Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Republicans choose power over democracy, every day.

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

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

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

Pelosi: “He either is stupid, or he thinks the rest of us are.” Why not both?

When we show up, we win.

The rest of the comments were smacking Boebert like she was a piñata.

Narcissists are always shocked to discover other people have agency.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

Please don’t feed the bears.

Russia bombs Ukraine’s maternity hospitals; Republicans in the House can’t sort out supporting Ukraine.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

Not all heroes wear capes.

Roe isn’t about choice, it’s about freedom.

“When somebody takes the time to draw up a playbook, they’re gonna use it.”

Republicans firmly believe having an abortion is a very personal, very private decision between a woman and J.D. Vance.

Republicans can’t even be trusted with their own money.

It is possible to do the right thing without the promise of a cookie.

We won’t go back.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

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Archives for January 2016

Tiny Texas Minority Demands Right to Carry On in Public

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For the record, it is possible to be a concealed-carry permit holder and not be a public nuisance. In fact, I suspect the sensible CCW people are almost as embarrassed as the rest of us are annoyed by the ammosexuals who demand the right to fondle their ‘fifth limbs’ in public. From the NYTimes article:

… The change directly affects only a small fraction of Texans — 925,000 men and women with active state-issued licenses to carry a concealed firearm, close to 4 percent of the state’s 27.4 million residents. Only those with a concealed-handgun permit are allowed to open carry, and all of them must submit their fingerprints and pass a criminal background check…

The law has brought renewed attention to the state’s licensed gun carriers, and questions of who will and who will not open carry. John Wittman, a spokesman for Gov. Greg Abbott, a longtime proponent of gun rights who signed the bill into law in June, declined to comment when asked whether the governor would openly carry. A spokesman for Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who also has a concealed-carry license, said Mr. Patrick did not plan on openly carrying.

For many pro-gun Texans, the arrival of open carry is not enough. Many of them did not support the open-carry bill but instead called for legislation for what they called “constitutional carry” — allowing Texans to display and wear their handguns regardless of whether they were licensed to carry a concealed firearm because, they argued, the Second Amendment gives them the right to do so. They are urging the passage of a constitutional-carry bill in the next session of the Legislature.

The new law is anticlimactic for one other reason. Texas has no prohibition on the open carrying of rifles, shotguns and other long guns, a right that gun owners have taken advantage of in recent years by showing up at open-carry rallies and other events with loaded AR-15s and other military-style rifles strapped across their backs.

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Texting With Mom

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The mother and son bond is unbreakable:

motherandson

“OJ” has nothing to do with OJ Simpson. One day we were doing something in public and my brother and I were tag-teaming her, either making her laugh inappropriately or intentionally trying to aggravate her, so she couldn’t give us the middle finger, so she just said “OJ.” We both asked “what the hell does OJ mean?” and she replied “obscene gesture,” aka she was flipping us the bird. That led to another round of hysterics when we pointed out that gesture doesn’t start with a “J,” which of course she knows, she’s got a doctorate in Education and taught English her entire life.

At any rate, I just thought this was funny. And before you get the vapors and say “Your mom flips you off,” think for a second. You would, too.

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Saturday Morning Cartoons Open Thread

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It was such a beautiful prospect, for us chaos muppets, but the New Yorker‘s Ryan Lizza says it’s not gonna happen:

In the Wall Street Journal, on Monday, Benjamin Ginsberg, a longtime Republican Party lawyer who is most famous for the role he played as the Bush campaign’s legal counsel during the 2000 Florida recount, caused a stir in political circles. In a piece called “Flirting With a Chaotic GOP Convention,” Ginsberg argued that Republican leaders need to take seriously the idea that there might not be a candidate who has secured more than half of the 2,472 delegates needed to win the Party’s nomination when Republicans meet at their convention, in Cleveland, next July…

… In the media, this situation is often referred to as a “brokered convention”—but that’s a misnomer, because there are no convention brokers. That job doesn’t exist anymore. When it was normal for convention delegates to gather and decide on their party’s nominee, brokers—state party leaders, labor or other interest-group bosses—acted as managers of blocs of delegates. These days, nobody even knows who the delegates are, much less exercise any control over them. The more precise term for a situation in which the nominee isn’t clear after the primaries is a “contested convention.”

