inside sound from bouncing around – hence all the foam inside pro recording booths). That indicates it’s probably either a friend of the candidate, or someone from one of the (spits) bottom barrel “dollar-a-holler” voiceover sites like Fiverr or Voice Bunny.

  75. 75.

    geg6

    @Gravenstone:

    We’ve been doing that training every year since VA Tech. College campuses are especially vulnerable, due to their openness and to the fact that there are an awful lot of disturbed and stressed young (white) men with access to guns there.

  82. 82.

    schrodinger's cat

    An armed society is a frightened society and these Columbine like incidents are designed to make everyone afraid, all the time. Fear is good for gun manufacturers since it results in more sales.

  83. 83.

    Mnemosyne (iPhone)

    @Gravenstone:

    Nope — it’s a class you take like first aid or CPR. Because the GEC is spread over a large area and in multiple locations, they try to get as many people as possible trained in emergency basics. Yes, active shooter response is now considered an emergency basic, like knowing how to splint a broken bone.

    (They offer some really high-level, quasi-EMT classes like triage if people are interested in taking them. We are in earthquake country, after all.)

  84. 84.

    Germy Shoemangler

    She’s a heavily armed and feral Victoria Jackson. Ladies and gentleman, your Republican party.

    She’s heavily armed, but I don’t think she’s feral. She’s a pampered housecat who stepped into the grassy backyard for a quick photo-op and then returned to the comfort of her plush cat tower/condo.

  85. 85.

    ? Martin

    @Gravenstone: Annually here. Basically, everyone at a university is just waiting for their turn.

    The thinking on how to handle an active shooter changed a bit after VATech. Previous instructions were to shelter in place, barricade if possible. They changed that shelter, but to flee if there’s an opportunity and danger is nearby, or fight back if you are cornered.

    I’ve been involved in two gun issues on my campus so far and was the only person on campus that identified the first gun issue – everyone else waved it off. This was before Columbine. That affords me a bit more involvement in the policies. The reason for the change is that it was assumed before VATech that most shooters had a specific grudge and were seeking out a specific person or persons. After VATech (Columbine, Sandy Hook and others informed this change) that shooters may simply be looking to kill as many people as possible and that’s why the focus on fighting back – with the new thinking being that if you can disrupt the shooter’s plan that they are more likely to stop and likely to take their own life.

    The change in approach is not terribly meaningful to individuals overall. You aren’t significantly more likely to survive under the new approach than under the old, but it does empower individuals to act which may help in the statistical sense – nobody survived Flight 93 but they potentially limited future loss of life, and as with the Giffords shooting may help in the real sense. Given that we can’t do anything meaningful to stop this, this is the best of what remains.

  86. 86.

    El Caganer

    Christ, I’ve seen this woman before! It was a Saturday night Dr. Shock show; she was starring in The Bride of Ted Nugent.

  87. 87.

    ? Martin

    @schrodinger’s cat: If you look at the gun sales trend, they are selling more and more guns to fewer and fewer people. Their industry is in trouble and extracting more money out of fewer customers requires some fairly desperate tactics. It’s unsustainable long term and eventually it’ll collapse, at which point we can measure the cost in lives for Colt shareholders to be kept whole.

  88. 88.

    I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet

    @schrodinger’s cat: High velocity rounds tend to go through people so there’s little momentum transfer… :-(

    There are magical materials these days, like Kevlar, that stop bullets without being especially massive. The energy is absorbed and spread laterally by the difficult-to-break fibers rather than just trying to be an impenetrable barrier.

    Congress had bullet-resistant chairs (with steel plates) in the early 1980s. Presumably they’ve got fancier things these days.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  90. 90.

    Rob Lll

    She must be a Prince fan. “Let’s Pretend We’re Married” is one of his best tunes!

  91. 91.

    J R in WV

    @Elizabelle:

    When my ship was in the Ingalls yard at Pascagoula MS in 1972 for overhaul, the nearest liquor store had a big sign behind the counter that said “All Proceeds from Sales to Niggers will be donated to the United Klans of America” [my apologies for the slur, but I wanted to quote it exactly, we were appalled at the time, and I can’t imagine how my black shipmates felt about it!!]

    The store had a very unfortunate fire the night before my ship departed Pascagoula forever. Whatever could have happened? So sad !

    I had some really good sailor shipmates from urban areas, and I was so sorry they had to come up against such things while serving their country. Imagine the kind of person who would put such a thing up in a town where thousands of military members of the US Navy were temporarily stationed!! Hate is such a terrible thing…

  92. 92.

    pseudonymous in nc

    @Elizabelle:

    I almost wanted to photograph the pavement condition change between I-95 South in NC and SC. It was that immediate. NC’s stretch is beautifully maintained.

    See also: I-26 and I-85. The reign of GOP fucknuts in Raleigh is damaging NC, but for the moment it’s not damaging car suspensions as much as the interstates of Lesser Cackalack.

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