Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires

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

Optimism opens the door to great things.

The GOP is a fucking disgrace.

Prediction: the GOP will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they donā€™t ask for more? Great plan.

“woke” is the new caravan.

In my day, never was longer.

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

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

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

Not all heroes wear capes.

The revolution will be supervised.

When do the post office & the dmv weigh in on the wuhan virus?

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

You cannot shame the shameless.

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

Republicans in disarray!

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68Comments

  12. 12.

    SFAW

    As predicted by more than a couple of commenters, something resembling an October Surprise is starting: Iran executed a nuke scientist, and Deadbeat Donnie is loudly proclaiming that it was because of Hitlary’s “hacked” e-mails. [ETA: Because the scientist was supposed to be spying for the US.]

    If that lying motherfucker ever utters a complete paragraph without a single lie in it, I may need to have a defibrillator at hand.

  16. 16.

    L&DinSLT

    @Major Major Major Major: We live about a mile from the lake in South Lake Tahoe, and about three miles from Pope Beach, where this was taken. We often see bears meandering down the street – sometimes year or two year old cubs alone, sometimes mamas with their cubs. A pleasant fact of life here but remember – a fed bear is a dead bear.

  20. 20.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Coleā€™s (most likely at this hour) not wearing any pants. Film at 11!

    I doubt that Cole without pants goes to 11, probably around a 7.4 like everyone else.

    I’m talking hand size. Wait what did you think I meant?

  21. 21.

    Adam L Silverman

    @SFAW: Senator Cotton started flogging this yesterday. There’s no there there. The Iranians knew we scarfed him up because he walked into their interest section at someone else’s embassy in DC and asked to be repatriated back to Iran because he wanted to go home. And before this they’d publicly accused us of snatching him up. His ultimate execution was predictable. The Iranians do not recognize any other citizenship for Iranians (this is why the scarf up Iranian Americans and Iranian Brits, etc and then hold them as leverage to get their not for cover spies back) and they do not look kindly on those that provide assistance to their enemies. And all of this was before anyone even had an idea that Secretary Clinton was running a private email server. And if anything this was an Intel Community failure. While State may have been responsible for getting him accommodated in the US, the IC were the ones responsible for him.

    Additionally, given that 1) the FBI has said there’s no evidence her server was hacked, 2) these were emails she was sent/cced on by staffers that were unclassified references to him, 3) the emails are only in the public domain because of Klayman’s FOIA requests and the multiple Congressional GOP attempts to turn them into something useful within their attempt to turn Benghazi into a political weapon, so 4) the responsibility for the Iranians being able to view these unclassified emails, of which there is no actual evidence, is on the hands of a conservative legal group – Judicial Watch – and their batshit crazy founder and the Congressional GOP.

  27. 27.

    L&DinSLT

    @Adam L Silverman: Black bears are not at all like grizzlies. They’re pretty mellow unless they smell food they can get to. We freeze all out pungent stuff – bones, artichoke leaves, cantaloupe rinds, etc., and put them in the trash the morning of pick up. That way they don’t percolate in the garbage can!

  29. 29.

    Adam L Silverman

    @L&DinSLT: I’m familiar with both black and brown/grizzly bears. I’ve lived in places that have one or the other, including way up in the mountains and had to do the same sort of thing with our trash.

  34. 34.

    SFAW

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Thanks, Adam.

    I was noting it because of the prior mentions here, and because, as you noted, Hillary’s e-mails weren’t hacked. Which is why I made the comment about Trump’s omnipresent lying.

  36. 36.

    Frankensteinbeck

    So, enjoy this completely debunked Donald Trump Donated To NAMBLA story. Did I mention it’s a wild rumor based on nothing? There’s no evidence at all that’s what his tax returns are hiding.

    @SFAW:
    Thank goodness. This doesn’t make white people feel scared. It’s another head scratching ‘What the Hell are conservatives gibbering about now?’ meme. They might as well have stuck with Benghazi.

  38. 38.

    Adam L Silverman

    @SFAW: I don’t do this kind of work – never have. But I have some understanding of it. And while we don’t keep people that don’t want to be here, that this guy was not being chaperoned 24/7 for his own safety just boggles my mind. That he was able to just walk into the DC embassy that happened to have the interest section for the Iranians is just astounding. Once he decided he was going to give us the info we had a responsibility to keep him safe – or as safe as possible. And this provides us with a terrible propaganda hit. The reason the Iranians made such a big deal out of this is for two reasons. The first is the internal control dimension – demonstrating to other Iranians that doing something like this only ends badly because the Iranian government will always find out. The second is to demonstrate to anyone/everyone – Iranian and non-Iranian – that if you take information to the Americans they will gladly have the info, but they won’t protect you. Somewhere there’s a case officer that has some serious explaining to do.

  39. 39.

    Adam L Silverman

    @eric: Danke!

    Also, for the curious: the folks that do Sesame Street used to do two different shows for the Israelis and the Palestinians. Once or twice a year the shows would have a crossover episode where the characters met in a tunnel connecting the West Bank to Israel. One of the most depressing pieces of information I ever learned about that conflict.