How likely is a contested convention? Not very. In fact, it may be infinitesimal…

It’s hard to see now, but the large field of Republican candidates will almost certainly be winnowed down to three or four contenders after the voting happens in the first three states—Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. The G.O.P. field has already been gradually compressing, as candidates who have found little support in the polls, or from donors and party insiders, have dropped out of the race… In previous cycles in which contested conventions were predicted, the dynamic of winnowing eventually produced a two-person race and then a clear winner. If Donald Trump is one of those two candidates this time, there will be enormous pressure on the Republican Party establishment to consolidate its support for one of his rivals, and the others will be driven from the race. Aside from Trump’s rise, the oddest thing about the 2016 race is that the G.O.P. establishment has been slow to pick an alternative. Usually this happens in the year before the election. But this time, it seems likely that it will take a few caucuses and primaries to offer some clarity before the Party decides on its mainstream choice. Avoiding a potentially disastrous contested convention will serve as an added incentive for the Republicans to rally around a single candidate…

For all the 2014 braggadocio about the GOP’s “deep bench”, what seems to have happened is that every candidate on offer had such shallow support that a whole bunch of second- (third-, fourth-) stringers weren’t discouraged from jumping into the competition face-first. Sure, by every rule of “normal” politics, it’ll be down to three or four candidates after March 1st, if not sooner — but “normal” hasn’t been a big factor in this cycle’s GOP competition, so far.
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Apart from wishing (further) confusion to our enemies, what’s on the agenda for the day?

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Late Night Jagoffs Open Thread: Repubs Step on Their Own… Meme, Again

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Remember when all Democrats were instructed to quake with terror because the incredibly deft and well-prepared prosecutor Trey Gowdy was taking over the latest incarnation of the endless Benghazi committee? Remember how all the Very Serious People tsk-tsked the wild men on the GOP side who couldn’t stop running their yaps to keep up the pretense that Gowdy’s was a totally impartial not-at-all-focused-on-HRClinton team? Yeah, well, Rep. Trey’s decided staying in the primary loop is more important than holding on to that increasingly transparent figleaf, per Politico:

White House hopeful Marco Rubio snagged a big-name endorsement this week from Trey Gowdy, the popular South Carolina congressman leading the House investigation of the Benghazi attack.

But the boost for Rubio could mean trouble for Gowdy back in Washington. Democrats are already pouncing, saying it shows Gowdy is not the politically disinterested inquisitor he’s portrayed himself to be throughout his months-long look into the 2012 attack, an investigation that’s scrutinized Hillary Clinton’s actions as secretary of state.

“We knew Trey Gowdy was abusing his power as chair of the Benghazi Committee to attack Hillary Clinton. What’s now clear is that he was doing so in order to help Marco Rubio run for president,” Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.), former head of House Democrats’ campaign arm, said in a statement to POLITICO. “His actions in Congress and on the campaign trail are nothing more than to further his partisan political agenda.”

Gowdy, a former federal prosecutor, has maintained for months that he’s running a fair and impartial investigation that has nothing to do with politics. He abstained from some campaign events and fundraisers, and distanced himself from political comments made by fellow Republicans about his probe — largely out of concern that it could tarnish the Benghazi investigation’s integrity and give Democrats fodder to argue that it’s a partisan witch hunt.

Those efforts, he and his allies have acknowledged, didn’t protect him from accusations of partisanship and attacks from the left on his panel’s credibility. The complaints reached a crescendo in the weeks leading up to Clinton’s marathon appearance before his panel in October.

