Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I’m just a talker, trying to find a channel!

Donald Jessica Trump found guilty as fuck – May 30, 2024!

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

The frogs are rarely mistaken.

If you are still in the gop, you are either an extremist yourself, or in bed with those who are.

There is no right way to do the wrong thing.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

The new republican ‘Pastor’ of the House is an odious authoritarian little creep.

“Can i answer the question? No you can not!”

Bogus polls are all they’ve got left. Let’s bury these fuckers at the polls a year from now.

Found liable for massive fraud, is required to post a massive bond, gets a break, then files a *fraudulent* bond!

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

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

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

Democrats have delivered the Square Deal, the New Deal, the Fair Deal, and now… the Big Joe Biden Deal.

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

In short, I come down firmly on all sides of the issue.

Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.

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

Fight them, without becoming them!

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

Never give a known liar the benefit of the doubt.

You are here: Home / Elections / Election 2016 / Open Thread: Some of Us Don’t Deserve Nice Things

Open Thread: Some of Us Don’t Deserve Nice Things

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Third-party challengers: First, as tragedy…

I actually feel sorry for Bill Weld, who’s probably the last surviving Honorable Republican Pol.

(He’s hoping for Secretary of State in the Trump administration.)

And then as farce…

(To borrow TBogg’s line: SHUT UP DUMB LADY.)

Reader Interactions

261Comments

  1. 1.

    Omnes Omnibus

    I actually feel sorry for Bill Weld, who’s probably the last surviving Honorable Republican Pol.

    If he didn’t do his due diligence, then screw him.

  2. 2.

    PaulWartenberg2016

    I should have made greater effort to put my name on all 50 state ballots plus DC.

    If there’s a write-in spot on your ballot, you can still use me as a fallback option!

    Wartenberg 4 Work 2016!

  3. 3.

    Baud

    Gov. Gary Johnson ✔ @GovGaryJohnson
    It’s been almost 24 hours…and I still can’t come up with a foreign leader I look up to.

    WTF?

  4. 4.

    Dog Dawg Damn

    Feels like I just listened to an hour of Rachel Maddow saying this Trump in Cuba thing won’t play well in Florida.

    Either Twitter has rotted my brain or damn that was a long, belabored introduction.

  10. 10.

    trollhattan

    @Baud:
    Shorter Gary Johnson: America is more awesome than everyone else, now let’s dismantle the evil bloated gummint!

  11. 11.

    Major Major Major Major

    Oh, lord, these two. I just can’t even.

    I’ve decided that my next balloon-juice analysis will be finding what phrases make a commenter stand out, that they use with some frequency and others don’t. I believe SD is trying to get her “go fuck yourself” numbers up–will it be too little, too late? Stay tuned!

    Somebody mentioned privacy concerns, which should be minimal, but I guess let me know if you don’t want to be included. It’s not like I’m publishing this stuff.

  15. 15.

    Turgidson

    @Dog Dawg Damn:

    Rachel does that a lot with her opening segments. She takes a long while to get to the point in some sort of attempt at building the suspense (which doesn’t always work), and when she arrives at the point, she says it in about five slightly different ways for emphasis. I respect Maddow a bunch, but find her hard to sit through when she is in that mode.

  21. 21.

    Ruckus

    @Omnes Omnibus:
    Xactly.
    He’s a big boy, wears long pants and all that, he couldn’t have figured out that his running mate is a fucking moron? I think he falls under the heading “Two Morons, together at last.”

  24. 24.

    jacy

    My stupid kid put a Johnson/Weld sticker on my car. Had to scrape it off. Had a talk about a) respecting other people’s things and b) being a fucking idiot for supporting Johnson. Seriously, I feel like I have failed as a parent.

  26. 26.

    gf120581

    Good news is these two appear to be well on their well to becoming irrelevant come Election Day. Stein in particular is down to the 1% or less I expected from her in the latest polling.

  28. 28.

    Adam L Silverman

    This is your campaign. This is your campaign on drugs (insert picture of Gary Johnson here).

    And, I fully think marijuana should be legalized, regulated, and taxed.

  29. 29.

    Fair Economist

    Surprised neither could name the popular marijuana legalizer Justin Trudeau. Too far abroad for them to think about, I guess.

    I do have to admit there’s rather a shortage of admirable leaders in the world right now. Abe, Merkel, May, Hollande – they all have their virtues but rather substantive flaws as well. Aung San Suu Kyi would have been good except she’s doing a tap dance about the Rohinga genocide. There’s always the Dalai Lama and Pope Francis though.

  32. 32.

    Thoughtful David

    I actually feel sorry for Bill Weld, who’s probably the last surviving Honorable Republican Pol.

    Um, sorry…no. If you are willing to call yourself a Republican or a Libertarian, you have given up all honor.