  40. 40.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @Adam L Silverman:
    That’s funny*. So this scandal could actually have significant real world meaning, but it will do jack squat as a political cudgel. It’s too inside baseball, and doesn’t produce a ‘Vote Republican or the browns will kill us all!’ gut reaction.

    *The death is not funny. The inversion of the usual Republican scandal-mongering paradigm is.

  41. 41.

    Mike in NC

    We did Lake Tahoe in April. Stayed at Zephyr Cove just across the Nevada border. Mountain paradise.

  43. 43.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Frankensteinbeck: It could. Right now the Iranians are trying to figure out what to do with the Landcruiser they caught (fun fact: the favored vehicle of the Iranian clerical class is the Toyota Landcruiser. And they said I never paid attention in my class on Shi’a Islam…). The limited diplomatic opening that led to the settlement of the weapons payment case in the Hague and the separate P5+1 negotiations have allowed the EU to ease (and ultimately lift) their sanctions on Iran. The Iranian leadership desperately wants access to the global system, economy, and markets. Some of this is for self validation: “see, where a full fledged member of the community of nations and we’re still a Shi’a Islamic Republic”. Some is out of economic reality – the sanctions regime was really hurting them. What they haven’t figure out how to do, and I’m not sure they will, is how to preserve the theocracy once the euro comes to Iran. And should the dollar eventually comes to Iran it will be even harder. Because the people carrying and spending those euros and dollars will be interacting with Iranians. The sanctions actually helped them to, if not stop, then certainly retard and restrict the signal. That can no longer happen. So this action is definitely aimed at the internal Iranian audience as a demonstration of power to promote social control.

    Whether it deters anyone else from anywhere else is more problematic. The more the GOP and FOX News and talk radio try to make a big deal out of this, the more play it gets. The more play it gets the more it could have this secondary impact. It seems they’d rather hurt Secretary Clinton’s candidacy more than they’d like to preserve American power right now. Not that I think most would find that surprising.

  44. 44.

    Mnemosyne

    Geez, this place is dead tonight. I’m in the beginning stages of planning a trip to Disney World with my Florida nieces, and I’m thinking that I may decide to go even if Crazy Mom changes her mind. I went last year for about a day and a half after not having been for 20 years, and now I want to go back and see everything I missed.

  45. 45.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Mnemosyne: The Iranians who run Iran – the clerics and the non-clerics who are from the revolutionary cadre – are hyper conservatives. The whole point of how the revolution went down is that it was hijacked by the most conservative to reactionary elements in Iranian society through the actions of the student revolutionaries falling in and in line with Ayatullah Khomeini. They are very, very committed to stability – to the point where it is social stagnation. In that respect it would make sense that they would want Secretary Clinton as she is within the right and left limits of US foreign and defense policy. However, given their stated goal of seeing the Great Satan defeated, and given his behavior during the campaign, it is possible they are rooting for Trump.

  46. 46.

    Ruckus

    @Mnemosyne:
    The US being stable is not in Iran’s worst interest. Having a nut job who wouldn’t think even once about starting a war (that might involve nukes) with them or in their neighborhood is.

  48. 48.

    ? Martin

    @Adam L Silverman: I would think they would worry about Trump. Yes, he’s destabilizing, but I don’t think Iran has any interest in a military encounter, and they might get that with Trump. They should be quite assured that they won’t get that with Clinton.

  49. 49.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Mnemosyne: I checked my sources: no one has ever heard of Silver Airways.

    As for Disney – do it!! I highly recommend, if you’re not worried about price, staying on the property. I’ve stayed at the Port Orleans Resort and the Saratoga Springs Resort. Both were very nice. The former was on Disney’s dime when I was brought in to run an inservice at Disney University in 2004. The latter was on mine when we took the Mom for a very long weekend at Walt Disney World with the family for her 70th birthday. I was able to get a big enough suite that the Mom had her room, my brother, sister in law, and the boys had theirs, and I slept on the sofa sleeper in the living room. And we had our own kitchen, which was also nice.

    For an upscale dinner, I highly recommend the Wolfgang Puck restaurant in Downtown Disney. The food is excellent and there’s a lot of variety on the menu. And they have a full sushi bar. For eating in the park, I have always thought the best sit down restaurant is in the Mexican Pavilion at EPCOT. My claim to fame is being at Disney the day it opened and EPCOT the day it opened (eat your heart out BettyC!!!). So if you’ve got questions, feel free to ping me offline.

  50. 50.

    Prescott Cactus

    @Adam L Silverman:

    that this guy was not being chaperoned 24/7 for his own safety just boggles my mind. That he was able to just walk into the DC embassy that happened to have the interest section for the Iranians is just astounding.

    Doesn’t the action of just walking into a foreign embassy and spilling your guts mark you as unsophisticated and open for a bad future. Not much of a world traveller myself, but you have to think if you are outside your home country and walk into an embassy of an enemy you’re a putting a target on your back.

    Maybe send them a USB thumb drive, a postcard or a CD as an initial hi / hello. James Bond wasn’t real, but he taught us all a few things about being a spy.

  51. 51.

