Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

Everybody saw this coming.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

Not all heroes wear capes.

The gop couldn’t organize an orgy in a whorehouse with a fist full of 50s.

Bad news for Ron DeSantis is great news for America.

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

Please don’t feed the bears.

“And when the Committee says to “report your income,” that could mean anything!

Democrats are back in array!

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

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

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

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

The lights are all blinking red.

This isn’t Democrats spending madly. This is government catching up.

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

The willow is too close to the house.

If you’re looking for someone who’s young and athletic, go watch a fucking movie.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

It looks like winning debates is a black job!

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Red Yawn

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If he lives another thousand years and keeps using that time to oppose the fascist kleptocrat who hijacked his party of reckless neocons, bible-humpers and plutocracy minions, David Frum might yet work off a fraction of the karmic debt he acquired in the run-up to the Iraq War:

For those of you who are not fellow old farts, Frum is referring to “Red Dawn,” a Reagan-era film that depicted brave American patriots taking on Soviet invaders. And Frum is right — the same people who envisioned themselves picking off Russians with pa’s squirrel rifle in 1984 are filled with admiration for Putin’s steely man-boobs today.

It’s not just the Republicans with a media platform either. Check out this remarkable turnaround in Putin’s poll numbers among a certain subset of our population:

yougov-putin

Of course, we suspected Republicans of being nascent fascist lackeys all along. Still, the stampede to the docks to welcome the conqueror with vodka and caviar is remarkable.

Open thread, comrades!

Reader Interactions

351Comments

  2. 2.

    Kryptik

    First off, Kudos on the title.

    Secondly, that graph proves it always comes down to two things: Power and winning at any cost, and Cleek’s Law

    Doesn’t matter whose you sell your soul to for Republicans, it seems, long as they find a way to win and then punish their enemies, at any and all costs.

    And Cleek’s Law? Enough said. Long as Dems like it, Republicans are obligated to opposite it, and vice versa. Doesn’t matter, long as it’s to spite those super evil EssJayDub commie…er…hrm….oh, right, GLOBALIST loving Libby Libs.

  5. 5.

    Monkeyfister

    An Events Marketing job will be opening here soon (DoN). Big events like X-Games, & scheduling touring assets. Pay starts at $48,900+Fed Bennies. West TN location.

  8. 8.

    Yarrow

    Also, I posted this at the end of the thread below, but in case people didn’t see it…

    Focus group with Ohio Trump voters. Apparently done on Tuesday. Doesn’t look like they either were asked about or brought up the Russia stuff.

    During a focus group discussion here Tuesday night, a dozen Trump supporters said they believed that Trump should make one major change: act more presidential. They said that his use of Twitter is unnecessary, unprofessional and potentially damaging to his presidency.

    “He needs to stay off Twitter and quit responding to every little thing people put out there,” said Melinda Berger, 51. “It seems juvenile. Bring yourself above it.”

    They love the Goldman Sachs guys.

    What about Trump’s Cabinet of Goldman Sachs executives, billionaires and business executives? Pitch perfect, they said.

    “Politicians are not dealmakers,” remarked Michael Rotella, 54, a staunch Republican.

    “I’m happy because I think it should be run as a business,” said Courtney Pitts, 37, a Democrat who counts Obama as her favorite president but who voted for Trump.

    And yes, Obama voters who voted for Trump.

    “The people are fed up, for lack of a better word. They’re looking for change and a new direction,” said Sarah Mars, 29, an independent who supported Obama in 2012. “I almost feel like I was willing to put aside human characteristics about him, because there were things I didn’t like about him, but I was willing to excuse it based on things I didn’t like about Hillary [Clinton].”

    Apparently they want him to “fix healthcare on day one.” WTF does that even mean? And how can they not ask them about Russia hacking our elections?

    I just don’t even know what to say at this point.

  10. 10.

    PaulWartenberg2016

    these blood-guzzling yaboos who think themselves mighty warriors for their God are eagerly selling themselves out to a foreign despot against their own country and their own people.

    And it’s not over the issues, or ideology, or jobs. They’re doing this out of spite, and an unstoppable urge to tear down every last bit of social and economic advancement of the 20th Century.

  14. 14.

    Jayleia

    Yeah, but these dipshits will meet our new Soviet Overlords with Trump [tm] brand vodka, and then we get nuked for that.

    They can’t even grovel effectively.

  15. 15.

    PaulWartenberg2016

    @Terry Buckalew:

    the original Red Dawn was based on the fears that the USSR along with their Cuban and Central American allies could pull off an Afghanistan-style invasion in order to secure American’s farm belt (the movie’s premise is based on communist rebels overtaking Mexico, and a massive famine developing in Russia forcing the Soviets to wage war for food, which is why they don’t use more nukes on US soil).

    the rumor is the script writers based the premise on a war game that the US military proposed as a possible invasion model. The end result of that war game was that the Soviets wouldn’t be able to maintain a foothold (too much land area to control, for one).

  17. 17.

    ThresherK

    Tangential post title study question:

    Red Dawn was a correct response on Jeopardy! last night.

    I swear I asked my wife right then: Excluding movies almost exclusively referred to for their awfulness (Eegah, Plan 9 From Outer Space), what do you consider the worst movie ever mentioned on Jeopardy! , in clue or response?

    Red Dawn has got to be up there. Your input is solicited.

  19. 19.

    hovercraft

    @Betty Cracker
    Still, the stampede to the docks to welcome the conqueror with vodka and caviar is remarkable

    Speaking of Putin and his conquest.

    Stephen Colbert Congratulates Russia’s Cold War Victory (VIDEO)

    So Trump was right. The election was rigged! Now this huge surprise is no surprise because back in October, we know the C.I.A. told the White House Russian hackers were involved. but they didn’t release the report because they didn’t want to sway a presidential election. That’s the F.B.I.’s job.

    The C.I.A.’s proof is that Russia hacked both the D.N.C. and the R.N.C. but did not release whatever information they got from the Republicans because nothing in the RNC emails was as bad as what Trump was saying out loud. Apparently, Russia’s goal was to “undercut confidence in the integrity of the vote.” Well, it didn’t work. I still have complete confidence in the vote. It’s my faith in humanity that’s been shattered.

  20. 20.

    Yarrow

    @Gordon Schumway: Yep. It’s authoritarianism, plain and simple. That’s your answer. And we’re all going to find out what it feels like.

    Speaking of which, Betty, Tom – is there any discussion going on behind the scenes at Balloon Juice with Cole about keeping people who post here safe? About keeping this place running? Because they’ll be coming for free speech with libel laws and anything else they can. They’ll be demanding data, shutting things down. Anyone talking about that?

  23. 23.

    low-tech cyclist

    That graph says everything, doesn’t it? Their Dear Leader told them that Putin was great, and all of a sudden, they love Putin, even though they despised him six months ago, though I bet few of them would own up to it. And Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.

    Having lived through 35 years’ worth of the Cold War, the turnabout in the GOP attitude towards Russia is causing my head to explode.

    Reagan: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

    Trump: “Mr. Putin, give us a kiss!”

  24. 24.

    ThresherK

    Hmm. Good one, but Is the concept of Roadhouse some failed wet dream like Red Dawn? And has it been on Jeopardy! ?

    Ooh: I wonder if An American Carol has ever been there?

    (PS I have no idea if I’m going to split this into “original” and “adapted” like the Oscars, because there are three Atlas Shruggedses out there and I have no idea that the movie versions were cited.)

  25. 25.

    CABona

    @TerryBuckalew It was mighty (!) Nicaraguan and Cuban troops who invaded Colorado, on behalf of their Russian overlords. Just as I always suspected, the problem was the “browns” lording it over us Amerikans and not the Russians, who look like us dontcha know!

  26. 26.

    azlib

    The Fascist did cut a deal with the Reds a while back, but then the Fascists stabbed the Reds in their back. Did not work out very well for the world.

  29. 29.

    hovercraft

    @ThresherK:

    Red Dawn has got to be up there. Your input is solicited.

    This hasn’t been asked yet, but if it is…
    What documentary film was the first sign of the end for America. If ” what is IDIOCRACY is the correct answer, then you know the end is nigh.

  32. 32.

    West of the Rockies (been a while)

    @Yarrow:

    I think, Yarrow, that people who are reasonably bright and educated, who have intellectual curiosity, are stunned over and over by how approximately four out of ten people in this country are extremely stupid or ignorant. Wilfully, pridefully ignorant.

    It takes so much less effort to say “I just think that Trump is a great leader,” rather than examine facts and extrapolate from them what will happen when we elect a Trump or Shrub or Palin, etc.

  33. 33.

    Tilda Swinton's Bald Cap

    @Yarrow:

    “The people are fed up, for lack of a better word. They’re looking for change and a new direction,” said Sarah Mars, 29, an independent who supported Obama in 2012.