  34. 34.

    Turgidson

    @Baud:

    To be fair, that’s a hard question for a libertarian nutball to answer, because, like America, the rest of the planet is also smart enough to realize that you don’t want anti-government wackjobs in charge of, and/or deliberately destroying, the fucking government. So they don’t get elected anywhere else either, thankfully.

    The only countries that get a taste of libertarian “principles” put into practice are places like Somalia, where the rule of law has fallen apart completely but not by design.

    So there aren’t any libertarian foreign leaders that Goofy Uncle Gary could smoke a j with. To the relief of everyone but the few dozen libertarians on the planet.

  36. 36.

    amk

    The Editorial Board has never taken sides in the presidential race. We’re doing it now.

    This year, one of the candidates — Republican nominee Donald Trump — is, by unanimous consensus of the Editorial Board, unfit for the presidency.

    At least, the print media seems to be doing some part of its job.

  38. 38.

    Davis X. Machina

    @jacy: He’s got lots of company. I’m not sure, because policy-wise Johnson is a bog-standard Republican, everywhere it matters. But the kids seem to love him.

  40. 40.

    Adam L Silverman

    @different-church-lady: I have a joint doctorate and a pair of masters degrees. I tend to talk in expansive tangents. She just rambles. Also, the other night when she did her debate thing and highlighted the Reagan team stealing Carter’s debate book it would have been nice if she’d mentioned the actual thief: George Will, PhD.

  41. 41.

    Jeffro

    GREAT new GOTV ad out:

    Barack &
    Michelle &
    Joe &
    Bernie &
    Elizabeth

    (aka the DEMOCRATIC AVENGERS!!)

    Will try to find a link – saw it on my FB feed just a moment ago.

    We are unified, we are top-heavy with talent, history and the issues are on our side – let’s GO!!!

  44. 44.

    Eural Joiner

    I can’t do this anymore – in response to the news about Trump’s excellent Cuban adventure my conservative FB friends are retorting with (I kid you not) “Well, Chelsea travelled to a climate change conference in a jet so both sides are equally hypocritical.” I thought they were joking. No. They. Weren’t.

  46. 46.

    Jeffro

    @Thoughtful David: Weld is so moderate on social issues and non-Kochian, non-1%er on economic ones, he could slip into the Democratic party and he’d cause hardly a ruffle. I’ll take Hillary of course but Weld doesn’t deserve to be lumped in with the rest of the Rs. His main flaw is that he’s running w/ Johnson instead of just giving speeches about the importance of taking down Trump.

  49. 49.

    the Conster, la Citoyenne

    @Fair Economist:

    Shouldn’t a Libertarian at least know the name Hassan Sheikh Mohamoud? Or is he still too much of a statist since he heads a government? The fact that a libertarian can’t name the leader of any successful libertarian country is all you need to know about the idiocy that is libertarianism, and the army of free riding Beavis and Buttheads that champion its stupid cause.

  50. 50.

    Anne Laurie

    @different-church-lady:

    And he definitely couldn’t name one that looks up to him.

    Oh, I dunno. There’s probably a couple small kleptocracies, former Soviet clients maybe, where the leadership is thinking “Damn! That’s all it took for him to get national attention? Sell weed to a bunch of rich stoners?”

  53. 53.

    Fair Economist

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Theresa May? Really?

    Yeah, really. She’s a conservative, but a comparatively non-nasty one, and she’s very good at compromise and consensus, which I think is valuable in a leader. She’s not one to make messes (Brexit she inherited).

  54. 54.

    Baud

    @Jeffro:

    His main flaw is that he’s running w/ Johnson instead of just giving speeches about the importance of taking down Trump.

    That’s a pretty big flaw in my book.

  56. 56.

    Mnemosyne

    @amk:

    Some of it is. Apparently the Detroit News endorsed Johnson because they know Trump is a dumpster fire but couldn’t stand the thought of Hillary cooties.

  62. 62.

    amk

    @Fair Economist:

    (Brexit she inherited).

    Bullshit. She pushed for it in a passive aggressive way. Ask cameron. And as a home minister, she failed at all levels. Of course, the cons voted her into power.

  64. 64.

    Jeffro

    @Mnemosyne: I missed that…I’ve seen the “_____&_____&_____&_____” frame a bunch of places over the past several years, so that can’t be it…can I use a lifeline here? Phone a friend?

  65. 65.

    Anne Laurie

    @Ruckus:

    [Weld]’s a big boy, wears long pants and all that, he couldn’t have figured out that his running mate is a fucking moron? I think he falls under the heading “Two Morons, together at last.”

    I actually voted for Bill Weld, once — when he was running for Guv against Jon Silber, who was essentially Trump without the funding. Weld was a patrician who didn’t go out of his way to be a jagoff, and who realized that when budget numbers had a liberal bias they still had to be taken into consideration.

