Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Narcissists are always shocked to discover other people have agency.

This country desperately needs a functioning fourth estate.

The low info voters probably won’t even notice or remember by their next lap around the goldfish bowl.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

Dear media: perhaps we ought to let Donald Trump speak for himself!

The republican speaker is a slippery little devil.

Not loving this new fraud based economy.

Washington Post Catch and Kill, not noticeably better than the Enquirer’s.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

Nothing worth doing is easy.

Republicans do not trust women.

Tide comes in. Tide goes out. You can’t explain that.

Speaker Mike Johnson is a vile traitor to the House and the Constitution.

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

It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

Giving up is unforgivable.

Not all heroes wear capes.

If you voted for Trump, you don’t get to speak about ethics, morals, or rule of law.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

You passed on an opportunity to be offended? What are you even doing here?

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

You are here: Home / Elections / Election 2016 / Wednesday Evening Open Thread: “Let’s Not Argue About Who Killed Who!…”

Wednesday Evening Open Thread: “Let’s Not Argue About Who Killed Who!…”

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… We could be larfing at these guys, instead!

Apart from congratulating ourselves on not being part of the Totally Risible & Yet Very Dangerous Party, what’s on the agenda for the evening?


Reader Interactions

133Comments

  1. 1.

    Corner Stone

    It’s not a berning desire or anything, but can anyone explain to me the (((name))) bullshit on twitter recently?
    /signed no hep cat

  4. 4.

    Percysowner

    This from Talking Points Memo

    If you go to the Republican National Committee website, there is a crowded homepage with no mention of Donald Trump. I’ve been watching it for a few days. They recently had a petition asking people to sign if they want to “Take Back The White House.” Even in the body of that petition, there was no mention of Trump. Judging from their website, the RNC is acting as if Clinton is running unopposed.

    I just checked and there are 2 pictures of Hillary, one of Bernie, Ted Cruz’s face can be seen in a video on a sidebar, heck, you can buy George H.W. Bush socks, but Donald Trump is nowhere to be seen. It’s weird.

  9. 9.

    smith

    @Corner Stone: I think it originated as a white supremicist/neo-nazi thing to identify Jews on the internet. If it’s being used widely now, it’s probably a way to obfuscate that meaning.

  12. 12.

    Baud

    @smith: That’s horrible. It was absolutely NOT Trump’s intent that his brand of fasism be extended to Jews. He must be upset over the whole thing.

  13. 13.

    Mike J

    @Corner Stone: There was a chrome extension that would automagically add double parens around jewish names. Google removed the extension, but people are adding parens themselves in solidarity.

  14. 14.

    Mai.naem.mobile

    @Corner Stone: ((())) are bat signals used by NeoNazi/White Aryan types to point out a Jooo twitterer so that they can all Twitter stalk and harrass the Jooo twitterer.

  15. 15.

    geg6

    @Corner Stone:

    I’m no IT expert, but somehow, white nationalists were using the multiple parens to target suspected Jews on the net and then sending them threatening tweets, picture of Auschwitz, pics of their open ovens with trails of dollar bills leading to them, etc. so a lot of people are using the multiple parens in solidarity with Jews and to fuck with the Nazis.

  17. 17.

    Corner Stone

    @chanster: Wow. That is much worse than I could’ve imagined. I had considered it was some cutesy affectation making light fun of some meme. That’s fucking awful.

  25. 25.

    Central Planning

    What’s Trump’s ideal judge? A white man? How would that be fair to the female plaintiffs? How would that be fair to any non-white plaintiffs? Why doesn’t anyone ask him those questions?

  31. 31.

    Mai.naem.mobile

    @Corner Stone: the NY Times reporter Jonathan Weidman got a ton of really really ugly anti semitic stuff on twitter after he linked to a piece on White Aryan types endorsing Trump. I couldn’t even go through all the stuff.

  33. 33.

    sigaba

    @Percysowner: The RNC setting Trump up to lose so they can finally kill the Tea Party cadres dead, tell them their ways have been tried and overwhelming rejected. Or so said Alex Jones maybe :)

  34. 34.

    nutella

    @smith:

    Saw an item that said it’s being applied to his son-in-law. Chickens >> roost.

    You wonder why any of Trump’s Jewish relatives even speak to him any more. When his antisemite supporters attacked a Jewish reporter who wrote a very bland article about Melania with graphic threats of ovens, etc. he refused to condemn them. Does he care that antisemitism is an attack on not only his son-in-law but also his daughter, three grandchildren, and a daughter-in-law?

