My hens have been unusually productive lately:
The colder weather must agree with them. I’m going to have to make a quiche to keep up.
What are you up to this evening? Please feel free to talk about whatever — open thread!
by Betty Cracker| 147 Comments
This post is in: Domestic Politics, Open Threads
My hens have been unusually productive lately:
The colder weather must agree with them. I’m going to have to make a quiche to keep up.
What are you up to this evening? Please feel free to talk about whatever — open thread!
by Elon James White| 19 Comments
This post is in: This Week In Blackness
For the second year in a row, there has not been a single Oscar nomination for people of color in any of the four acting categories. Last year there was backlash. This year, Spike Lee and Jada Pinkett Smith have called for a boycott. But not everyone agrees with that line of reasoning, such as Janet Hubert, best known as playing “Aunt Viv” on The Fresh Prince of Bel Air:
Hubert uploaded a grainy, four-minute video in which she addressed Pinkett Smith as “Miss Thing,” then accused her of boycotting the Oscars because Pinkett Smith’s superstar husband, Will Smith, wasn’t nominated by the academy for his role in Concussion. It went downhill from there, with Hubert adding, more or less, that the Smiths’ concern about the Oscars is frivolous in the face of greater injustices against Americans of African descent, and calling the Smiths “a part of the system that is unfair to other actors.”
Team Blackness also discussed our big plans for what to watch instead of this year’s Oscars and comments by Alveda King, MLK’s niece, on Fox News about the “war on police.”
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by Hillary Rettig| 69 Comments
This post is in: #BLM #M4BL
Some crappy personalities in the news today, so here’s something nicer. Meet The Radical Brownies.
The Radical Brownies, a social justice-oriented version of the Girl Scouts, was set up only a few weeks ago to “empower young girls of colour to step into their collective power, brilliance and leadership to make the world a more radical place”. The group of 12 girls are not affiliated to the Girl Guide movement and there are no badges for hostessing. Instead, the members, aged between eight and 12 years old, learn about black history, civil rights and social justice; their reward system includes a “Black Lives Matter” badge and lessons in sustainable agriculture for a “Food Justice” badge. “Radical Beauty,” “Radical Self-Love,” and “LGBT Ally” badges are also on the curriculum.
This picture slays me:
I still remember showing up at my first Girl Scouts meeting, way back when, thinking that I was going to get to go camping like the boys; then finding out that we were actually going to learn to bake and make lanyards.
[insert sad trombone sound here]I think I lasted two weeks.
by TaMara| 152 Comments
This post is in: Clown Shoes
I’m sorry, because you’ll be singing this all day:
Right Wing and Bitter, Right Wing and BitterPost + Comments (152)
by DougJ| 93 Comments
This post is in: Green Balloons
More wise, tough talk from the very serious daddy party:
GOP strategist Rick Wilson dismissed the “childless single men” who support Trump’s presidential bid.
“The fact of the matter is, most of them are childless single men who masturbate to anime.”
Instead of masturbating to American-made internet porn like real patriots!
The boom anime babes who make me think the wrong thingPost + Comments (93)
This post is in: Crazification Factor, Crock Pot Craziness, Bring on the Brawndo!, Bring On The Meteor, Clown Shoes, Fuck Yeah!, General Stupidity, Looks Like I Picked the Wrong Week to Stop Sniffing Glue, Meth Laboratories of Democracy, Peak Wingnut Was a Lie!, Somewhere a Village is Missing its Idiot, Teabagger Stupidity, Their Motto: Apocalypse Now
Because I could(n’t resist):
SHARE UPDATE BURNS OREGON! CHRISTIANS THE BATTLE TRUMPET HAS BEEN SOUNDED TIME TO RISE! CALL TO ACTION SEND IN THE TROOPS TO STAND WITH US IN BURNS OREGON!
Posted by Blaine Cooper on Sunday, January 17, 2016
Just to ram the point home: if I were those guys I’d think long and hard about the story of Nadab and Abihu. False prophets do not usually achieve happy endings. A sheepish withdrawal is by far their best outcome…which would let them get back (continue) to fleece their flock.
But I’ll say this: those big horns are not that easy to blow. Kudos for that at least.
This post is in: Bernie Sanders 2016, Election 2016, Hillary Clinton 2016, Post-racial America, Proud to Be A Democrat, World's Best Healthcare (If You Can Afford It)
Be careful what you wish for. Per CNN:
The Democratic presidential hopefuls will face voters in a CNN town hall on Monday in Des Moines — one week before the highly anticipated Iowa caucuses.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders will field questions from Iowa Democrats in this prime-time event hosted by the Iowa Democratic Party and Drake University…
The town hall, which will be moderated by CNN anchor Chris Cuomo, will air from 9 p.m.-11 p.m. ET, the network announced. A CNN spokesperson added that it will make the town hall available to its Iowa affiliates to air live.
Some of the enticing new-candidate aura may be leaking away from Senator Sanders, as it is. Ta-Nehisi Coates asks “Why Precisely Is Bernie Sanders Against Reparations?”
… For those of us interested in how the left prioritizes its various radicalisms, Sanders’s answer is illuminating. The spectacle of a socialist candidate opposing reparations as “divisive” (there are few political labels more divisive in the minds of Americans than socialist) is only rivaled by the implausibility of Sanders posing as a pragmatist. Sanders says the chance of getting reparations through Congress is “nil,” a correct observation which could just as well apply to much of the Vermont senator’s own platform. The chances of a President Sanders coaxing a Republican Congress to pass a $1 trillion jobs and infrastructure bill are also nil. Considering Sanders’s proposal for single-payer health-care, Paul Krugman asks, “Is there any realistic prospect that a drastic overhaul could be enacted any time soon—say, in the next eight years? No.”…
Speaking of Professor Krugman’s judgement…
…[H]ere’s the thing: we now have a clear view of Sanders’ positions on two crucial issues, financial reform and health care. And in both cases his positioning is disturbing — not just because it’s politically unrealistic to imagine that we can get the kind of radical overhaul he’s proposing, but also because he takes his own version of cheap shots. Not at people — he really is a fundamentally decent guy — but by going for easy slogans and punting when the going gets tough.
On finance: Sanders has made restoring Glass-Steagal and breaking up the big banks the be-all and end-all of his program. That sounds good, but it’s nowhere near solving the real problems. The core of what went wrong in 2008 was the rise of shadow banking; too big to fail was at best marginal, and as Mike Konczal notes, pushing the big banks out of shadow banking, on its own, could make the problem worse by causing the risky stuff to “migrate elsewhere, often to places where there is less regulatory infrastructure.”
On health care: leave on one side the virtual impossibility of achieving single-payer. Beyond the politics, the Sanders “plan” isn’t just lacking in detail; as Ezra Klein notes, it both promises more comprehensive coverage than Medicare or for that matter single-payer systems in other countries, and assumes huge cost savings that are at best unlikely given that kind of generosity. This lets Sanders claim that he could make it work with much lower middle-class taxes than would probably be needed in practice.
To be harsh but accurate: the Sanders health plan looks a little bit like a standard Republican tax-cut plan, which relies on fantasies about huge supply-side effects to make the numbers supposedly add up. Only a little bit: after all, this is a plan seeking to provide health care, not lavish windfalls on the rich — and single-payer really does save money, whereas there’s no evidence that tax cuts deliver growth. Still, it’s not the kind of brave truth-telling the Sanders campaign pitch might have led you to expect…
Looks like Monday will be another long evening of liveblogging.
(Already up past my bedtime, so I won’t be here for you to argue with until this evening.)
Another Democratic “Town Hall” Just AnnouncedPost + Comments (223)