    This new stunt, however, has me wondering how much truth there may’ve been in the rumors that he’d agree to practically anything once the second pitcher of martinis had been broached.

  67. 67.

    Fair Economist

    @the Conster, la Citoyenne:

    Shouldn’t a Libertarian at least know the name Hassan Sheikh Mohamoud? Or is he still too much of a statist since he heads a government

    LOL. Well the operative word is *successful* libertarian country and Somalia isn’t that, which obviously means it can’t *really* be libertarian because true Scotsman and all that. Besides, the name sounds Muslim and he couldn’t admit admiring a *Muslim* on national TV. Icky!

  68. 68.

    Anne Laurie

    @jacy:

    Seriously, I feel like I have failed as a parent.

    Do like every other parent in history: Blame it on the bad gene from your ex-husband’s side of the family!

  69. 69.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Fair Economist: I’ll leave it at “I disagree.” The rest of your list was pretty good. Another approach would have been to say, “Queen Elizabeth. She has handled her duties with quiet dignity and grace for so many years.”

  70. 70.

    Another Scott

    @Omnes Omnibus: Hasn’t he been that way since he first tried to enter the national political stage?

    Kerry beat him by 8 points in the 1996 Senate race. His nomination to be ambassador to Mexico in 1997 imploded/stalled, then he resigned as governor to somehow campaign full-time for the slot when it was clear that the GOP wasn’t going to confirm him, and then he finally withdrew.

    I dunno. He may have been a decent governor in MA (when he had a strong Democratic legislature keeping him in check), but he seems to have had very poor political instincts for the last 20 years or so.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  76. 76.

    Fair Economist

    @amk:

    Bullshit. She pushed for it in a passive aggressive way. Ask cameron. And as a home minister, she failed at all levels. Of course, the cons voted her into power.

    I don’t agree. I read several of her speeches during the Brexit campaign and she was certainly against it. I’m not happy with what she did as Home Minister, which I consider her primary flaw, and why overall I couldn’t call her “admirable”.

  77. 77.

    the Conster, la Citoyenne

    @Anne Laurie:

    LOL – he’s got a drinker’s nose, that looked like he covered it in pancake makeup. I liked the guy – he lowered the state flag for Jerry Garcia’s death. The Republicans in my office would vote for him, but the Johnson interview just made them feel sorry for him. They were in a very heated discussion today about who to write in. They’re not voting for Trump, for sure.

  79. 79.

    hueyplong

    @Baud:
    “That’s a pretty big flaw in my book.”

    Yes. Weld could be out there opposing dumbed-down fascism, but instead he ran off and joined the circus.

  80. 80.

    Anne Laurie

    @Davis X. Machina:

    I’m not sure, because policy-wise Johnson is a bog-standard Republican, everywhere it matters. But the kids seem to love him

    He’s flipping a bird at the Establishment, maaaan.

    What teenager doesn’t love a pot-smoking layabout who can afford to do that?

    Or, at the very least, what teenager doesn’t love pretending to their elders that they do?

  81. 81.

    Fair Economist

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Another approach would have been to say, “Queen Elizabeth. She has handled her duties with quiet dignity and grace for so many years.”

    Ooh yes, ceremonial leaders – great people to praise for a TV audience.

  83. 83.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    I actually feel sorry for Bill Weld, who’s probably the last surviving Honorable Republican Pol.

    Before he signed on with Johnson, I might’ve agreed, but helping perpetuate the libertarian nonsense, especially in the cycle, is beyond stupid. I’d give that title to old John Warner.

  84. 84.

    SiubhanDuinne, liberal mob enforcer bitch

    @Major Major Major Major:

    I believe SD is trying to get her “go fuck yourself” numbers up–will it be too little, too late? Stay tuned!

    No no no, I was merely trying to give beloved and ancient commenter efgoldman a helping hand. He owns “go fuck yourself.” Believe me.

  85. 85.

    jacy

    Oh, for anybody who was entertained/enraged by the email I got from my son’s private Catholic school last week telling people to stand for the National Anthem or else, complaints were lodged. Resulting in this email today:

    “To the XXX family and our greater community,

    Please allow me like to clarify a few things regarding the recent email concerning a show of respect during the national anthem:

    1. The email was sent to XXX parents, students, and faculty/staff. It was meant for XXX students, faculty and staff only – not the general public. The term “spectators” was used to indicate the XXX students, faculty and staff in attendance at the football game.

    2. XXX does not have any public position on national protests or other news issues regarding the national anthem. The school simply requires respectful behavior during all school-sponsored events, including the playing of the national anthem.

    For further issues of clarity or concern, please contact the school administration directly.

