Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Beware of advice from anyone for whom Democrats are “they” and not “we.”

Meanwhile over at truth Social, the former president is busy confessing to crimes.

Well, whatever it is, it’s better than being a Republican.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

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

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

People are weird.

The real work of an opposition party is to oppose.

Someone should tell Republicans that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, or possibly the first.

Can we lighten up on the doomsday scenarios?

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

The willow is too close to the house.

If marriage is the equivalent of selling yourself into slavery, women with self respect should reject the offer.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

Alternative history is always a weak argument. Always.

Democracy cannot function without a free press.

People really shouldn’t expect the government to help after they watched the GOP drown it in a bathtub.

I really should read my own blog.

He really is that stupid.

Republicans cannot even be trusted with their own money.

If you thought you’d already seen people saying the stupidest things possible on the internet, prepare yourselves.

Of course you can have champagne before noon. That’s why orange juice was invented.

Everybody saw this coming.

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

You are here: Home / Climate Change / Late Night Open Thread: An Inconvenient Trump

Late Night Open Thread: An Inconvenient Trump

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Of course “extremely interesting” is frequently a diplomatic euphemism for “completely bonkers”, but let’s look on the brighter side, shall we?

… Mr. Gore, who starred in the Academy Award-winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” projected optimism in the lobby of Trump Tower, telling reporters that his meeting with Mr. Trump was “lengthy and very productive,” and calling it “a sincere search for areas of common ground.”…

Environmental activists looking for straws to grasp pointed to Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka, who met separately with Mr. Gore on Monday and who is reportedly seeking to use her platform as first daughter to speak out on climate change.

Ms. Trump has also met recently with the movie star and environmental advocate Leonardo DiCaprio, who gave her a copy of his documentary “Before the Flood,” which warns of the perils of climate change…

There’s one Trump trait upon which both his “friends” (temporary allies & paid shills) and many enemies agree: The man hungers to be taken seriously, to be spoken of as a Very Important Person, someone who matters.

Now, destroying the planet is very important to the official Republicans currently using Trump as their figurehead, but Trump himself doesn’t seem very interested — he’d be happy in a sealed biodome, as long as it included unlimited gilt furniture, good cable/internet access and a very classy, high-end golf course (or at least a clubhouse with ‘windows’ suggesting such vistas).

Sure, there’s still money to be made in the extraction industries — but those are expensive, unglamorous, dying businesses. “Clean fuels,” renewables, retrofitting, on the other hand: very chic, very popular, with real movie stars no less. And it’s not as though Deadbeat Don wasn’t already getting a lot of pushback and complaining from those GOP hotshots, who seem to be under the impression that he owes them for his electoral-college “win”…

Reader Interactions

47Comments

  1. 1.

    mai naem mobile

    I am going to bring this up again. Forget Calexit. The blue states need to ask Canada to take them in. You don’t have to worry about east to west contiguity except for NM and CO unless you take AZ. They’re almost all ‘giver’ states,not ‘moocher’states so Canada should be happy to have the blue states. I am sorry about the blue islands in the red states but I don’t think red state RWNJS are reachable. If they want to live in the 1950s,let them. The values of the blue states line up more with Canadians’ including climate change. I haven’t come up with a snappy hashtable name for this idea CanWelcome?

  2. 2.

    NotMax

    Shall shyly suggest again that the front pagers agree on one President-elect Sniffles-free day per week. Sure, BJ may be small potatoes but being ignored is what gets to him more than anything and the day and the concept might just catch on across other platforms.

    Maybe Wednesdays. No Trump Hump Day.

  4. 4.

    Suzanne

    @NotMax:

    No Trump Hump Day.

    That’s every day. Every fuckin’ day. EW.

    God, I almost feel bad for Melania. She banged that at least once.

  7. 7.

    NotMax

    @mai naem mobile

    Sorry, but if it comes down to fight or flight shall side with fighting for the ideals of America and if necessary for their restoration and rededication, not fleeing when they are threatened or smothered.

    And Canada is not without problematic backwards-facing politicians, including in the up and coming lane.

  9. 9.