Now he appears to be casting aside that caution, plunging into the 2016 campaign. A Gowdy spokesperson noted that the lawmaker still refuses to campaign on the topic of Benghazi and argued he is keeping the two issues separate…

Gowdy’s embrace of Rubio, which included a formal endorsement during a two-day swing through Iowa this week, comes as the Benghazi committee is winding down its work. The panel is slated in the next few months to release its final report on the attacks in which four Americans were killed…

My own suspicion, given the timing here: Conventional wisdom, at this point in time, is that Ted Cruz is now expected to win in Iowa, and one of the four “Establishment” candidates (Rubio, Bush, Christie or Kasich) is supposed to consolidate enough support to win in New Hampshire (or at least come in a strong second behind wild man card Donald Trump). If none of the Favored Four can pull ahead in NH, then the South Carolina primary (Feb. 20) becomes that much more important to winnow out a “permanent party” candidate to stand against Talivangelical Ted — and, of course, The Donald. That’s why Lindsay Graham dropped out when he did, so that his SC supporters could switch to one of the Favored Four well in advance of primary day. And Rep. Gowdy is said to be a Big Man in SC politics; presumably, getting his endorsement out as soon as possible (even before Iowa, just in case the caucus voters don’t like Ted Cruz any better than every other human who’s spent more than an hour in his company) has become more important in the GOP Long Con than the never-very-convincing pretense of “impartiality” around his Benghazi investigation.

Which is good news for us Democrats, I’m thinking: It means the Repubs have given up on using Benghazi as a weapon against HRClinton for the nonpartisan (low information) voting bloc. It’s still a pious incantation among the faithful, like saying pater-nosters against the monsters under the bed… but they don’t expect any ‘new revelations’ to convince the unbelievers.

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Open Thread: “The Year the Trump Laughter Died”

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Matt Taibbi, in Rolling Stone:

… Trump seemed like a perfect foil in particular for Jeb Bush, a hesitating, gelatinous aristocrat who lacked the cocksure brainlessness the previous Bush used to sell himself as a “regular guy.” In an era when Republican voters were more distrustful than ever of the Same Old Politics, stiff, birthright-bearing Jeb was exactly the wrong candidate for the party elders to back.

And they seemed to realize it, too. Once the Republican race got going, the party appeared too disorganized and fractured to throw its institutional weight behind anyone. This left a comically enormous cast of hopefuls to duke it out in the equivalent of a schoolyard rock fight. And without the gravitas of party and media support, the candidates on the Republican side turned out to be just a bunch of chattering, defenseless, fourth-rate flesh-bags, exquisitely vulnerable to any strong personality. The entrance of Trump into the race on June 16th therefore offered the potential of an entertaining car wreck of awesome proportions…

The ancient report that he used to keep a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside notwithstanding, it’s very likely that Donald Trump never in his life thought seriously about things like nativism, fascism, eugenics, or any kind of ideology at all. This was not someone who likely ever dreamed of cattle cars and rivers of blood. Trump is a narcissist, not a demagogue; his pathology is himself, not politics… But shortly after Trump jumped into the race, he stumbled onto a secret: whenever he blurted out forbidden thoughts about race, ethnicity or gender, he was showered with the attention he always craved.

It was a bizarre marriage, but it made sense from from a clinical point of view. Attention is attention. Patient with narcissistic personality disorder discovers massive source of narcissistic supply, so he sets about securing its regular delivery…

Trump made the Republican field look weak by blurting straight-out what they would only say in code (Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Chris Christie all parroted Romney’s pathetic “free stuff” line this year, for instance). This part of Trump’s act has to thrill Democrats, since he’s stealing away from Republicans the illusion of centrism. Future Republican nominees will have a tough time remembering how in the world George W. Bush ever won 44% of the Hispanic vote, as he did in 2004.

But Trump’s act isn’t all about race. He’s also scoring points by mining the same mainstream frustrations over language-policing and political correctness that made Sam Kinison and Andrew Dice Clay famous…

All comedy is about misunderstandings. A little town gets word that a government inspector is coming, so it mistakenly rolls out the red carpet for a visiting drunk on a gambling spree.