    Mrs. “Please don’t call me a Fascist Again”
    Interim Principal

  87. 87.

    SiubhanDuinne, liberal mob enforcer bitch

    @Barbara:

    Angela Merkel? It’s not that hard.

    Or Justin Trudeau. I mean, if he’s good enough for the Duchess of Cambridge….

  93. 93.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Am I the only one who thinks naming names like this, you’re always gonna be implicitly naming the leaders you don’t respect or like or whatever, is bad diplomacy for a presidential candidate? Johnson’s a cartoon, but I don’t think Clinton should’ve played along.

  95. 95.

    Anne Laurie

    @amk: Weld can legitimately joke that his family didn’t come over on the Mayflower — ‘but we sent the servants ahead to prep the summer cottage.’

    And it’s not as though I considered patrician as a positive; it’s just an accurate descriptor.

  96. 96.

    JGabriel

    Speaking of people who don’t deserve nice things, Thomas Friedman drops this gem in a lament against voting for Trump:

    Trump is so obsessed with proving his infallibility that he missed scoring an easy debate point for himself by saying, “Yes, I supported the Iraq war as a citizen, but Hillary voted for it as a senator when she had access to the intelligence and her job was to make the right judgment.”

    I guess that tells us how Tom ‘Suck on This’ Friedman excuses his own Iraq demagoguery – and lives with himself after being wrong about everything regarding Iraq, so violently and for so long.

  99. 99.

    SiubhanDuinne, liberal mob enforcer bitch

    @p.a.:

    May I suggest ‘long-time’ instead of ancient?

    You may suggest, but I may ignore. I’m a few years older than efg and enjoy indulging the privileges of vast age.

  102. 102.

    jl

    OK, good to know this cycle’s third party candidates might be as goofy as Trump.
    On the bright side, more talking points if favor of voting for the Dems this year that we can use on people who are not prepared to pro-actively come to the defense of their country at the voting booth.

    Edit: I thought Johnson’s follow-up tweet (It’s been almost 24 hours…and I still can’t come up with a foreign leader I look up to) was especially stupid and offensive, much worse than his bad Aleppo jape, and puts him dangerously close to Trump territory.

  103. 103.

    Wapiti

    @Iowa Old Lady: Hopefully that ends up costing Trump some money. Maybe give his foundation’s directors a lesson about what their mismanagement could do to their inheritances. (Though to be honest, proper management of the foundation likely would have resulted in their inheritance being zeroed out. Mammon-worshipers, the lot of them.)

  104. 104.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @jacy:
    So, they want the people with the power to protest assured this rule only applies to the helpless, and this petty, draconian restriction has nothing to do with a controversy over race, even though nobody cared until the controversy over race, honest! How… Republican.

  107. 107.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @Baud:
    Venerable? I call dibs on ‘eccentric commenter Frankensteinbeck’. If that’s just too respectful for this pit of snarling jackals, my second choice is ‘decrepit.’

    EDIT – Ooh! ‘Internet enabled pest bog mummy, Frankensteinbeck’!

  114. 114.

    cmorenc

    @Dog Dawg Damn:

    Feels like I just listened to an hour of Rachel Maddow saying this Trump in Cuba thing won’t play well in Florida.

    This is why as much as I admire Rachael Maddow for her intelligence and person, the times I tune into her show, I so often find it frustratingly unlistenable after ten minutes or so. She has adopted a style of introducing and presenting stories that is so elliptically repetitive and drawn out that I want to shout at the TV or radio “DAMMIT WOMAN, GET OUT THE BULLSHIT AND GET ON WITH THE SUBSTANCE OF THE STORY”. And I often wind up turning the station to another channel after only ten minutes or so.

    In her earlier days on MSNBC, she got much quicker and more directly to the substance of each of the story segments on her show, and it was a FAR better show. It’s as if she studied a textbook about storytelling, and used her considerable scholarly skills to remember the recommended techniques, without really understanding the art of how to make them actually work to hold audience interest. Rachael, you’re a master political reporter, not Garrison Keillor, and you would do well to recognize that.

  117. 117.

    Citizen_X

    It’s been almost 24 hours…and I still can’t come up with a foreign leader I look up to.

    Goddamn that must be some good weed!

  118. 118.

    hovercraft

    @JGabriel:
    The balls on these fucking assholes, people are dead, while you bleated on and on about fucking Freidman units, and now suddenly you’re just a civilian?

  121. 121.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @p.a.: “Superannuated” is the term I’d use. I mean jeebus cripes, peeps, you can’t spell “efgoldman” without “old man,” canya?

    Also too, fa in culo. (I think I’ll claim that as my italoamericano go-to epithet…)

  131. 131.

    different-church-lady

    @Anne Laurie:

    I actually voted for Bill Weld, once — when he was running for Guv against Jon Silber

    You weren’t alone. Only time I ever crossed party lines.