  36. 36.

    JPL

    @Mai.naem.mobile: He left twitter today and will only post on facebook. Twitter does little to stop the abuses. link

    Trump rid us of political correctness, or any form of common decency.

  38. 38.

    Mai.naem.mobile

    Ivana Trump and Melanoma behind Trumpsters speech yesterday really do look like blonde versions of the models in the Robert Palmer video. Ivana didn’t look that happy yesterday. Wonder if she thinks she’s seeing the value of inheritance drop by a fraction of a percent every day and there’s about 150 more days to go.

  39. 39.

    Randy P

    @sigaba: Saw something recently that the loss of centralized authoritarian control by the RNC was an unintended consequence of Citizens United. Anybody with a big spigot of money can take over their local Republican party and control the elections, the state govt, etc. So rather than funneling money into Big RNC, it actually accelerated the splintering into lots of little mini-fiefdoms.

    As with Trump and everything else we’re schadenfreud-ing at this year, they are hoist by their own petards.

  40. 40.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    @Baud: Did you start your comment with ‘Green Balloons’? No? Then it’s not a safe thread.

  41. 41.

    humboldtblue

    @Mai.naem.mobile:

    Good friend of mine did a piece years ago describing his experience joining the Army in 1968 and being a Jew from Brooklyn.

    He spent 8 minutes hilariously describing how he had never known the word Jew could contain so many syllables but after six months at Benning and running into a cadre of those with southern accents he had learned differently.

  43. 43.

    Corner Stone

    @Randy P:

    Saw something recently that the loss of centralized authoritarian control by the RNC was an unintended consequence of Citizens United. Anybody with a big spigot of money can take over their local Republican party and control the elections, the state govt, etc. So rather than funneling money into Big RNC, it actually accelerated the splintering into lots of little mini-fiefdoms.

    In conjunction with getting rid of pork. The RNC as party leadership no longer has any way to carrot and stick elected officials.

  46. 46.

    Miss Bianca

    @Baud: Baud, there will be no safe threads until after you concede. It’s all up to you.

    @efgoldman: ETA: Or what you said, sir, since once again you’ve got there before me.

  48. 48.

    Trollhattan

    @Corner Stone:
    Neonazis have been using it to flag Jews they’re targeting, so folks are flooding content with it in order to water it down to uselessness. (My $0.02 explainer based on reading two articles.) In short, they’re trying to be mensches.

  50. 50.

    Gravenstone

    @Corner Stone: I believe it extends from an app (now pulled) that white nationalists had on the App store that placed brackets around “Jewish” names so the user could monitor articles for “bias” from the wrong sort of author.

  54. 54.

    Trollhattan

    I see the British commitment to quality cured meat products is robust as ever.

  55. 55.

    Emma

    @nutella: Actually and more to the point, is his daughter so desperate not to lose the old man’s money that she will allow him to insult her husband and children? Feh. They’re all disgusting.

  56. 56.

    Steeplejack (phone)

    @Corner Stone:

    Can you link to an example?

    /signed, Can’t even do Facebook, much less Twitter.

    ETA: And I see the question has been answered ad (my) nauseam.

  58. 58.

    Archon

    I can’t wait to see the first poll out after Hillary gets an endorsement from Bernie and Obama.

  67. 67.

    Corner Stone

    @Steeplejack (phone): Cole himself is doing it, although I did not put together what it meant. I thought it was a play off his “I Hate People” tag line and shifted to be against Trump somehow. In the tweets quoted above Daniel Drezner also does it. I’ve seen it all over the place but just in the last three or so days so did not know what that was.

  71. 71.

    SRW1

    God, I think I attended one of these Bio things. 2003 in Washington. The key note speech in that year, while we were still shuffling dessert, was given by the then RNC chairman, who’s name I don’t remember. Must have been May or June, because Bush had declared the armed fight in Iraq over and was still basking in his ‘success’.

    Apart from rambling on and on about how biotech and the GOP were both huge believers in innovation, competition, and the private sector, the RNC dude told us that he had seen Bush only a short while ago and that one thing he could tell us was that it was gonna be a while until Bush would be ready to forgive those European allies that had betrayed him.

    Bio is an international partnering event and there were quite a number of German and French nationals in the audience. That statement cause a few moments of rather awkward atmosphere.

  72. 72.

    Carl W

    @Percysowner:

    I just checked and there are 2 pictures of Hillary, one of Bernie, Ted Cruz’s face can be seen in a video on a sidebar, heck, you can buy George H.W. Bush socks, but Donald Trump is nowhere to be seen. It’s weird.