2015 was the same kind of mistaken-identity tale. The Silent Majority has been waiting 50 years for a prophet, but this year it settled for a billionaire loudmouth with a comb-over and a personality disorder. Like all comedies, this one is bound to end with an explosion of unintended consequences. What we won’t know until 2016 is whether this joke will end up being on all of us — or just those of us who waited too long to take Trump’s accidental war seriously.

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More On SoundBars

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To answer a few questions, I’m not exactly sure what the problem with the NHt’s are, jus tthat the high’s and mid-range do not feel the same as they once did. Regardless, I have plans for them anyway, as I intent to put them in the basement when I get around to cleaning it up.

I should also add, my biggest complaint when listening to new speakers is if they are brassy- I just can’t stand that. Back in the day, I had a pair of Polk Audio RTA 15T’s that I absolutely adored bridged to two adcom amps at 4 ohms, and that was really all I ever wanted. I’m not going to go into why I no longer have them, as it is a long story. After that, I had a set of paradigm speakers I bought in the mid 90’s, and I gave them to my brother when I got the NHT’s. I also had a pair of Bose 601’s before I got the Polks, but I sold them shortly after getting them. I don’t necessarily think of myself as an audiophile, but there is a certain texture to the kind of sound I like- maybe actual audiophiles can determine what it is by just examining my speaker choices. For example, I have never been a fan of Cerwin Vegas, Klipsch have not ever interested me for whatever reason, and I am definitely not interested in overwhelming base. I remember liking but not falling in love with some Boston Acoustics speakers, but haven’t heard any in ages.

At any rate, I am going to move the adcoms and the speakers to the basement, so I need a soundbar, and it sounds like Sonos is a good option but pricier than I want to pay (unless one of you wants to drop a shitload of gold in the tip jar).

And sure, if you have a set of Magnepans or a pair of Beolab 90’s (looking at you Soros) you want to give me, great. But I think I am looking at the Sonos and down for now. Do the Sonos come with a sub?

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I Blame Obama

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Here’s a piece of unequivocal good news with which to start the last full year of the Obama presidency:

The executive director of the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, which coordinates the federal response on the issue, said in a letter to Mayor Bill de Blasio this week that [New York] city had “effectively” ended chronic homelessness among veterans.

Lives change:

In 2015 alone, the city placed more than 1,000 veterans in permanent housing, according to city officials. Several weeks ago, at Clinton Avenue Residence, a new 43-unit development in the Bronx specifically for veterans, several men dragged garbage bags with their belongings through the gleaming lobby and into their studio apartments.

“I woke up and there wasn’t a person sleeping three feet away,” Eric Peters, 54, an Air Force veteran who has been in and out of homelessness for decades, said the next morning.

Mednyánszky,_László_-_Reclining_Soldier_(ca_1916)

New York City is doing better than many places, though not uniquely so.  Homelessness among vets is down 36% nationwide, and, as The New York Times reports,

 Houston, Las Vegas and New Orleans, among several cities, [have] effectively ending overall veteran homelessness, meaning they have identified all homeless veterans, not just the chronic cases, and placed them in homes.

Why has this happened? Because:

The city’s efforts are part of a broader federal initiative, started under President Obama and aimed at ending veteran homelessness in the United States. The federal housing agency, working in partnership with the Department of Veterans Affairs, has now distributed 79,000 rental assistance vouchers to veterans across the country dating to 2008.

Three cheers for both the hard work being done at both the national and local levels.  I hope the program serves as a model to tackle homelessness writ large — but I have no problem with selecting veterans as the first to demonstrate that the world’s last superpower does not in fact have to house its people in cardboard boxes.

But I do want to point out what’s obvious in this crowd, and should be so in the wide world:  this is what respect — and more, support — for those who serve our military looks like.  The next time your wingnut acquaintance spouts about the Muslim Kenyan Usurpers disregard for the armed services, point this out to her or him — and ask him which GOPster has made this a priority.

Happy new year all.  Going to be an interesting ride in this year of our [insert pasta shape here] 2016

Image:  Ladislav Medňanský, Reclining Soldier, c. 1916.

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