    Just proving that Mitch McConnell may be the smartest politician working today.

  36. 36.

    ribber

    Gross scary oversimplification of the day: IIRC, circa 2008 the Putin-sponsored elected leader of Georgia got unelected and Russia invaded Georgia. Then circa 2012 the Putin-sponsored elected leader of Ukraine got unelected and Russia invaded the Ukraine. So what happens when the Putin-sponsored party in power in the US gets eventually unelected?

  37. 37.

    Chris

    Of course, we suspected Republicans of being nascent fascist lackeys all along.

    I always suspected they had it in them, but I never suspected they’d actually get a chance to show it unless the United States were overrun and occupied like France in 1940, which our nuclear arsenal makes essentially impossible.

    In the meantime, I thought their basic nationalism and obsession with America being on top would preclude any kind of playing too nice with foreign powers at Russia or China’s level (much less what we’re seeing now). Dreamy admiration for Putin and wishing we could have such a manly man in charge in our country, yes, total denial of a blatant attempt to manipulate the political system and/or suggestion that it’s totally cool if he did, no. Failure of imagination on my part.

  38. 38.

    JMG

    The people are always fed up, at least people like Ms. Mars. They won’t be any happier four years from now, or even two. These are the people who will readily defect from the Trump coalition. They are perpetually disgruntled, and politics, let alone policy, has little to do with it.

  39. 39.

    Mnemosyne

    As I said a couple of days ago, it looks like American conservatives were A-OK with the Russians as soon as they dropped that whole pesky lip service to racial equality (which was why so many Black Americans joined the American Communist Party back in the 1920s and 1930s).

    Turns out that white straight male supremacy is a unifying force that overrides pesky things like international boundaries.

  40. 40.

    Yarrow

    @Tilda Swinton’s Bald Cap: Yep. And this is also from the article. Remember how Kay said the economy in Ohio is going gangbusters? Hasn’t been this good in years? Everyone can get a job? Remember these people are in Cleveland:

    And although his supporters have a laundry list of projects they hope he will tackle, most of all, they want him to prioritize bringing back jobs and fixing the health-care system on Day One.

    Asked by Hart how they would judge Trump as a success or a failure, most cited the state of the economy and the affordability of health care as key tests.

    “He’d be failing if he didn’t do anything with the health-care system,” Viersulz said.

    Bring back jobs! improve the economy! I thought Kay said the Ohio economy was good. The stock market is doing well. What do these people want that they don’t have now?

    Also, too, the healthcare system? What do they even mean by that?

  41. 41.

    Ian

    @Terry Buckalew:
    They had Nicaraguan invaders too. This film was produced at a time we were destroying Nicaragua economically and with proxy contras. Yet somehow tiny impoverished Nicaragua swept through all of central America and Mexico to invade the US. Right wing projection has been with us for a long time.

  42. 42.

    Emerald

    @Yarrow:
    I have thought about that too. I’m hoping that this site is small enough that John will be able to protect our identities and that the trumpniks won’t notice us for a good long while.

    The GOS is probably toast. Not much loss there except for the pootie diaries.

  43. 43.

    Betty Cracker

    @Yarrow: I’m not involved in those decisions because I am utterly unqualified to assess security status or know what it would take to keep folks safe, but I know user privacy is a big deal to Cole, and one reason he won’t use a plug-in for comments is that it could compromise that. I believe there was a discussion about that here not too long ago…maybe someone can provide a link. I can’t remember who initiated it.

  46. 46.

    liberal

    @ribber:

    Then circa 2012 the Putin-sponsored elected leader of Ukraine got unelected and Russia invaded the Ukraine.

    “Unelected”? Overthrown by an unconstitutional coup. Yeah, yeah, I know, that makes me a Putin stooge.

  49. 49.

    Inmourning

    Yarrow, re the need to prepare for the worst. I think we should try to do meet ups in cities where commenters live, so we can get analog info to use in case needed. I lived through the 60’s, where actual in person meetings was the way to make plans to March, protest, etc. I am in St. Louis, and would be glad to organize a meet up here. Any takers?

  50. 50.

    Yarrow

    @Betty Cracker: In your behind the curtain discussions is there any way to bring this up with Alain and anyone else who is knowledgeable about security? I know we had that one post here from someone about security and nothing else. Can we have more like that please. And address the actual upcoming clamp down on free speech and what John is thinking about it.

  51. 51.

    JustRuss

    @Chris: I think it’s basically “Sure the Russians meddled in the election, but they meddled on the right side, so who cares?” Like torture, when the right people benefit, it’s OK.

  52. 52.

    liberal

    @Yarrow: yeah, yeah, sure.

    Yes, they’re evil. Yeah, Trump is a fascist. But the job you’re describing is way, way too big.

    I can see certain problems that could crop up. Like you work for Uncle Sam and you comment here from a work computer.

    But otherwise? The web is too big and too messy. And for better or worse they’re not going to really give a shit about a mere blog. They’re going to be too busy destroying climate expertise in the Energy Dept, for example.

  56. 56.

    Chris

    @Yarrow:

    It’s that, definitely… and, it’s also a thing about property rights and who the real citizens are. Conservatives firmly believe that America is their country and no one else’s, and over the last several decades have increasingly come to view us as an occupying force, a treasonous insurgent power, basically not a legitimate governing partner. In this mindset, allying with Putin’s Russia to take their country back is no less legitimate than, say, De Gaulle and the French Resistance allying with the British, Americans and Russians to take his country back from Vichy and its Nazi bosses.

  57. 57.

    Yarrow

    @Emerald: I hope so but I doubt it. Here’s why:

    The political network helmed by Charles and David Koch has quietly built a secretive operation that conducts surveillance and intelligence gathering on its liberal opponents, viewing it as a key strategic tool in its efforts to reshape American public life.

    The operation, which is little-known even within the Koch network, gathers what Koch insiders refer to as “competitive intelligence” that is used to try to thwart liberal groups and activists, and to identify potential threats to the expansive network.

    The competitive intelligence team has a staff of 25, including one former CIA analyst, and operates from one of the non-descript Koch network offices clustered near the Courthouse metro stop in suburban Arlington, Va. It has provided network officials with documents detailing confidential voter-mobilization plans by major Democrat-aligned groups. It also sends regular “intelligence briefing” emails tracking the canvassing, phone-banking and voter-registration efforts of labor unions, environmental groups and their allies, according to documents reviewed by POLITICO and interviews with a half-dozen sources with knowledge of the group.

    The competitive intelligence team has gathered on-the-ground intelligence from liberal groups’ canvassing events in an effort to assess the technology and techniques of field efforts to boost Democrats, according to the sources. And they say the team utilizes high-tech tactics to track the movements of liberal organizers, including culling geo-data embedded in their social media posts.

  60. 60.

    Chris

    @PaulWartenberg2016:

    And it’s not over the issues, or ideology, or jobs. They’re doing this out of spite, and an unstoppable urge to tear down every last bit of social and economic advancement of the 20th Century.

    There was a quote from one of the latter, shittier Tom Clancy books where a character says “it’s not love that makes the world go round. It isn’t even money. It’s bullshit.”

    Say what you will about the source, I increasingly find it hard to argue.

  61. 61.

    Miss Bianca

    @albertZ: No, I will dispute you on that one. Roadhouse is *brilliantly* dumb. A Zen koan disguised as a stupid action flick. Love that movie. Plus, Sam Elliott, yum. In fact, it might be time to watch that one again…

  63. 63.

    GregB

    Many of the same horrible people who are demanding evidence of Russian hacking are the some horrible people who believe evidence in Sandy Hook leads to a government plot.

  64. 64.

    liberal

    @Yarrow: LOL. They’re going to be really puzzled when they do all this fancy-smanzy tracking of Balloon Juice regulars and it all leads back to dog rescue services.

  65. 65.

    Gravenstone

    @Terry Buckalew: Cuban paratroops – in Colorado!!! Yeah, common sense got nowhere near that particular script. Most notable memory of that film back in the day was watching it on video with several others in my dorm a couple of years after release. As there was a bit of drinking involved, some of the more impressionable youths in the room took it a bit too much to heart. Once it ended, we had to physically restrain one of them who wanted to go beat up a couple of soccer players on our floor for being “Cubans”. One was a Latino kid from East Chicago, the other was a Spanish national. Good times. *eyeroll*

  66. 66.

    hovercraft

    @Meg:

    Was it the time when Trump had his last press conference, in which he called for Russia to hack Hillary’s emails?

    Yes that was his last presser, funny how that coincides with the sharp rise in Putin’s favorability numbers. Since they saw Putin as a means to defeat the evil bitch, he became someone they favored. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, too bad they’ve befriended a deadly snake.

  67. 67.

    Mnemosyne

    @liberal:

    They’ll shut down websites long before they go after individual commenters.