  132. 132.

    Fair Economist

    @cmorenc:

    [Rachel Maddow] has adopted a style of introducing and presenting stories that is so elliptically repetitive and drawn out that I want to shout at the TV or radio “DAMMIT WOMAN, GET OUT THE BULLSHIT AND GET ON WITH THE SUBSTANCE OF THE STORY”.

    Regrettably, that’s the constraint of the medium. She’s got to fill up an hour every day. National news has a huge staff, and they’re only supposed to do half an hour.

  133. 133.

    p.a.

    @Uncle Cosmo: vai a fare in culo. in italamerican, vafongul’, vafoncul’.

    Connecticut School of Broadcasting had a radio commercial with a ‘student’ named Stu Gatz! Any Sopranos fan will get the joke. Advertisers having a little fun (I hope no one is really named Stuart Gatz)

  134. 134.

    jl

    @?BillinGlendaleCA:

    Baud! 2016!’s miserable failure of a campaign may go down in history, in a very bad way.
    But a very good excuse to taunt Baud some more, so some good will come of it.

    Edit: I see Baud has been infesting this comment thread, but conveniently disappeared soon after BillinGelndale offered his important insight, which history may well note.

  135. 135.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @jacy: And what school is that? Our Lady of Indoor Plumbing? Immaculate Heart of Lettuce?

    Bear in mind that for 50 years post-WW2 in Europe, “Christian Democrat” was a pseudonym for “Catholic Falangist”. And that they didn’t call Charles Coughlin “Father” for his contribution of genetic matter to future generations…

    (Disclaimer: I walked out of the self-styled One Holy Catholic & Apostolic Church prior to Vatican II, & never looked back.)

  141. 141.

    p.a.

    @efgoldman: I read it as describing the length of time you’ve commented here, as it seemed more germaine than a description of your age. Ancient wouldn’t occur to me to describe someone < 100.

  143. 143.

    jl

    @different-church-lady: I followed the link in your comment to see Friedman’s wisdom. So Friedman is, for some reason, aping the piss poor defenses that Trump supporters are spewing out.

    OK, suppose Trump had been a Senator, what would his reasoning have been. Well, from what the historical record of his own damn words at the relevant time, it would have been ‘Gee I haven’t thought about it much, but invading Iraq seems like a swell idea. I’ll vote with the winners. It’s a yes.’

    These goofs miss the whole point. Trump is offering his supposed wisdom, AS a PRIVATE CITIZEN, that led him to supposedly oppose three major military policy decisions that he now says he KNEW were mistakes at the time. But he is bald face lying about all three. And there is recorded audio and visual evidence to confirm that he is lying now. What difference does it make whether he was private citizen or a Senator?

    I wish I was a US corporate media pundit, and I could get a fat paycheck to drivel out ignorant and stupid BS.

  144. 144.

    SFAW

    @Adam L Silverman:

    I have a Joint doctorate and a pair of masters degrees.

    What were the Master’s degrees in, Bongology and Hash Browniness? Must’ve gotten them in Colorado. Or maybe it was Maui?

    Wowie!

  146. 146.

    Calouste

    @Uncle Cosmo: Ah no. In Germany for example half of the Christian Democrats are Protestants. Italy and Austria are the only Catholic countries in Europe that had a Christian-Democratic party for 50 years after WWII. (In Spain of course, they just had the Falange, but they didn’t pretend to have anything to do with democracy.)

  148. 148.

    piratedan

    @jl: well, there’s also this one teensy little difference…HRC has admitted it was a mistake and has apologized for it. Trump instead has lied about it and completely disavowed himself of any kind of culpability.

  150. 150.

    SFAW

    @efgoldman:

    My very own progeny has been telling me “gawd, you’re old” since she was a teenager, 20+ years ago.

    Um, well, you were.

    But you’re younger than that now

  151. 151.

    p.a.

    World Cup Hockey
    Canada wins series, wins tonight 2-1. All goals scored by Bruins; Chara Team Euro, Bergeron, Marchand (shorthanded late 3rd period) for Canada.

    Let’s give thanks tonight’s NFL game was not too easy to access; 1 td each, 5 field goals for Cincy. TV ratings down 10%. Revulsion with owner greed and decades of ignoring player damage? Or because the product really does suck?

  152. 152.

    seaboogie

    @Adam L Silverman:

    And, I fully think marijuana should be legalized, regulated, and taxed.

    Hence your “joint doctorate”….which as I understand it, can also be a “spliff” doctorate.

  155. 155.