    Anne Laurie

    @Suzanne:

    I almost feel bad for Melania. She banged that at least once.

    She made a business deal. Not the deal you or I would’ve been comfortable making, but from all reports, she’s plenty smart enough to know exactly what she was getting into when she signed the contract.

    And unlike most of the other people Trump signs contracts with, she seems to have held him to his end of the bargain, so far. She’s got her son, (presumably) her citizenship, her parents live in a nice apartment in one of the outer boroughs, and I’m sure she’s had the sound business sense to sock away a nice ‘pension’ fund somewhere neither the old man nor the IRS can touch it. Especially since she hasn’t even been required to move to DC with the rest of the circus!

    Would I go through what she had to go through to get where she is? No, but then, her job requires gifts I never possessed anyway. As long as Princess Ivanka doesn’t manage to have her… taken care of... she and the spare back-up emergency son will be just fine…

  10. 10.

    Mnemosyne

    I’ve been wandering around various writing websites to get inspiration and was amused by an article about what writers wear while writing, particularly from the poet Jill Alexander Essbaum:

    Not shown: A pair of breakaway warm-up pants, Houston Rockets red, worn by James Harden prior to the Shooting Stars Challenge during NBA All-Star Weekend 2013 (auction won, gift from her husband). Sometimes the author wears those. Because she likes to say, “I wrote this sonnet while wearing James Harden’s pants.” Who else gets to say that? Ok, who regularly gets to say that?

  15. 15.

    Juice Box

    @mai naem mobile: And Canada would treat us a lot better than the crap deal we get now. We pay the bills and get a reduced say in how the money gets spent and the country gets run. I’m ready to join Canada along with the rest of the 14th province, Cascadia.

    Sadly, the 14th province would be bigger than the current 13 combined and they probably wouldn’t want us.

  19. 19.

    Esme's Mom

    @NotMax:

    NYT had a piece about skyscrapers and I think they mentioned that, but in a whisper.

    On the other hand, I saw a honest to bob chart showing drumfbo’s height at 5’6″, so I’m taller than that guy.

  21. 21.

    seaboogie

    @Suzanne:

    God, I almost feel bad for Melania. She banged that at least once.

    As much as I try to maintain a Buddhist outlook and not get bitchy, my exception to that rule is the observation that Melania’s ever-squintier squint and hair tent is because she has to share quarters with the semi-human abomination that sired her kid, and frankly, she’d rather not sully her eyeballs any further.

  24. 24.

    NR

    Great interview with Van Jones here.

    You have a huge consultancy class that is neither working class nor people of color — basically a bunch of overwhelmingly white guys that got a billion dollars and set it on fire in the Clinton campaign. They didn’t spend the money on black people and Latinos. Our turnout operations were underfunded. The organization Voto Latino ran out of money registering voters and couldn’t raise money because people were so busy giving money to the DNC to get points toward being ambassadors.

    It’s not like the Democrats raised a bunch of money and spent it on people of color and now they need to stop doing that and start spending it on working-class white people. They didn’t spend the money on working-class white people or people of color. Now they want to pretend they did too much for us and now they’ve got to start doing something for somebody else. No, you didn’t do anything for anybody in the campaign.

    The whole thing is well worth reading.

  25. 25.

    seaboogie

    @efgoldman:

    I’d bet she has her own private suite which locks.

    Yeah – a whole series of locks with those really cool, super-resonant final sounds you hear at the movies.

  29. 29.

    Dog Dawg Damn

    CalExit is cute but U.S. would never allow us to leave with our ports and money, so it’s a non-starter.

  32. 32.

    Uncharismatic megafauna

    @mai naem mobile:

    Following the lead of the Duchy of Grand Fenwick, here’s my escape strategy for our little blue cul de sac. Sorry we can’t take everyone with us. We can’t afford to win.

    Resolution of War

    Resolution Declaring That a State of War Exists Between San Juan County, Washington, of The United States and The Government of British Columbia of Canada and Making Provisions to Prosecute The Same.