    And Yankuyovich’s overthrow is complicated, shall we say. Were they supposed to let the guy who was openly looting the country stay in charge because there wasn’t a mechanism to remove him?

  69. 69.

    cmorenc

    @PaulWartenberg2016:

    these blood-guzzling yaboos who think themselves mighty warriors for their God are eagerly selling themselves out to a foreign despot against their own country and their own people.

    One response that will stop at least a not-insignificant fraction of Bible-thumpers-for-Trump in their tracks is:
    “When did seeking to achieve something worthwhile by making a bargain with the Devil ever work out well or anything remotely like expected? Can you cite any examples in the Bible?” Of course, many of them will try to glibly leap over a mountain of cognitive dissonance by trying to rationalize why Trump’s not such a bad man after all, but some will be bothered enough by this paradigm to have serious doubts they did the right thing after all.

    We don’t need to reach but a very modest fraction (around 5%) of Trump voters to cause an enormous shift in dynamics and voting results – because every “flipped” Trump vote effectively counts for twice as much as motivating a democratically-inclined but insufficiently motivated person to turn out.

  70. 70.

    Ellen R

    @Monkeyfister: Does this mean you’re retiring and will bring your blog back? Always one of my favorites. Even got tomato seeds from you once. Didn’t end well, but it was the thought that counted.

  71. 71.

    mkro

    Not so sure that being the genius behind “Axis of Evil” will ever allow Frum to pay off his “karmic debt”.

  72. 72.

    Chris

    @Gordon Schumway:

    The extent to which Republicanism is simply authoritarianism never fails to amaze me.

    I finally realized it in the giggly, pumped-up, fanboyish response I was seeing to the OWS crackdowns and even the more blatant and unjustifiable acts of police brutality. They really, really do get off on watching the nightsticks and jackboots come out and being applied to any person they disapprove of. Like sports fans watching their team win the superbowl. I suspect in more than a few cases, “get off on” isn’t even a metaphor.

  73. 73.

    ThresherK

    @hovercraft: Heehee.

    Speaking of Mike Judge, I guess it’s a good thing there’s no new stories to write about the fictional Hank Hill. The critical mass is shifted to Dale Gribble now.

  74. 74.

    opiejeanne

    i thought that picture at the top was Scut Farkus, from A Christmas Story, and did not remember him having an assault weapon.

  75. 75.

    mkro

    EVERYTHING is political these days. Notice that your regression lines do not work on your graph. Opinions in our country are all now colored by hardened ideology. So opinion polls like this one need to be view as point-in-time measurements, not as a linear pattern.

  76. 76.

    PeakVT

    Thanks, everyone. That specific impetus just makes the change all the more crazy.

    Paging Andrew Sullivan. We’ve found your “Fifth Column” you insufferable fucktard.

  77. 77.

    Chris

    @azlib:

    Of course, there are no Reds and possibly no fascists in the equation now. Putin’s vision appears to be semi-fascist, but in some kind of weird amalgamation of Franco-era Spain and Capone-era Chicago. Which also seems to be Trump’s ideal.

    Trump’s vision doesn’t necessitate destroying Putinism in the same way that Hitler’s vision necessitated destroying Stalinism, IOW. Not sure if that makes things better or worse.

  78. 78.

    Gravenstone

    @Yarrow: As others have noted elsewhere, they want their father’s jobs back. They want a simplistic, labor intensive manufacturing based economy. Ain’t gonna happen, ever. That ship has long ago sailed. And the morons who pine for it today, will forever remain disappointed. But first, they had to cast the rest of the country into the dustbin of history in their vain pursuit of that which will never be again.

  81. 81.

    Gin & Tonic

    @liberal: “Overthrown by an unconstitutional coup”?

    Fled the country in the middle of the night with his tail between his legs.

    But I don’t expect we’ll ever agree on this.

  82. 82.

    SatanicPanic

    @Inmourning: This is a good idea. There’s a lot going on, so if some BJers want to join some existing things, that could be good too. I wonder if there’s a good way to let people know what’s going on in their city?

  84. 84.

    john (not mccain)

    Russia is a nation populated by the children of drunk skanks. Not a surprise Trump would feel a kinship.

  85. 85.

    Chris

    @cmorenc:

    “The real deal with the devil would’ve been to accept Hillary the genocidal abortionist just because Trump wasn’t a perfect Christian (and really, who of us is?)!”
    – 99% of Bible thumpers, three seconds after hearing your suggestion.

    I hope a few people are swayed by your argument, I just have my doubts. These people have advanced degrees in rationalization.

  87. 87.

    hovercraft

    Where are all those people who were yelling that Hillary wouldn’t be able to get security clearance to be the president because of the e-mail server, I’m looking at you Paul Shitstain Ryan.

    Flynn, Who Improperly Shared Classified Info, Giving Trump Daily ‘Intel Updates’

    “He is meeting with General Flynn on a daily basis to get an intel update so in some cases he is getting an intel briefing every single day, in some cases twice,” Spicer said. “So I think that it would be false to say that he is not getting an intel briefing every day. Every single day he is getting a briefing. Three times a week it’s the actual TBD [sic].”

    Spicer argued in a subsequent interview with CNN’s Kate Bolduan that a briefing from Flynn is equivalent to an in-person meeting with official presidential intelligence briefers.

    “Why wouldn’t he want to get it from the source?” Bolduan asked.

    “He does get it from the source,” Spicer said. “He’s his national security advisor.”

    “Michael Flynn gets the presidential daily briefing from the briefers and then Michael Flynn relays it to Donald Trump,” Bolduan pressed. “Why wouldn’t Donald Trump want to get it from the source?”

    Flynn is also facing renewed scrutiny of his own handling of classified intelligence. According to U.S. Army documents obtained by the Washington Post through a Freedom of Information Act request and published Wednesday, a 2010 Army investigation had determined that Flynn “inappropriately shared” classified information with foreign officials in Afghanistan.

    The investigation itself still is classified, but the Washington Post cited former U.S. officials familiar with the matter who said Flynn was accused of sharing information about operations by the CIA and other agencies in Afghanistan.

  89. 89.

    Gravenstone

    @JustRuss: I noted this in a different forum, but the less damning reason for Republican silence regarding Russian interference is that various principals are being privately compromised by Russian intelligence services. The more damning reason is that Republicans long ago adopted “any means necessary” to remain in power, so they’re perfectly happy to take advantage of Russian interference on their behalf if it means they can retain power. These need not be mutually exclusive options.

  90. 90.

    Mnemosyne

    @sukabi:

    IIRC — because I know my Reagan-loving brother made me watch it at least once — the Cubans were ambivalent about the invasion (I think Raul Julia played the sympathetic Cuban commander?), but the Russians were just pure Nazi-style evil.

    Little did we know that the grown-up Wolverines would say, Come on in! Would you like some ammunition!

  91. 91.

    Monkeyfister

    @Ellen R: My plan is to retire from here in 4 years. A co-worker just got fired for being very stupid, so this is his GS-9 position opening up. Start pay rises with experience. Just posting up for those in search of a job. I’d prefer to work with a like-minded person, instead of trusting the Federal Wheel Of Fortune dropping some dirtbag on me!
    Living in Armpit, TN is the biggest downside.
    As to my blog– it is shuttered probably permanently. I appreciate the nice words, tho, Ellen!

  93. 93.

    NR

    @cmorenc:

    We don’t need to reach but a very modest fraction (around 5%) of Trump voters to cause an enormous shift in dynamics and voting results – because every “flipped” Trump vote effectively counts for twice as much as motivating a democratically-inclined but insufficiently motivated person to turn out.

    Fortunately, Bernie Sanders is doing exactly that.

  95. 95.

    Tilda Swinton's Bald Cap

    @Yarrow: Most people don’t know shit about shit. I challenge people who complain about how much tax they pay to tell me exactly the % they paid in income tax the previous year. Most people don’t know and they can’t even be arsed to a) figure it out and b) in some cases don’t know how to figure it out. I can’t tell you what I paid last year, but I can figure it out in 10 minutes, on the other hand I ain’t complaining either. But the larger issue is that all the things those people said are all just distillations of the right wing radio talkers, and Fox news. There is been a fire hose deluge for 8 years of “bad economy and Obamacare done fucked up health care” from those sources.

  96. 96.

    Corner Stone

    @liberal:

    They’re going to be really puzzled when they do all this fancy-smanzy tracking of Balloon Juice regulars and it all leads back to dog rescue services.

    Do you think they will eventually get tired of resolving the IP addresses back to one Mr. Doug J. Balloon?

  97. 97.

    J R in WV

    @Tom Levenson:

    “Я, например, приветствовать наших постсоветских повелителей” !!

    according to Google Translate, which works well sometimes. Didn’t do so well on Hindi the other day, but has done well in Spanish in the recent past.