    MoxieM

    Weld owes it to his legacy as a Smart Guy to get the hell off that ticket with that bag of hammers (aka Gary Johnson). Besides the White Shoe, East-Coast WASPY legacy thing he’s got going on, he is not a dummy…just bores easily. I think his first wife, the Roosevelt (yeah, that Roosevelt) would have done better, is probably smarter, and more ethical, too.

  156. 156.

    Steve in the ATL

    @p.a.:

    Let’s give thanks tonight’s NFL game was not too easy to access; 1 td each, 5 field goals for Cincy. TV ratings down 10%. Revulsion with owner greed and decades of ignoring player damage? Or because the product really does suck?

    The unwatchability of the dolphins’ play is met or exceeded by the unwatchability of the dolphins’ uniforms

  157. 157.

    Miss Bianca

    @Mnemosyne: btw, I have been listening to the Musical that Must Not Be Named pretty much non-stop. It got me thru’ a crazy day of orders today.

    I blame you. And Obama.

  158. 158.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @MoxieM: there are rumors he’s planning to drop out if it looks like their ticket is helping Trump, but even if true, I can’t imagine that dramatic moment will change many votes

  160. 160.

    CaseyL

    Being a history buff has its advantages: “Ancient” to me means “older than 2000 years.” On that scale, we’re all dewy-eyed infants.

    People get old, older, oldest, really amazingly old. They never get ancient. No one lasts long enough to be ancient.

    (I don’t mention geology or cosmology because those time scales are just crazy.)

  162. 162.

    redshirt

    @p.a.: Solidarity with Pats fans over the OUTRAGE that is Tom Brady’s 4 game suspension.

    But fret not league, when the Pats come out of it 4-0 and Brady fully healthy and rested and ready to destroy everyone, it will be so glorious everyone will forget (for a moment) how awful you are.

  164. 164.

    Felonius Monk

    It’s been almost 24 hours…and I still don’t know who Gary Johnson is.

    /snark — for those whose meter is broken..

  165. 165.

    SFAW

    @efgoldman:

    It didn’t do much for the quality when they expanded to 16 out of 21 (or so) teams getting into the playoffs. I remember when they did that, but I can’t remember what decade (never mind the year).

    If only there were some easy online tool to find out that info …

    ETA: And if I weren’t so fucking illiterate, I would have realized that p.a. had switched from hockey to (real) football in the second paragraph. So ignore the above comment. (Yeah, as if you need to be told that.)

  171. 171.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @SFAW: There are 32 NFL teams. I’ll admit that some don’t count. The Bills, the Jets, and the Raiders right now, but there are 32 teams in the league.

  172. 172.

    SFAW

    @redshirt:

    Even a healthy Brady will feel some apprehension when he goes against the offensive juggernaut that is Ryan Leaf Fitzpatrick and the J-E-T-S!

  173. 173.

    Mnemosyne

    @Uncle Cosmo:

    Vatican II was pretty cool — we got to sing Beatles songs in church, and girls could be altar servers.

    Then JPII decided that VII had gone a little too far and started trying to walk it back …

  174. 174.

    seaboogie

    @Miss Bianca: That is the ear-wormiest musical ever written. I suspect LMM hisself is lying in a flotation tank somewhere listening to an endless loop of Stairway to Heaven just to wash his brain of his infectious music. Genius stuff – but it will take over your synapses…

  175. 175.

    jacy

    @Uncle Cosmo: one of the things that pisses my catholic ex off is that, despite years of catholic school, all my children are agnostics. Partly my good example as a non-believer, but much more his family’s horrible examples as believers.

  176. 176.

    hovercraft

    @SFAW:
    You mean that ‘rigged’ search engine google? Trump and Sputnik have told me it hides certain information, so it cannot be trusted.

  179. 179.

    SiubhanDuinne, liberal mob enforcer bitch

    @MisterForkbeard:

    I’m super late to this, but can I suggest “antediluvian”? It’s old, but biblical and therefore classy.

    I’m going with “prelapsarian.”

  180. 180.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @SFAW: If you come out in favor of threaded comments, you are dead to me.*

    *I am not sure that this helps my cause. Life is complicated.

  181. 181.

    Mnemosyne

    @Miss Bianca:

    Pro tip while at work or driving: if you fast-forward past “Blow Us All Away” and “Stay Alive (Reprise),” you’ll be able to listen to “It’s Quiet Uptown” without the full ugly cry.

    I still think I scared some poor person on the freeway who saw me crying really hard the first time I heard “Uptown.” Fortunately for the safety of everyone, I was not driving.

  183. 183.

    SiubhanDuinne, liberal mob enforcer bitch

    @seaboogie:

    Hence your “joint doctorate”….which as I understand it, can also be a “spliff” doctorate.

    Or “doobie doctorate,” which adds advantages of alliteration.

  185. 185.