    This is hilarious. The store sells Bush, Reagan, and Cheney (!) swag, but nothing that mentions Trump.

    They do mention Trump occasionally. If you search for Trump in the search widget, you see that they’ve mentioned Trump in 86 of their blog posts. Skimming through the 10 most recent of these (back through September 2015), 7 of the posts that mention Trump are actually about Clinton but mention Trump in passing; 3 of the posts are actually about Trump. There are only 2 posts specifically about Trump since May 4, when Kasich dropped out.

    It’s particularly interesting to compare their 86 mentions of Trump with 2019 mentions of Clinton (some of those might be about Bill instead of Hillary) or their 6111 mentions of Obama.

  75. 75.

    MomSense

    @Mai.naem.mobile:

    I couldn’t see Melania in the feed I was watching last night but Ivanka looked troubled. I’m sure they have been through a lot with him. I may not be remembering this correctly but I think DT was broke back in the 80s. He was heavily in debt and of course his marriages fell apart. One of our dear family friends worked for Ivana at The Plaza Hotel so he saw the whole mess up close. Fortunately for them he is a discreet person.

    She has probably seen him spiral before and dreads this one.

  76. 76.

    dmsilev

    @Carl W: I’m sure that after Election Day, the RNC will do its best to pretend that Trump never existed and that in fact the most recent previous GOP President was Reagan.

  85. 85.

    Emma

    @MomSense: She’s supposedly one of the authors/editors of last night’s speech.

    As far as Donnie and the money, I lived in Long Island through the 1990s. I was acquainted with a guy who worked in seriously rich people banking and he told me that his bank refused to loan the Trump companies any money. And he said they weren’t the only one. So it’s happened more than once.

  86. 86.

    Anne Laurie

    @MomSense: I couldn’t not use that pic, but I wanted to share it well before you & OO might stumble upon it right before bedtime!

  88. 88.

    lollipopguild

    Where is the TrumpTroll who always talked about trump using his Twitter feed on Clinton like a flamethrower? A flamethrower! My Kingdom for a flamethrower!

  89. 89.

    Carl W

    @Carl W: OK, both sides do it.

    On the DNC web site, the biggest pictures are of Obama and Trump; there are no pictures of Clinton. The word “Trump” occurs on the main page; the word “Clinton” does not. Doing a search for Clinton gives 2 hits, most recently from July 2015; doing a search for Trump gives 21 hits.

    This makes me sad…

    ETA: I see M^4 beat me to it.

  91. 91.

    Original Lee

    @Omnes Omnibus: I’m not allowed to donate blood anymore, either. Six weeks in England in 1982 did me in. Makes me very sad because as an O-negative donor, I always did ped bags.

    ETA: Followed by 8 weeks in 1985, for a total of 14 weeks.

  93. 93.

    Baud

    @Carl W:

    They probably didn’t want to do that while the primary was still going on. It’ll change soon, I’m sure.

  94. 94.

    Anne Laurie

    @Mai.naem.mobile:

    Ivana didn’t look that happy yesterday. Wonder if she thinks she’s seeing the value of inheritance drop by a fraction of a percent every day and there’s about 150 more days to go.

    He’s her dad, and he seems to have treated her as well as he’s capable of treating anyone — it can’t be easy watching him disgrace himself so publicly.

    Also too, on the secondary theme of this thread, that’s her husband and kids those brave internet Stormtroopers are threatening.

    No pass for her half-brothers, however; Uday & Qusay are arseholes like their old man.

  96. 96.

    sdhays

    @Chance: Holy crap, that’s awful! You know you’ve lost yourself when you’re obsessing over the fact that you might not know the ethnicity of someone mentioned on the internets to the point that you feel the need to annotate every “known Jew”‘s name with a stupid Chrome plugin. What is wrong with people?

    And there’s actually a podcast called “The Daily Shoah”? I just threw up in my mouth.

  97. 97.

    Eric U.

    @Emma: according to his recent statements, Trump’s approach to paying debts is to offer 10 percent and threaten to walk. So I guess it makes sense that banks aren’t interested

  101. 101.

    smith

    @Emma: He’s probably broke now. He hasn’t been doing much fundraising, and it’s already way late in the game, and the usual big bucks guys for the Rs aren’t enthusiastic about funding him. If he really were worth $10 billion he could go it alone without too much difficulty (but it would cut into Ivanka’s inheritance), but it’s looking like that was all just bluff. TPM has a summary of how big a hole he’s in, and it’s not pretty.