  99. 99.

    Bobby D

    @Terry Buckalew: Cubans and Nicaraguans backed by Russia, and eventually actual Russians in the OG version. At least IIRC, been about 20 years since I saw the movie.

    It was full of future “stars” btw, Charlie Sheen, Pat Swayze, Jennifer Grey, C Thomas Howell, Lea Thompson, and Harry Dean Stanton. Quite a cast.

  100. 100.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @albertZ:

    Reading that article makes me wonder, whatever happened to former BJ Front-Pager Dennis G (Dengre)? This would be right up his alley. I checked the contact-a-front-pager drop down and he is still listed, but it’s been years since he posted a thread or even commented here.

    Anyone know? I have a vague memory he might have been writing a book, but even authors need to come up for air occasionally.

  101. 101.

    Yarrow

    @Gravenstone: The other thing is, what they don’t seem to factor in is that their “father’s good manufacturing jobs” were not only possible because of the state of manufacturing at that time, but the jobs were “good” because of strong unions. They don’t like those stinkin’ unions anymore. So just like the jobs, the “good” part is gone too.

  103. 103.

    Yarrow

    I really wish they’d try this:

    Froufrou Fifth Avenue resembles a police state.

    Officers wielding gigantic guns guard Trump Tower, where President-elect Donald Trump conducts all transition business, and soon lots of presidential business, too. Shoppers patronizing the stores, cafes or public gardens inside must endure layers of security screening. Streets and sidewalks are barricaded; traffic is snarled; and costumed buskers milk money from the looky-loos obstructing the entrances to Gucci and Tiffany.

    The challenges of securing this 58-story building in a high-density neighborhood will, by Inauguration Day alone, drain $35 million of local taxpayer money. Who knows the additional costs to commerce and property values?

    The feds have thus far been stingy about footing the bill. Fortunately, I’ve come up with a solution that should warm the cockles of the president-elect’s heart: New York should use eminent domain to seize Trump Tower.

    Trump loves eminent domain, especially this ruling. He thinks it’s wonderful. And there’s no question why: Throughout his career, Trump has lobbied governments to seize properties from those who refuse to sell when he wants to build amusement parks, golf courses, office buildings and parking lots on their land. He believes expansive use of eminent domain is necessary to promote economic growth and “beautification,” and that it’s even a good deal for property owners who don’t want to sell.

    “When eminent domain is used on somebody’s property, that person gets a fortune,” he has declared.

    Yes please. Bring it on.

  104. 104.

    hovercraft

    @Gravenstone:

    They want a simplistic, labor intensive manufacturing based economy. Ain’t gonna happen, ever. That ship has long ago sailed. And the morons who pine for it today, will forever remain disappointed.

    They will so too get it back the Shitgibbon and Franklin Graham said so: (re-post from downstairs)

    “Start working to make America great again, that’s what Trump wants to do,” the pastor continued. “We need jobs, we need to get employment up, we need to have hope for the future. And the only way you’re going to have hope for the future is if a kid goes to college and comes out and knows, ‘I can get a job and I can get a good paying job and maybe I can work my way up the ladder.'”
    “This is terrible. I live in North Carolina where so much of our manufacturing base has gone to other countries,” he insisted. “And people are out of jobs, are out of work. And they say, ‘But we’ll retrain you, we’ll let you be a computer programmer.'”

    “They don’t want to be a computer programmer!” Graham continued. “They want to do the same job as their fathers and their grandfathers. There was pride in the manufacturing and the building. And we’ve taken all that away and it’s sad.”

    Matthew Yglesias has some news about this
    Rising inequality has crushed the dream of upward mobility

    Unless the Shitgibbon has a way to return us to the days when we grew at a very rapid rate because we were coming out of the Great Depression, they better start learning how to use computers.

    We have a very different economy now, to make it, you actually have to do some book learning. I’m not trying to denigrate anyone, just stating a fact, booklearning isn’t just for elitists.

  105. 105.

    EZSmirkzz

    What I want to know is who is going to clean up all the goo when their heads explode after they discover Vlad Putin is a Kenyan Muslim. Or do you suppose they’ll just pop?

  106. 106.

    Mike J

    Anybody ever read the Phillip Roth book about Lindbergh beating FDR? It’s a good read. For some reason it’s been on my mind.

  107. 107.

    hovercraft

    @J R in WV:

    “Я, например, приветствовать наших постсоветских повелителей” !!

    Can you please put that in American, we don’t learn no stinkin ferren languages, we speak American as god intended !

  109. 109.

    Mike in dc

    I’m going to laugh bitterly in 2020 when China hacks the GOP and the Trump campaign and Republicans are complaining about the national security implications.

  110. 110.

    Mnemosyne

    @cmorenc:

    If my fundie cousin in Wisconsin pisses me off one more time, I’m going to tell her that she’s a goat who’s pretending that she’s a sheep, but we all know the truth.

    In the Bible-thumping world, that’s going nuclear.

    (For those unfamiliar with the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, it’s Matthew 25:31-46.)

    ETA: Even my coworker who’s getting a graduate degree from Fuller Theological Seminary thought that might be a step too far.

  111. 111.

    Betty Cracker

    @hovercraft: Good point, but honestly, I’m less troubled by Flynn’s lax handling of classified information than I am by the fact that he is a crackpot who believes in outlandish conspiracy theories like PizzaGate and distributes anti-Semitic material. He’s a gibbering loon, and he’ll be whispering his demented, unsubstantiated stories into the shitgibbon’s ear every day. Scary AF.

  112. 112.

    RoonieRooski

    You know, I completed my first BA back in ’89 and it was in International Studies specializing in USSR and Eastern Europe. Shortly after graduation, my degree turned into a “history” degree. Needless to say, I went into software as a career. Makes sense if you consider the 90’s. Anyhoo, I never, ever, ever dreamed that BA would ever come back to haunt me in my life and provide any real purpose. My Russian is mighty rusty but I have to say I’ve been digging the cruft off of it and trying to get it back into my old brain.

    Geeze, now I’m depressed again.

  114. 114.

    Bobby D

    @Yarrow: Yep. And the disconnect between “hope for the future is if a kid goes to college and comes out and knows, ‘I can get a job and I can get a good paying job and maybe I can work my way up the ladder” and wanting the jobs their ancestors did…it doesn’t square. Why on earth spend $50k-$100k on a college degree so you can do high school level wood shop work, or crawl down a dirty hole to mine coal.

    The cognitive dissonance is just stunning.

  115. 115.

    Chris

    @Mnemosyne:

    IIRC — because I know my Reagan-loving brother made me watch it at least once — the Cubans were ambivalent about the invasion (I think Raul Julia played the sympathetic Cuban commander?), but the Russians were just pure Nazi-style evil.

    There’s a reading of Red Dawn I’ve heard in which it’s supposed to be a stealth portrayal of the U.S’s behavior in Central America and other similar places. Hence the sympathetic Cuban pointing out that he used to be exactly where the Wolverines are now.

    @Yarrow:

    The other thing is, what they don’t seem to factor in is that their “father’s good manufacturing jobs” were not only possible because of the state of manufacturing at that time, but the jobs were “good” because of strong unions. They don’t like those stinkin’ unions anymore. So just like the jobs, the “good” part is gone too.

    Yeah, this is something I never seem to hear mentioned in the “economic anxiety” arguments. It’s not just the awful, highfalutin’, heavy-handed, corporatist neoliberal Wall Street Democrats that are being rejected by white voters. Or even just the local Democratic Party. Even the local unions, the most basic and archetypical institution that’re there to do nothing but protect the economic livelihood of workers, have been doing it for a hundred years, and were a massive part of what made the Great Lakes and the Northeast so successful, are being abandoned. Walker and a few other Republican governors got elected in the heart of what was supposed to be union territory, passed union-busting laws, and the public declined to either stop or recall them.

    Economic populism isn’t selling with white people like it used to. Period. It’s not that no one’s offering it. It’s not that they’re not being told about it. They’re not interested, and they’re abandoning even the most elementary institutions designed to ensure it.

  116. 116.

    Yarrow

    @Mike in dc:

    I’m going to laugh bitterly in 2020 when China hacks the GOP and the Trump campaign and Republicans are complaining about the national security implications.

    2020? Why wait? Why not 2018?

    And I’m going to say it again, when Mitch McConnell got up and did his announcement that he was calling for investigations into the Russian hacking, he did NOT look comfortable. He looked like he’d been forced to go up there and say that. I watched it more than once and he just looked off – very different from how he usually looks.

    I think he was forced to go up there either because of what he knows they have on him and/or his family or because of what he fears they have on him and/or his family. He’s at risk of blackmail, if they aren’t already blackmailing him. As are a lot of our Republican officials.