    JR in WV

    @jacy:

    Obviously “Mrs. “Please don’t call me a Fascist Again”
    Interim Principal ” missed the principle of the thing. She can’t really tell anyone what to do regarding respect.

    Not without owning the name “Fasciest Again” completely and totally. Not in America, where burning the flag as a symbol of protest is completely legal.

    Perhaps a large group of parents should arrange a parental flag burning for the next performance of the “Star Spangled Banner”?

    Those verses past the first one get stranger than you might think!

    Back in the 1940s (! IIRC) the Supremes decided that the WV legislature could not force students to stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. So I would suppose that Mrs “Please don’t call me Fascist again” is sliding on very thin ice!

    Here it is:

    In West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943), the Supreme Court ruled that requiring the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments. The case grew out of West Virginia’s passage of legislation requiring the pledge and flag-saluting.

    How different is the national anthem? Which talks about slaves in other verses!

  186. 186.

    Jibeaux

    For us healthy hetero females, Trudeau in his three piece suit talking about feminism might as well be a mashup of Magic Mike XXL and the best of NPR.
    I’m just saying if I’m running for president, I’m not whiffing on that question at all. I am tremendous at that question.

  189. 189.

    scott alloway

    @Baud: A long time ago (1976). a friend ran a spoof campaign for a state house seat. His tagline: “He can be bought.” It has come the full circle.

  192. 192.

    MomSense

    Well I’ve failed as a parent. My dog was kicked out of doggy day care after only 15 minutes. Nothing aggressive but they determined she’s a flight risk. As soon as she got into the yard, she ran along the fence non stop looking for a way out. Poor girl was too obsessed with finding a way out to play with any of the other dogs.

  193. 193.

    hovercraft

    @SFAW:
    Google is still working fine for me, the Orangutan, not so much.

    Trump also introduced a new conspiracy theory to the campaign on Wednesday night when he accused Google of somehow colluding with Hillary Clinton’s campaign. “Google search engine was suppressing the bad news about Hillary Clinton,” the Republican told a cheering crowd of supporters in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Neither Google nor the Trump campaign responded to requests for comment on this accusation, which seems to stem from a report in Sputnik News, a Russian state propaganda outlet. The reference to Google did not appear to be ad libbed as it was in Trump’s prepared remarks.

    Study it out !!

  196. 196.

    Omnes Omnibus

    Why is my ‘nym smaller after a comment? I assume it is something Tommy did because we internet wrong that Alain has not had a chance to fix.

  199. 199.

    Steeplejack (tablet)

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Yes, it dates from the previous “upgrade,” but it’s way down my list of things I’d like to see fixed.

    No. 1? Naked motherfucking links, thank you for asking.

  201. 201.

    CaseyL

    @MomSense: I’m not sure why they kicked her out instead of just letting her tire herself out – maybe they were worried she would find a hole big enough to squeeze though?

    Is there a dog version of Montessori?

  204. 204.

    jl

    @Baud: More LIES from the erstwhile Baud! 2016! defunct campaign unspeakable mess.

    Baud’s slogan was ‘Baud! 2016! We still have time to mess things up!’

    That is what brought me on board. Baud is clearly willing and able to tell ridiculous lies like a real Trump, yet his campaign went nowhere. Why? History will ask ‘Why?’

  207. 207.

    Fair Economist

    @catclub:

    So is there any place to see present status of Brexit plans? Is anything happening?

    Plans? Brexit? Hahahahaha. Nobody has any idea how Brexit will come out and it will take 10 years to sort things out if May pulls the trigger (and there’s a serious question as to whether she actually could). She’s stalling and hoping the problem goes away somehow.

  208. 208.

    SFAW

    @jl:

    Why?

    Because Baud, to his everlasting credit, was unwilling to emulate “Trumpf, the Insulting-But-Not-Especially-Funny-Nor-Witty Comic Dog. ”

    Pathetic!

  212. 212.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    great tweet from Iowa, I don’t think I could post the accompanying picture even if I understood the mysterious ways of twitter

    Felix Wu
    ‏@ FelixYWu
    103 year-old Ruline just cast her early vote for Hillary: “I never thought I would vote for a woman.” #WithHerFirst

  216. 216.

    Mnemosyne

    If I bitch that there’s no new thread, will that make one magically appear between the time I type this and the time I press “Comment”?

    Let’s find out.

    ETA: It was worth a try. I regret nothing.

  224. 224.

    Steeplejack (tablet)

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    It was fixed at least once before and got unfixed when ATSF ran some module updates and didn’t tidy up afterwards. Plus it’s a known, supposedly easy fix that has been detailed several times by Mike J, The Other Chuck and possibly others.

  226. 226.

    Origuy

    I read a comment this morning listing two world leaders that a libertarian like Johnson could admire. I wish I could remember where I saw it. They weren’t anyone you’d recognize. Ken Jennings tweeted earlier that no world leaders knew who Johnson was, so that made things even.