    Whereas The Government of British Columbia Repeatedly Has Assaulted The Good People (and The Rest of Us) within San Juan County with Frigid Air and Unconscionably High Winds from Its Fraser River Drainage;

    Whereas the Government of British Columbia Has Allowed The Mountains of Vancouver Island to Mercilessly Deprive San Juan County of The Rainfall That It Would Otherwise Receive;

    Whereas the Government of British Columbia Has Sought to Undermine our Archaic Means of Measurement with Its Unrelenting Use and Promotion of the Metric System;

    And Whereas the People of British Columbia Have Patronized Us with Reserved Sympathy and Understanding for the Stupefying Mortal Wound That Is President-Elect Donald J. Trump Which the United States Has Recently Inflicted Upon Itself.

    Therefore be it Resolved by Any Number of Angry, Desperate, Distraught, Depressed or Otherwise Disturbed People Within San Juan County That a State of War Is Formally Declared Between San Juan County and British Columbia; and, To Pursue The Conflict Until Either British Columbia Completely Ceases Its Heinous Assaults Upon Us or We The People Are So Thoroughly Defeated That The Islands of San Juan County Are Annexed By The Governments of British Columbia and Canada.

  33. 33.

    Feathers

    Almost made it to bed before discovering that someone uploaded a bootleg Hamilton video up to YouTube. Sigh. I am not to be trusted without an external schedule.

  36. 36.

    SWMBO

    @bmaccnm: I just threw up. There isn’t enough brain bleach in the blogosphere to get rid of that image.

    @Uncharismatic megafauna: There was the Conch Republic a few years ago. They seceded from the United States, fired one shot in a declaration of war and surrendered to get foreign aid for a country that lost to the United States.

  38. 38.

    Dog Dawg Damn

    Just watched Joe Biden on Colbert and really wish he had run for POTUS this year.

    Hoping he’s healthy enough to run in 4, because watching him mop the floor with Trump’s weave would be a joy.

  39. 39.

    hellslittlestangel

    @Suzanne: I’m sure he’s not the first old creep she’s fucked for money. She knows how to lie back and think of Bulgari.

  40. 40.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    @Dog Dawg Damn:

    Hoping he’s healthy enough to run in 4

    No, please no. I like the VP but the man will be close to 80. It’s time for the Silents and Boomers to move on(and I say that as a younger Boomer).

  41. 41.

    Patricia Kayden

    @NotMax: Hmmmm. Given how erratic Trump is going to be, taking our eyes off him wouldn’t make any sense. We need to watch him like a hawk so we can rally against his policies.

  43. 43.

    opiejeanne

    It’s 23F outside according to Weather Underground. Just before 1am when it was 25F, much warmer, we heard an animal crying out by the driveway, a high-pitched moan with sort of a snarl at the end, like it was cornered. We put on our bathrobes and slippers and went outside with flashlights, but couldn’t find it and it stopped making noise. Probably ran away. I hope it was just a coyote and not the neighbor’s feral cat.
    The sky was clear and we could see the stars, not always possible in Western Washington. There was frost on the driveway and it crunched under our feet. There was no sound at all, no cars in the distance, no wind.
    Then we ran back inside because it is very cold outside right now and we’re not total idiots.

  44. 44.

    opiejeanne

    @Dog Dawg Damn: Oh, you wish Biden had run so he would have gotten beaten by Trump? I like him as much as anyone else but I won’t wish that heartache on him or anyone else. Hillary was a strong candidate; the vote counting continues and she has almost as many votes right now as Obama did in 2012.

  45. 45.

    Keith G

    @opiejeanne:

    Hillary was a strong candidate

    Hillary was a strong candidate for a certain slice of the American voting public. But let’s not rewrite history. Before she announced, many folks here were pointing out how she is just not an ideal campaigner, not the type of “rally round the party” candidate that is useful to have on one’s ticket. I’m not saying Biden would have done any better. There’s evidence to suggest he wouldn’t have…… and there’s evidence to suggest he connected more with the type of people that Hillary could not connect with which eventually lost her the electoral vote.

  47. 47.

    opiejeanne

    @Keith G: And yet she has more votes than anyone other than Obama, and is closing fast on his 2012 total.
    A certain slice of Americans. Put-leeze.

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