    People should be shouting this from the rooftops. Our Republican officials can be blackmailed by the Russians! It’s short and easily understood by people. Blackmail means something and people know what it means.

  118. 118.

    hovercraft

    @Yarrow:

    but the jobs were “good” because of strong unions. They don’t like those stinkin’ unions anymore.

    Stop lying to the good people of America, everyone knows that unions are the reason that manufacturing jobs have disappeared, they demanded things like fair pay, safe work places and benefits for workers. Now that we’ve elected people to do away with those blood suckers, we no longer have to pay those onerous union dues, and now we have the freedom to negotiate for ourselves, yeah!! Do you have good wages, benefits, job security, or anything else that improves your life? No, but we have freedom from their tyranny. I would at this point refer you back to the Cornell Belcher piece that was posted yesterday, it’s cultural, not economic, they are voting for their identity not economics.
    Ironic isn’t it?

  121. 121.

    Mike in NC

    John Milius was the idiot largely responsible for the making of “Red Dawn” (the terrible 1984 film and the even stupider 2012 remake). I think I read that he was very close to the late, still dead Andrew Breitbart. Would not be surprised to see him pop up at Trump Tower for lunch with Steve Barron and the rest of the asshole Alt Right crowd.

  122. 122.

    J R in WV

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    Oh, I see. Thanks for the additional education. India is SO complex. When I read the local mews media from India, it just overwhelms me how little I understand about the nation, even after studying it to some extent.

    So Sanskrit is more or less an antique language, still used for special purposes?

  125. 125.

    NR

    @Betty Cracker: I know Bernie is never going to be president. But I’m really glad that people like him are taking the lead these days, instead of people like the commenters here. Somehow I don’t think that you guys’ approach (i.e., screaming at her that she’s a racist over and over and over) would have worked nearly as well with this voter as Bernie’s approach did.

  126. 126.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Betty Cracker: Right wing sites, Reason, the Blaze, Lucianne dot com, were thrilled with St Bernards discussion of political correctness. It’s even less coherent in print

    “[Trump] said he will not be politically correct,” said Sanders. “I think he said some outrageous and painful things, but I think people are tired of the same old politically correct rhetoric. [ETA boy, they’re loving that]I think some people believe he was speaking from his heart and willing to take on everybody.”
    Hayes then asked what political correctness means to Sanders. He responded:
    “What it means is you have a set of talking points which have been poll-tested and focus-group-tested and that’s what you say rather than what’s really going on. And often what you are not allowed to say are things which offend very powerful people. For years and years we have been told by Republicans and many Democrats that our trade policy was a great idea, that it was working for America. The American people don’t believe it. The American people I think want candidates and politicians to have the guts to stand up to the billionaire class and start representing the middle class and working families of America. I don’t think it’s more complicated than that.”
    Hayes then challenged Sanders’ contention that political correctness has anything to do with trade policy. Instead, Hayes suggested that political correctness was more about not offending people for identity-based reasons.
    “[Trump] was going after these consensus things but he was always saying things frankly that when we talk about political correctness are basically just rules about not being a jerk,” said Hayes. “He’s violating taboos that a lot of people think we should keep.”
    But Sanders hit back. “He was talking about the media,” said Sanders. “Do people here think the media reflects the reality of American society?”

  128. 128.

    Angrifon

    @Terry Buckalew: Cubans and Mexicans in the original film with Russian advisors. IIRC, the opening scroll says that a Cuban sponsored revolution in Mexico was successful, and that the invasion force came up across the southern border disguised as commercial airliners. Also, apparently, the Russians nuked China. One of the kids asks downed fighter pilot Powers Booth who is on our side and he replies “800 million screamin’ Chinamen”. Someone else says “Weren’t there a billion screaming Chinamen?” and Booth replies ominously, “There were…”

  129. 129.

    Brachiator

    @Yarrow:

    People should be shouting this from the rooftops. Our Republican officials can be blackmailed by the Russians! It’s short and easily understood by people. Blackmail means something and people know what it means.

    What makes you think that anyone cares? Trump supporters are convinced that the warnings about Russian interference is only the whining of sore losers.

  130. 130.

    Major Major Major Major

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: I found this piece about “PC” to be excellent.

    [anti-‘identity’ writers] insist that liberalism is founded on principles that all could share, and that liberal politics should “speak to the nation as a nation of citizens who are in this together and must help one another,” then appeal to FDR, one of the architects of the white welfare state and the imprisoner of Japanese-Americans, to drive the point home.

    As political scientist Ira Katznelson has documented, Roosevelt’s ability to bring the New Deal into existence depended on active complicity with southern white identity politics—an easy and tempting thing to do for those who are too convinced that their political goals represent neutral and universal political truth.

  131. 131.

    Citizen_X

    @Yarrow: Yeah, without unions? They’ll get back their great-grandfathers’ murderously dangerous child-labor manufacturing jobs.

    @Mike J: I was just leafing through my copy yesterday. Somehow I feel inspired to re-read it.

  132. 132.

    Mnemosyne

    @Chris:

    Economic populism isn’t selling with white people like it used to. Period. It’s not that no one’s offering it. It’s not that they’re not being told about it. They’re not interested, and they’re abandoning even the most elementary institutions designed to ensure it

    This. I’ve been saying that, if you look at American history, the times of the worst outbreaks of racist violence have been when white people have been doing pretty well economically, not when they’re having trouble. Jim Crow laws weren’t prevalent until Plessy v Ferguson was decided in 1896.

    White people didn’t vote for Trump because they’re hurting. They voted for Trump because they were feeling a little more secure and started looking around to see who needed to be pushed down. It’s what Americans do.

  134. 134.

    Yarrow

    @NR: Speaking of Bernie Sanders, he’s been conspicuously quiet about the Russian hacking of our election. As has Elizabeth Warren.

  135. 135.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    More of Bernie! winning over Trump voters

    CHRIS HAYES: What did you think of it when the senator said, “Free college tuition”?
    MARY MAGDALEN MOSER: [To Sanders] That’s the moment I stopped listening to anything coming out of your mouth. Because who is going to pay for it? Why don’t you address how college tuition has skyrocketed 6,000 percent since the 1980s? You can’t have an industry where you have a seniority level where once you’re past a certain level they are unable to fire you. No other industry has that type of protection. That needs to go.
    […]
    MOSER: I believe the way the United States works today, where every single human being in the United States has the opportunity to go to college — I do not believe it is a right. I don’t think I should be expected to pay not only for my education and my children’s, but someone else’s as well.

  136. 136.

    Yarrow

    @Brachiator: They’re convinced of that now. Enough people saying “Republicans are being blackmailed!” and things might change. If even a small percentage of Trump supporters understand this is a risk, that could be enough.

  138. 138.

    Yarrow

    @Citizen_X:

    Yeah, without unions? They’ll get back their great-grandfathers’ murderously dangerous child-labor manufacturing jobs.

    Incoming Education Secretery, Betsy DeVos is on record supporting child labor.

  139. 139.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Major Major Major Major: Yeah, I read that this morning. This rather clear and direct paragraph ought to give a few people pause

    The 2016 election is bringing forth especially strange versions of pundits’ fallacies and morality plays. Donald Trump received a smaller share of the popular vote than Mitt Romney did in 2012, but his Electoral College victory was so unexpected that it seems to call forth explanation after explanation. The result is almost certainly over-explanation: theories get offered that, if they were true, would seem to imply that Trump should have done much better than he did, and much better than Romney did. But there is a powerful temptation to attribute the surprising and dramatic fact of Trump’s win to some issue about which one had some preexisting ax to grind.

  140. 140.

    Botsplainer

    @NR:

    When your only tools are a hammer and sickle, everything looks like a class war.

    Fuck Bernie Sanders, fuck his bullshit ideology, fuck his lies, fuck his concerns and fuck his partisans. He’s a fucking incompetent.

    The sooner he dies, turns into a bigger gibbering idiot such that he is completely ignored or is defeated, the better.

    And fuck you.

  141. 141.

    Betty Cracker

    @NR: I hope Sanders devotes the rest of his career to attempting to convert WWC Trump voters one by one. That would be a far better outcome than his successfully influencing the Democratic Party (of which he is a non-member) to downplay its emphasis on equality to chase those lunkheads.

  146. 146.

    Yarrow

    @Betty Cracker: Whoever the incoming DNC head is, one thing I hope they change is whatever rule allows just anyone to declare they’re a Democrat and run for President using the Dem party infrastructure, something that person has never contributed to building at all. At least there should be some minimum time someone is a Democrat – a year possibly? They should have some track record of actually BEING a Democrat before being allowed to run to be the party standard bearer.

  150. 150.