  230. 230.

    Ian

    @Fair Economist:
    You rate Abe over Kyi because of her lack of stance on the Rohingya? What about Abe’s denial of the Japanese genocide in China? And Theresa May? Let her do something (anything) before you call her admirable.

    As for Hollande, I thought we balloon-juicers looked down on anti-muslim bigots trying to impose anti-sharia nonsense on their countries.

  231. 231.

    Mnemosyne

    Apropos of nothing, the person who decided that all “women’s” t-shirts should now be junior’s sizes so that an actual grown woman who needs a shirt that’s at least 37 inches in circumference has to buy a 2XL size can go fuck themselves.

  244. 244.

    FlipYrWhig

    What Gary Johnson should have said was “I’m a libertarian. I don’t admire government leaders, I admire the people.” Like when Scott Brown said it wasn’t Ted Kennedy’s seat but the people’s seat and the audience ate it UP.

  245. 245.

    Anne Laurie

    @CaseyL:

    I’m not sure why they kicked her out instead of just letting her tire herself out – maybe they were worried she would find a hole big enough to squeeze though?

    Liability risk. A dog who’s got the runrunrun glitch in their programming — and I most sincerely hope, for MomSense’s sake, this is not true of Kira! — will never stop looking for a chance to escape. And when they eventually succeed, they may only be a danger to themselves, but there’s always a chance they turn out to be a danger to others as well. (Or that a grieving / angry owner will sue the doggy daycare operators.)

    I have known otherwise sane, intelligent dogs who got in serious trouble because of the RunRunRun glitch. An Afghan Hound who took advantage of someone entering a securely gated area to shoot past them, sprint through three pastures, and get her pelvis & multiple ribs broken when she reached the highway seconds later. A Springer Spaniel who’d been hit by cars three times by his second birthday, despite his owners’ best efforts.

    Our own beloved rescue Papillon Zevon… who earned that name, within 36 hours of coming to live with us, when he leapt out an open window, dropped six feet onto gravel, and disappeared into a mizzling dark November night before I could yank the door open to follow him. Fortunately he was picked up fairly soon by a couple of kids… on the other side of the third-most-dangerous highway interchange in Massachusetts. After a couple more incidents, I became convinced that his original owners turned an otherwise “perfect” pet (housebroken, not noisy, good w/other dogs / cats / kids) over to the rescue group because they could not bear to spend one more night searching & praying that it wouldn’t be his lifeless body they found…

  246. 246.

    Mnemosyne

    @Anne Laurie:

    G helped capture a dog like that last summer, which was of course trying to fling itself across a busy 6-lane street. He and a couple of other people were able to wrestle it to a stop and call the frantic owner’s cell phone based on the tags. He had been driving around trying to locate the dog.

    And the owner was extra frantic because the dog was still recovering after having been hit by a car during a previous escape a few weeks before and still had various stitches and limps that did not prevent his escape.

  248. 248.

    Cain

    Seriously, what about Nehru or Gandhi as leaders? I mean, he can’t find anybody in this time stream that he can look up to? Sheesh.

  250. 250.

    Mnemosyne

    @efgoldman:

    What with the whole biopsy thing, I feel like I’ve already discussed my boobs way too much here, but men’s t-shirts tend to bunch strangely on me because, well, my chest slopes quite differently and drastically compared to a man’s chest.

  251. 251.

    TriassicSands

    I actually feel sorry for Bill Weld, who’s probably the last surviving Honorable Republican Pol.

    But, Anne, he’s not a Republican. He’s a Libertarian.

    And why feel sorry for someone who hitched his trailer to a dunce like Johnson?

  255. 255.

    NorthLeft12

    Johnson and Stein are doing their best to absolutely destroy this generation of Americans’ belief in the value of having a viable third or fourth party in your political system.

  257. 257.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Omnes Omnibus: I beeched about that awhile back. As it happens, the miniaturization of the nym only lasts until the next time you refresh the page, then your Handel is restored from Trumpdigitish weenieness to normal size. IOW, it’s no big thing :p… & IMHO they’s lots more pressin’ shit to get fixed hyar foist.

  258. 258.

    cgordon

    Yah, the guy is so stupid he doesn’t even have a favorite foreign leader! He must have an IQ of 50! Someone should ask him if he has a favorite color! Maybe he could answer that one at least!!

  261. 261.

    tones

    @Turgidson: it drives me bonkers, but suspect it is leftover from being on radio…I try to forgive it but usually cannot.
    this and then when she tries to tell a joke or be funny?
    Ugh.
    not once has she managed it, humor is definitely not her strong suit, to be overly generous.
    Yet she tries incessantly over and over and it is embarrassing.

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