    Mnemosyne

    @?BillinGlendaleCA:

    WDW (which is what the insiders call it) has some cool stuff that’s not at Disneyland. I’m a total nerd, so I actually like Epcot. But if I didn’t have my employee passes and discounts, there’s no way I’d do it.

  52. 52.

    Tissue Thin Pseudonym

    @Adam L Silverman: My understanding is that he told his handlers that he was heading to the Pakistani embassy to go back to Iran, and that the conclusion of the people watching him is that they couldn’t stop him if that’s what he wanted to do. It had been building for a couple of years.

  54. 54.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Tissue Thin Pseudonym: I hadn’t seen it reported out that way (I’ve not actually been following this one that closely). But what you’ve indicated wouldn’t surprise me. It is often hard to protect people from themselves.

  56. 56.

    Mnemosyne

    @Adam L Silverman:

    If I can get agreement from Crazy Mom, I will definitely be asking questions, because it’s been a long time since I went. I get a quite nice employee discount on rooms, so if I can splurge, I may see if I can swing the Polynesian, especially since my older niece is a “Lilo & Stitch” fan (what can I say, the kid has good taste). If I can’t get a great price on that, second choice would be the new Art of Animation Resort where the family suites are very reasonably priced.

    The kids are 16 and 10, so there will probably be many princess pictures and character breakfasts, but I don’t mind. My traveling companion will probably be my non-crazy sister-in-law who lives out here in CA.

    ETA: I feel like no news is good news on Silver Airlines and they’re the only ones who fly the route, so …

  59. 59.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Mnemosyne: No worries. Standing by on this side. As a kid I’ve stayed in the Continental Hotel, as well as the Polynesian (where Dad was confused for an employee brought in from Polynesia on more than one occasion…), and the Tree Top Tree Houses. As an adult just Port Orleans and Saratoga Springs. You can’t go wrong with the Polynesian Resort.

  60. 60.

    ?BillinGlendaleCA

    @Mnemosyne: Yup, and across Fairfax from the old May Co.(soon to be the Academy Museum, you can see a portion of the May Co. building in the pic).

  61. 61.

    Mnemosyne

    @Adam L Silverman:

    As an adult, I stayed at the Beach Club 25 years ago and at the All-Star Movie Resort last year since it was a last-second visit. I called the All-Star Resort “Walt Disney’s Motel 6,” because that’s how basic it was. But for people with kids who are going to want to spend 90 percent of their time in one of the parks, it’s probably fine.

    I don’t remember where we stayed when I was a kid. I’d have to ask my older brother.

    If they ever fly you out for a Disneyland event, the Grand Californian is gorgeous. This last time, we got randomly upgraded to a one-bedroom suite, and since we were already getting a 60 percent off special rate, it was pretty awesome.

  62. 62.

    ?BillinGlendaleCA

    My adventure today consisted of the following:

    Campo De Cahuenga,
    Hollywood Blvd and Vine St. to Capitol Records(had to see the stars for John, Paul, George, and Ringo),
    Hospital I was born in(I was BillinHollywoodCA long before I was BillinGlendaleCA, I also found out today there is a UCLA connection),
    UCLA’s Vermont Ave. Campus(UCLA was at the current site of LACC, before moving to Westwood),
    Koreatown(mainly pictures of building, mostly churches),
    LA County Museum of Art(there’s a portion of the Berlin wall across the street),
    The Tar Pits,
    The Ross store on 3rd street(the reason we don’t currently have a subway to Westwood, or to the sea),
    The old Pan Pacific Auditorium site.

  64. 64.

    SFBayAreaGal

    @Mnemosyne:

    I love staying at the Grand Californian. My favorite Disneyland Hotel. Mnemosyne, how did you get 60% off the room rate?

  65. 65.

    Gvg

    @Mnemosyne: I suppose you know to watch disney’s own site for hotel room rates? The available rates change quite a bit even during a day. Supposedly this is because travel agents buy up blocks of rooms and give some back or something. We do a lot of last minute watching for a deal since we have an 8 year old, live a couple of hours away, and my sisters work schedule changes a lot. Sometimes late at night, we’ll find an opening at a good price, but it can happen at any time. We usually go for the basic on property motels. It is conveinent to get on a bus and not have to deal with the huge parking lot. All Disney hotels have good pools which our kid considers nessesary.
    Set up your fast pass choices ahead of time. You get 3. Then after you have used them at the park, you can add another couple. I have never managed the phone app for checking wait times on the rides but more techie relatives have and it does save time and patience. Phone games can make ride lines better. Good shoes recommended, make sure they are not hot.

  66. 66.

    J R in WV

    @Adam L Silverman:

    WE were at Disney World the press day the day before it opened to the public. Got in free, even, wife was city editor for the Key West Citizen, I was USN Bosun’s Mate. At the time Key West was a sleepy shrimper town with lots of Cubanos and Conchs still living in their Conch houses. No cruise liners, 8 hotels (now there are 80!) really nice shops and restaurants… all diff now.

    The only thing I really enjoyed at Disney was the Haunted House. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was closed, they hadn’t finished something, and it had to be right because most of it was supposed to be under water, but it was pumped dry when we were there.

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