    Jeffro

    Btw I’ve been tied up all day (for once) and just now see that
    1) Trump’s skipping intelligence briefings ’cause Flynn’s telling him everything he needs to hear. Wee-ooo
    2) GSA has told Trump he has to fully divest himself of the Post Office building before his inauguration
    3) Trump has to testify in the Jose Andres case before the inauguration
    4) Romney wasn’t made SoS because he refused to apologize during their meetings…way to show him, Mitt! (NOT)
    5) Team Trump is pretending that the “who at EPA worked on climate change?” witch-hunt ‘wasn’t authorized’. Uh-huh.

    And the Gish Marathon rolls on…

    Hey PBO, how about addressing the nation tomorrow night on the extent of Russian hacking and Trump-aiding in the election? Any day before the 19th of December would be fine, actually.

  152. 152.

    Jeffro

    @hovercraft: You beat me to it (#5 at comment #149)

    It’s almost like…timely & accurate reporting, coupled with some backbone by EPA, made der Trumpsters back down a bit. How ’bout that?

  153. 153.

    catclub

    I think the market for Democratically leaning cyber security teams is very good right now. I suspect that the DNC, DCCC, etc, will make sure this does not happen to them again.

    Whether there is also a market for Democratically leaning cyber breakin teams will remain a mystery.

  156. 156.

    schrodinger's cat

    @J R in WV: It is like Latin is to English and other western European languages. Many of the current Indian languages are derived from Sanskrit. Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi etc are derived from Sanskrit. Most north Indian languages have also been heavily influenced by Persian, the language of the various Muslim courts in India.
    Sanskrit == Is the language of culture/learning and religion.
    The core of most Hindu religious ceremonies is performed in Sanskrit.
    Like this Shiva Tandava which is Sanskrit poem that describes Shiva in his magnificent glory as he does the tandava, the dance of cosmic destruction.
    Sanskrit also has ties to most European languages, they form the Indo-European language group.
    Deva = Deity
    Agni= Igneous=Fire
    Path=path (pronunciation is different, the a is short not long a like in English)
    Sant= Saint
    and so on.
    I find languages and the connections between them fascinating. India is complex, its like Europe, if it were one country.

  159. 159.

    catclub

    @Jeffro:

    4) Romney wasn’t made SoS because he refused to apologize during their meetings…way to show him, Mitt! (NOT)

    After Romney gave his principled speech on how Trump is a fraudulent businessman and fraudulent conservative, why he even bothered to meet with Trump is just idiocy.

  161. 161.

    NR

    @Betty Cracker:

    That would be a far better outcome than [Sanders] successfully influencing the Democratic Party (of which he is a non-member) to downplay its emphasis on equality to chase those lunkheads.

    These kinds of bullshit straw man arguments are tiresome. Here’s Sanders’ own words on that subject:

    “Here is the simple truth. Trump’s reactionary agenda will not be defeated in the halls of Congress. It will be defeated when millions of Americans, at the grassroots level, come together to oppose xenophobia and attacks on the immigrant community. It will be defeated when we stand together against racism, sexism, homophobia and Islamophobia. It will be defeated when working people throughout our country – black, white, Latino, Asian-American and Native American – demand a government and economy which works for all, and not just the one percent. Our political task now is to educate, organize and mobilize.”

    And again:

    “This country, since its inception, has struggled to overcome discrimination of all forms: racism, sexism, xenophobia and homophobia. Over the years we have made progress in becoming a less discriminatory and more tolerant society – and we are not going backward. The appointment by President-elect Trump of a racist individual like Mr. Bannon to a position of authority is totally unacceptable. In a democratic society we can disagree all we want over issues, but racism and bigotry cannot be part of any public policy. The appointment of Mr. Bannon by Mr. Trump must be rescinded.”

    And again:

    If Donald Trump takes people’s anger and turns it against Muslims, Hispanics, African Americans and women, we will be his worst nightmare.

    Stop trying to pretend that Bernie Sanders only cares about white men. It wasn’t true in the primary and it isn’t true now.

  162. 162.

    Yarrow

    @Jeffro:

    It’s almost like…timely & accurate reporting, coupled with some backbone by EPA, made der Trumpsters back down a bit. How ’bout that?

    Trump’s a bully, among other things. When people stand up to bullies they very often back off. Trump will have a big arsenal at his disposal that is going to make doing this increasingly difficult. All the authoritarian experts are warning we have to do everything we can BEFORE they get into office. Once they’re there laws will change quickly. The EPA people won’t be given a choice.

  166. 166.

    Botsplainer

    OT – to sum up in the emoluments clause issue, office consensus is that he takes office but gets stuck with an injunction preventing him from doing business and a likely court appointed receiver.

    This could get really interesting as the receiver starts untangling things.

    We’re a little concerned about standing issues under traditional standing analysis, but think that could be done with the right sort of commercial
    Plaintiffs.

  167. 167.

    Citizen_X

    @hovercraft: Wow! Is “properly counseled” going to be the operative phrase for “disappeared” in the Trump years?

    That questionnaire was pretty detailed (and, I think, done by a DOE insider who knew the programs involved). It wasn’t just thrown together on a whim.

  168. 168.

    SFBayAreaGal

    @PaulWartenberg2016: Funny, when I was in the Army, we trained for possible invasion from Russia through Alaska. It was called Jack Frost Training. We were sent to Alaska in January for a month of cold war (no pun intended) training.

  169. 169.

    PJ

    @Chris: No, it’s like the French aristocrats and politicians allying with the Nazis to keep France strong. The dirty not-so-little secret about the collapse of France in 1940 is that many of the country’s elite preferred to have to answer to Germans than to share the wealth of their country with the working classes, and were not so unhappy to see the Third Republic vanish.

  171. 171.

    Davis X. Machina

    @schrodinger’s cat: Indo-European comparative philology begins when English scholars who had Greek and Latin with their mothers’ milk turned to the study of Sanskrit in the days of the East India Company.

  172. 172.

    Jeffro

    @Yarrow: here’s hoping that they come up with a bad case of “Gee I can’t recall…”

    Or barring that, have everyone agree it was all Carl, the guy who’s retiring next week. Carl sure did a bang-up job of all that researchin’ and writin’ and stuff. ;)

  173. 173.

    Betty Cracker

    @NR: I actually don’t believe Sanders only cares about white men and spent some time defending him from those charges early in the primary. But he has displayed willingness to downplay equality issues in favor of economic ones throughout his career, and he’s incredibly tone deaf on issues like gender equality and race.

  175. 175.

    Jeffro

    @Botsplainer:

    This could get really interesting as the receiver starts untangling things.

    The receiver’s probably going to need to look at some tax returns, I’m just saying…

  176. 176.

    Botsplainer

    @NR:

    Bernie never really pretended he was in personal danger like those other tools, so I’m not inclined to so fantasize that conclusion to his tenure on earth. For The Bern, the pain of obscurity is a mighty fine tonic.

    For the ones I want droned, their screams as the drone flies in would be the rhapsodies that call to my heart.

  177. 177.

    Brachiator

    @hovercraft:

    We have a very different economy now, to make it, you actually have to do some book learning. I’m not trying to denigrate anyone, just stating a fact, booklearning isn’t just for elitists.

    What does this even mean? What are all the magical jobs that are going to be available for people with book learning?

  179. 179.

    hoodie

    @Chris: They have status anxiety, not economic anxiety. Deep down, they feel inadequate, so a lot of this is about fixing their wounded self-image. All the claptrap about economic populism only serves to reinforce their status anxiety, gives them a claim that they’re at risk from ominous forces when their own circumstances don’t seem to compel them to do anything tangible about it, particularly since they’ve got a safety net generously provided by the Democrats they periodically shit on for being elitist. The vast majority of them know that Trump won’t bring back the old jobs. He’s just restoring their self-image by doing his whole “politically incorrect” schtick. It’s Reagan II, except the sequel is even cheesier because the budget’s lower and the director is an even bigger scumbag.

  180. 180.

    Davis X. Machina

    @Yarrow: You haven’t been hanging with the bien-pensants much.

    The three-step plan to fix American politics:
    1.) Get the parties out of politics.
    2.) Get the politicians out of politics.
    3.) Get the politics out of politics.

    Totebags for all!

  181. 181.

    Davis X. Machina

    @Shana: This isn’t necessarily a bad thing for actually-existing Democrats. DU can make Daily Kos look like the Brookings Institute.

  182. 182.

    hovercraft

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist:

    Hayes then asked what political correctness means to Sanders. He responded:
    “What it means is you have a set of talking points which have been poll-tested and focus-group-tested and that’s what you say rather than what’s really going on. And often what you are not allowed to say are things which offend very powerful people.

    Words have meanings, and making shit up to change their meaning is standard gop bullshit. Talking points are talking points, being politically correct means not saying things that are offensive to other people, when there’s another way to get your message across without causing offense. Coopting the gop definition is aiding them in their effort to not be held accountable when they insult people on purpose.
    Go away Bernie, I still have no use for you, perhaps if you actually join the party and show some desire to improve it. I will give you the time of day. So far all I’ve seen is you trying to re-make it in your image, you already gave us that opportunity in the primary, and we said no thanks.