  102. 102.

    Original Lee

    @Trollhattan: It isn’t just brains, it’s also nerve tissue. Ground meat in particular might contain prion-containing pieces. So unless you can somehow document that you were strictly vegan the entire time you were in England, you’re SOL on blood donations. I keep hoping that they’ll decide 30 years is long enough and let me start donating again, but so far, nothing.

  104. 104.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Original Lee: I also spent 3 1/2 years on the European continent during the relevant period. Another disqualification. Not even going into hookers and heroin and stuff.

  105. 105.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @sdhays: I sent a message to Jeff Merkley to that effect just about a half hour ago…he needs to talk Bernie off the ledge.

  106. 106.

    nutella

    @Eric U.:

    Trump’s approach to paying debts is to offer 10 percent and threaten to walk. So I guess it makes sense that banks aren’t interested

    Some banks are slow to catch on, though. Deutsche Bank thought they wouldn’t get scammed like all the others (apparently blinded by a big ‘fee’) but of course Trump did scam them to the tune of hundreds of millions in the Chicago Trump tower deal.

  108. 108.

    Original Lee

    @Omnes Omnibus: Yeah, I have about another year racked up in Benelux and Germany in the relevant time period, too, so even if I had presciently managed to stay out of England a few weeks, I’d still have some ‘splainin’ to do.

  111. 111.

    Original Lee

    @Eric U.: Not to mention the Nevada Gmblng Commission. I love that his hotel can’t have a csno there.

    Edited to disenvowel a couple of significant words.

  112. 112.

    SRW1

    @Steeplejack (phone):

    contains neither leber nor käse

    That’s not necessarily correct. If you buy Leberkäse in Bavaria, it is not allowed to contain liver, but if you buy it in the neighboring Baden-Wurttemberg, it must contain at least five percent liver.

    Originally the name likely has nothing to do with liver (Leber), and certainly not with cheese (Käse). The ‘käse’ probably comes from the bavarian ‘Kas’, meaning a compact, eatable mass (of variable composition). The ‘Leber’ most likely derives from ‘Laib’ as in ‘Brotlaib’ (loaf of bread), ie refers to the form.

  115. 115.

    Baud

    Via GOS

    Sen. Elizabeth Warren will be endorsing Hillary Clinton “soon”, says Reuters. And maybe something more?

    Senator Elizabeth Warren will soon endorse presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and, while not currently interested in serving as her running mate, has not ruled it out, several sources close to Warren told Reuters. […]

  116. 116.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Carl W:

    I like all the silos separating GOP Hispanics from Black Republican Activists from GOP Millenials from groups for Asian-Pacific, Faith-based, and Military/Veterans (say, whatever happened to the Log Cabin Republicans, anyhow?). Diversity is great for everyone as long as they all stay in their own little boxes.

  117. 117.

    gene108

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    Trump has unleashed a lot of ugliness that has always existed under the surface.

    It existed but had been rendered relatively impotent.

    The white supremacists no longer had the protection of local law enforcement, because the Feds would step in, if white supremacists were involved.

    The more militant groups were (are) being targeted by the Feds, if they poke their heads up too high.

    The political establishment had officially rejected them. Maybe they felt a little comfort, with Republican dog-whistles, but Bush, Jr. went out of his way to have a racially inclusive cabinet and was working hard to bring Latinos into the Republican “big” tent.

    But Trump’s breathed new life into these knuckle-draggers, because they finally feel that here’s a guy, who’ll side with them, if a black kid is found swinging from a tree and not sic the DoJ on them. And the rest of the Republican Party has been caught, without knowing what to do (as they lack a conscience that would compel a normal person to actually denounce statements like most Mexicans in America are rapists, even if it might hurt their electoral chances).

  118. 118.

    Percysowner

    @Major Major Major Major: If that stays the same after Bernie comes on board, I’ll see it as the same. For now, she just won the pledged delegates and was running against an opponent that was screaming that the nomination was “rigged” by the Democratic party. They couldn’t afford to make it look like the supported one candidate over the other. Heck,Bernie is still hinting that he may take the fight to the convention. This is now “don’t upset Bernie’s supporters” time. Trump has been the nominee for weeks. Every other Republican candidate has given up and are supporting Trump. There are no voters to offend by putting Trump on the page.

  120. 120.

    Bobby Thomson

    @jl: Josh quotes an email that concludes:

    The fact that the Republican leadership, or rather “leadership,” is supporting Trump has gotten a lot of attention; the funny part is that they think they can also pretend it isn’t happening.