  184. 184.

    Botsplainer

    @Jeffro:

    Tax returns, bank accounts, notes, statements of account, along with Trump’s screaming asshole stereotype lawyers fighting every step of the way so that it all finds its way into PACER and the public record…

  186. 186.

    Botsplainer

    @NR:

    C’mon, doesn’t a blasted-to-bits Assange or Griftwald fulfill some index of joy with you? You’d have martyrs to the holy cause and I’d get to chuckle about the scalps.

  187. 187.

    Brachiator

    @NR:

    Stop trying to pretend that Bernie Sanders only cares about white men.

    Stop trying to pretend that Bernie Sanders is important.

  188. 188.

    NR

    @Botsplainer:

    C’mon, doesn’t a blasted-to-bits Assange or Griftwald fulfill some index of joy with you?

    No it doesn’t, because I’m not a fucking psychopath like you.

  190. 190.

    NR

    @Betty Cracker: Economics has always been his top priority, but he is fully committed to the rights of everyone regardless or race or gender. Just look at the statements I quoted. He’s made many more like them.

  191. 191.

    Chris

    @Mnemosyne:

    This. I’ve been saying that, if you look at American history, the times of the worst outbreaks of racist violence have been when white people have been doing pretty well economically, not when they’re having trouble. Jim Crow laws weren’t prevalent until Plessy v Ferguson was decided in 1896.

    It’s always struck me as pretty revealing that the two Ku Klux Klan revivals took place in the 1920s and the 1950s. In other words, two of the decades that are most associated with widespread peace and prosperity, especially for WASPs. Those decades also witnessed Red Scares, puritan religious campaigns, conservative electoral backlash against recent liberal reformers, and general conspiratorial hysterics about poorly defined foreign enemies plotting against Our Pure American heritage.

    Much as I love Star Trek, it’s wrong. Peace and prosperity don’t turn people into saints because there’s nothing to fight over. There’s no absolute rule, but peace and prosperity are at least as likely to simply turn people free to ignore their material conditions and indulge their whims and prejudices… which frequently include fucking over other people.

  195. 195.

    Major Major Major Major

    @hovercraft: He isn’t co-opting the GOP definition; he’s stating the hard left definition. They just happen to be very similar. The GOP definition doesn’t include not offending the powerful, except insofar as they think trans rights activists are somehow powerful.

  196. 196.

    Yarrow

    @Jeffro: Good to see! And good for him for calling out the conspiracy theorists!

    “Congress must take whatever action is necessary to protect the integrity of our democracy. I call on the leaders of Congress to delay the date of the vote for the Electoral College until an intelligence briefing has been given to each Elector.”

    A later tweet added: “Given the choice between trusting conspiracy theorists or our own intelligence community, I, like most Americans, will choose the latter.”

    I hope everyone here is making at least one call a day – more is better – to at least one of their representatives. Or, call one of the growing list of other Reps and Senators around the country who are concerned about Russian involvement in our election. The more voices the better. Get on the phone, people! Let them know you’re here! Ask to delay the electoral college vote. Ask for an independent prosecutor or at least a special committee to be created to investigate it. Keep up the pressure!

  198. 198.

    Betty Cracker

    @NR: He’s also made statements like this:

    But, but here is my point, and this is where there is going to be division within the Democratic Party. It is not good enough for someone to say, “I’m a woman! Vote for me!” No, that’s not good enough. What we need is a woman who has the guts to stand up to Wall Street, to the insurance companies, to the drug companies, to the fossil fuel industry.

    Before saying that, he cleared his throat with statements about how committed to gender and racial equality he is. But implicit in the statement above is the notion that the Democratic Party prioritizes so-called identity politics over policy, and that’s not only NOT true, it’s a harmful lie that plays right into the hands of people like Trump.

    Sanders is a one-note pony. That doesn’t mean the note he plays isn’t important — it is. But remaking the party in his image would be madness, IMO. So I hope that doesn’t happen. And that is all I have to say on the subject of Sanders.

  201. 201.

    daverave

    Look who’s sitting at the head of the table in Trump’s official meeting with tech CEO’s: Don Jr., Ivanka Trump and Eric Trump.

  202. 202.

    Davis X. Machina

    @schrodinger’s cat: Real understanding of our — English, German, Latin —language didn’t happen until the ‘discovery’ of Sanskrit. It’s pivotal. And if God spares me, it’s my retirement project.

  203. 203.

    Botsplainer

    @NR:

    On the “utility as human beings” scorecard, I find that each one is at a negative.

    Greenwald has never met a white supremacist whose cause he couldn’t champion in court and in public opinion, and Assange is a narcissistic tool of Putin.

    Each deserved a good droning, for which I choose to blame Obama.

  205. 205.

    rikyrah

    Sessions Pretends Senate Never Rejected Him for Racism
    by Martin Longman
    December 14, 2016 11:48 AM

    The Democrats’ opening salvo against the nomination of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III isn’t all that impressive. It comes down to a complaint that Sessions swamped them with so many documents that they can’t adequately review them between now and the scheduled confirmation hearings on January 10th and 11th. Maybe so, but the public couldn’t possibly care less.

    Their more salient (politically) attack is that Sessions pretended that the elephant in the room simply isn’t there.

    Sessions, 69, returned his questionnaire to the committee amid little fanfare late last Friday evening. The former U.S. attorney and attorney general for the state of Alabama dutifully listed his employment record. But under a section asking for “any unsuccessful candidacies you have had for elective office or unsuccessful nominations for appointed offices,” Sessions didn’t mention his failed bid for a federal judge post.

    I’ve written about this several times, but one of the most noteworthy things about Sessions’ career is that he was nominated for a federal judgeship by Ronald Reagan and rejected by the Senate Judiciary Committee because he was too obviously a racist.

    On June 5, 1986, the Committee voted 10–8 against recommending the nomination to the Senate floor, with Republican Senators Charles Mathias of Maryland and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania voting with the Democrats. It then split 9–9 on a vote to send Sessions’ nomination to the Senate floor with no recommendation, this time with Specter in support. A majority was required for the nomination to proceed. The pivotal votes against Sessions came from his home state’s Democratic Senator Howell Heflin of Alabama. Although Heflin had previously backed Sessions, he began to oppose Sessions after hearing testimony, concluding that there were “reasonable doubts” over Sessions’ ability to be “fair and impartial.” The nomination was withdrawn on July 31, 1986.

  206. 206.

    bemused

    @Major Major Major Major:

    Was this Niskanen Center named after William Niskanen who was president of liberarian Cato? Why I remember Niskanen is that he wrote an opinion that trickle down economics doesn’t seem to work.

  207. 207.

    schrodinger's cat

    @Davis X. Machina: Its my project too. I tried to study it on my own but its too difficult. I understand some because of my upbringing, although my diction could be better. I know some prayers that I learned as a kid and some just by osmosis.
    Don’t you teach Latin? Or am I not remembering it right?

  208. 208.

    hovercraft

    @Brachiator:

    What does this even mean? What are all the magical jobs that are going to be available for people with book learning?

    It means that the better educated you are, the better your chances are of being gainfully employed.

    Employment and Unemployment Rates by Educational Attainment
    (Last Updated: May 2016)

    The employment rate was higher for people with higher levels of educational attainment than for those with lower levels of educational attainment. For example, among 20- to 24-year-olds in 2015, the employment rate was 89 percent for those with a bachelor’s or higher degree and 51 percent for those who did not complete high school.

    This indicator examines recent trends in two distinct yet related measures of labor market conditions—the employment rate (also known as the employment to population ratio) and the unemployment rate—by age group and educational attainment level. For each age group, the employment rate is the number of persons in that age group who are employed as a percentage of the civilian population in that age group. The unemployment rate is the percentage of persons in the civilian labor force (i.e., all civilians who are employed or seeking employment) who are not working and who made specific efforts to find employment sometime during the prior 4 weeks. Trends in the unemployment rate reflect net changes in the relative number of people who are looking for work, while the employment rate reflects whether the economy is generating jobs relative to population growth in a specific age group.

  209. 209.

    glory b

    @NR: What, to tell people of color that as soon as white people’s money gets straight they won’t be racists anymore? Because that’s what he said during the campaign.

    The other day I was listening to Tom Hartmann. a caller told him how glad he was that Bernie was directing Chuck Schumer’s moves now and the social justice stuff has to take a back seat to Bernie’s priorities. I thought Tom would push back a little at least, but he just agreed.

    To quote rikyrah,

    Uh huh.

  214. 214.