    I think the funny thing is that they are pretending to support him while actually giving him only nominal support at best. It’s a trap so clever I must be imagining it.

  121. 121.

    SRW1

    @debbie:

    If I remember right, that stuff is called ‘Sülze’ in German, which is to say refers to the stuff that is solid when cold, but liquifies upon heating up (might be collagen-based). The German expression for head cheese rather elegantly circumvents the source of the pieces of meat.

    ETA: The ‘filler’ for head cheese is indeed collagen-based. Or to be more precise, its gelatin.

  122. 122.

    smith

    @gene108:

    But Trump’s breathed new life into these knuckle-draggers

    Well, actually I think the election of Obama breathed new life into them. In reaction to that, the barely suppressed racism endemic to this country bubbled up very close to the surface, greatly encouraged by the Republican establishment and the funders of the Tea Party, and showed the knuckledraggers they had a lot of fellow travelers. Those fellow travelers voted for Trump. I’d say Trump is more a symptom than a cause.

  123. 123.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    @Baud: NO Governors or Senators with a Republican Governor should be Hills VP, NO, just NO. And DWS’s replacement should be a current office holder.

  124. 124.

    Davebo

    Oil closed above $51 for the first time since July 15.

    Why not take the family on a nice long summer road trip people!

  125. 125.

    geg6

    @Emma:

    From what I’ve read, only Deutsche Bank will lend to him and it’s not the entire bank that will work with him, just one small stand alone division. He’s a total deadbeat and owes and has burned every lender in America and, probably, the world. When you’re too scummy for Big Banking, well…

  126. 126.

    Davebo

    @Anne Laurie: I’ve actually been fairly impressed by Ivana the few times I’ve seen her speak.

    And yes, I’m sure she cringes when he talks sometimes but she hides it well.

  127. 127.

    Enhanced Voting Techinques

    @geg6:

    I’m no IT expert, but somehow, white nationalists were using the multiple parens to target suspected Jews on the net and then sending them threatening tweets, picture of Auschwitz, pics of their open ovens with trails of dollar bills leading to them, etc. so a lot of people are using the multiple parens in solidarity with Jews and to fuck with the Nazis.

    Reminds me of the guy in Second Life saying he wanted to play an SS officer in a role play and me telling him I was playing an NKVD guard at a Soviet gulog in Siberia set in 1946 and we would just love to have SS officers.

  128. 128.

    Emma

    @geg6: Well, it’s nice that Deutsche Bank can take the losses, considering the SOBs were ready to crush the Greeks not so long ago.

  129. 129.

    hovercraft

    Did anyone else notice how scared Ivanka looked last night during Trumps’ speech? She was reading along on the teleprompter and kept glancing at him to make sure he kept to the script. Going forward they should attach electrodes to him and if goes off script they can just zap him back on message.

  130. 130.

    Schmend

    @Omnes Omnibus: I, too, am precluded from donating blood because I lived for several years in Germany during the 80’s and had access to the UK meat in the commissary (which apparently makes my blood suspect.)

  131. 131.

    Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)

    @Original Lee: 30 days in England in 1986, followed by a couple of years there during the 90s. No blood donating for me.

    One thing I was struck by during my time with my parents: that part of rural Alabama has been reduced to a single industry, logging. Economy is an unmitigated disaster. Wally World bailed on them. You’d figure it for fertile Hair Furor land, right? Nope. They don’t think that anyone is going to help them, INCLUDING the Trumpster. I don’t think they’ll go for Hillary, but I’ll settle for a stand down on the President ballot.

  132. 132.

    daves09

    @Carl W: Possibly because she hadn’t officially become the “presumptive” nominee. No pictures of berndo either, so I’m assuming they didn’t want the screaming mob down on them.
    Can’t you just hear it? “Her picture is twice as big as mine, and it’s on the top of the page, and you got her good side, and DWS is just the worst bitch in the world.”

  133. 133.

    J R in WV

    I quit donating blood because the last time I donated I got a hemotoma the size of a softball in my elbow. That stopped the blood flow about 2/3rds full, and she (the same “nurse” ) wanted to start another draw on my other arm. No. Just no.

    The parenthesis collection for potentially Jewish names was really strange. As they really had no way of knowing who has Jewish ancestry, they just built a list of names, jumped to the assumption that all the people with any of their selected names were Jewish, and allowed anyone to add new names to the list.

    So anyone could have been on the list if they pissed off a white nationalist. ({[ Smith]}) or ({[Jones]})….

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