    Yarrow

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    So is Bernie a useful idiot or a Putin puppet? Why did he even run this year? If not to weaken HRC, T campaign weaponized Bernie’s innuendo against her.

    One does wonder. And he does have some known connections to Russia. And his lack of speaking out on the Russians hacking our election is notable. Where is Bernie on this? Why so quiet, Bernie?

  216. 216.

    gene108

    @rikyrah:

    Republicans, 30 years later, will move in lock-step to get Sessions confirmed, no matter what. For them, Party and power are more important than country.

  217. 217.

    Davis X. Machina

    @schrodinger’s cat: Yes, Latin, Greek, and a little German. That’s English. I burned my English dictionary years ago. But that’s only one branch of the tree. Then after Sanskrit, in another lifetime, a non-Indo-European language… And Chinese in the third lifetime after that.

    I’ve always joked with my students that if I hit Powerball, I’m going to some Enormous State University where they teach everything, diving in at Afrikaans, and studying through the catalogue till I hit Yiddish, go broke, or die.

  218. 218.

    Mnemosyne

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    I’m pretty sure that Bernie is a useful idiot. But if I were the Democratic leadership, I wouldn’t tell Bernie anything that I wouldn’t want Tad Devine to tell his buddy Comrade Putin.

  219. 219.

    bemused

    @hoodie:

    I’ve lived among the Trumpsters all my life and have always thought they were so reactionary and belligerant due to low self-esteem. When they say college educated, liberals, tree huggers, you name it look down on them, it’s because they feel inferior in various ways.

  221. 221.

    Millard Filmore

    @Chris:

    They really, really do get off on watching the nightsticks and jackboots come out and being applied to any person they disapprove of. Like sports fans watching their team win the superbowl. I suspect in more than a few cases, “get off on” isn’t even a metaphor.

    Think of it as Revenge Porn.

  226. 226.

    SenyorDave

    @rikyrah: Sessions racial views and his past failure to win approval for federal judgeship should be pretty much the only things the Democrats bring up in his confirmation hearings. He’ll get in since being a racist didn’t disqualify the predator-elect from winning, but at least the Democrats should emphasize Session’s history, especially his kaln affinity.

  227. 227.

    hovercraft

    @Brachiator

    The Rising Cost of Not Going to College

    For those who question the value of college in this era of soaring student debt and high unemployment, the attitudes and experiences of today’s young adults—members of the so-called Millennial generation—provide a compelling answer. On virtually every measure of economic well-being and career attainment—from personal earnings to job satisfaction to the share employed full time—young college graduates are outperforming their peers with less education. And when today’s young adults are compared with previous generations, the disparity in economic outcomes between college graduates and those with a high school diploma or less formal schooling has never been greater in the modern era.

    These assessments are based on findings from a new nationally representative Pew Research Center survey of 2,002 adults supplemented by a Pew Research analysis of economic data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

    The economic analysis finds that Millennial college graduates ages 25 to 321 who are working full time earn more annually—about $17,500 more—than employed young adults holding only a high school diploma. The pay gap was significantly smaller in previous generations.2 College-educated Millennials also are more likely to be employed full time than their less-educated counterparts (89% vs. 82%) and significantly less likely to be unemployed (3.8% vs. 12.2%).

    I tried to post a couple of links to BLS, but they kept getting eaten by the gremlins, google them, they are more recent, than this which is from 2014.

  228. 228.

    Mnemosyne

    @Gin & Tonic:

    I’ve been told that I’m just paranoid for asking about Devine’s connections to Putin. They’re totally coincidental, just like all of the other unrelated and totally coincidental connections to Russia in this whole election.

  231. 231.

    Davis X. Machina

    @hovercraft:

    On virtually every measure of economic well-being and career attainment—from personal earnings to job satisfaction to the share employed full time—young college graduates are outperforming their peers with less education.

    This doesn’t take into consideration our new political world, where their peers with less education, if they’re white, have their votes count more.

  234. 234.

    Yarrow

    If Russia had physically attacked us instead of using cyber warfare, we'd be seeing a much different response from a lot of people.— Laura Silverman (@LauraJSilverman) December 14, 2016

    Yep.

  236. 236.

    rikyrah

    @SenyorDave:

    Sessions racial views and his past failure to win approval for federal judgeship should be pretty much the only things the Democrats bring up in his confirmation hearings. He’ll get in since being a racist didn’t disqualify the predator-elect from winning, but at least the Democrats should emphasize Session’s history, especially his kaln affinity.

    I completely agree.

  238. 238.

    tybee

    @NR:

    Fortunately, Bernie Sanders is doing exactly that.

    so when does that voter who was turned into a liberal get to vote for clinton?

  239. 239.

    Yarrow

    @SenyorDave: That was not an ignorant remark. It was a tell. He does like the poorly educated because those are his voters. The poorly educated are also more easily fooled by his propaganda.

  242. 242.

    Millard Filmore

    @Yarrow:

    when Mitch McConnell got up and did his announcement that he was calling for investigations into the Russian hacking,

    Sorry, I do not understand. Who is blackmailing McConnell into an investigation? The Chinese? I cannot imagine that Russia or Trump wants an investigation, so why would they blackmail anyone to get it started?

  244. 244.

    coin operated

    @Chris:

    “The real deal with the devil would’ve been to accept Hillary the genocidal abortionist just because Trump wasn’t a perfect Christian (and really, who of us is?)!”
    – 99% of Bible thumpers, three seconds after hearing your suggestion.

    Quoted for truth….

  245. 245.

    SenyorDave

    @Yarrow: That was not an ignorant remark. It was a tell.

    You are correct. From my perspective it is openly anti-education, and I would like to think a candidate for POTUS would talk about expanded educational opportunities, but I am projecting. From the perspective of how he ran his campaign it was a shrewd move. Another reason why I loathe the man. He normalized so many abhorrent behaviors.

  247. 247.

    Gin & Tonic

    @NR: His own Wikipedia page puts him as working for Viktor Yanukovych’s campaigns in 2006 and 2009-10. If you don’t see a Putin connection then you’re too dumb to exist.

  249. 249.

    Major Major Major Major

    @schrodinger’s cat: there’s a few vestiges in English but they’re just that, vestiges. We have a number of indo-European archaisms that survive in a handful of words. I especially like these two:

    Causative verbs. A form of a verb that means to make the verb happen to something else. For example, to fell a tree means to make the tree fall.

    -n suffix on nouns meaning “made of”. Gold, golden. In older texts you’ll see silvern and leathern.

    These sorts of things used to be something you could do to a lot of words, like the dual.

  250. 250.

    NR

    @Gin & Tonic: So because you worked for someone seven years ago, that automatically means you work for them for the rest of your life?

    If your boss from seven years ago, who you no longer work for, called you up and told you to do something, you’d just drop everything and do it?

    You’re pretty strange.

  251. 251.

    Yarrow

    @Millard Filmore: McConnell determined that if he didn’t hold an investigation that McCain and Graham would do it instead. He knows the Russians have stuff on him. He wants to control the investigation so he changed his tune from Friday when he said investigations weren’t necessary. But he wasn’t happy about it. He hopes he can control how it goes but if he doesn’t….

  252. 252.

    hovercraft

    @rikyrah:

    Incoming Education Secretery, Betsy DeVos is on record supporting child labor.

    Between that and the new (reported/floated) head of the FDA not believing in drug trails, he says that drug companies would never bring dangerous drugs to market, and if they did the market would fix it, we are in for some interesting times.

    I guess America was great right after the turn of the last century, no minimum wage, child labor laws, meat inspectors, education standards, wait a minute, it’s almost like they want to roll back the New Deal and all the protections that it came with.

  253. 253.

    Gin & Tonic

    @NR: Well, my boss from seven years ago isn’t an ex-KGB kleptocratic dictator who has his political opponents and other nosy questioners loudly and publicly assassinated, so I’ll decline to accept your “argument.”

  254. 254.

    Davis X. Machina

    @Major Major Major Major: No real English duals left. Even E “oxen”, and ME ‘eyen”, sometimes adduced as fossilized duals (oxen and eyes naturally occur in pairs), are just -en plurals, which are as common as muck in German. “Scissors” and “pants” should be duals — but they take plural verbs in sentences.

    Homeric Greek, but not later dialects, still has a number of dual forms, both noun and verb. But that’s about it. I can’t think of a live IE dual off the top of my head in the western branch, anyways. Maybe in the Caucasus? There are weird things up in those mountains.

  255. 255.

    gene108

    @SenyorDave:

    emphasize Session’s history, especially his kaln affinity.

    You do know Robert “Sheets” Bird was the fucking Grand Wizard of the West Virginia KKK and a hero to many Democrats, including Hillary Clinton?

    /right-wing response

  256. 256.

    FlipYrWhig

    As I said the other day, undecided debate-watchers came away liking Hillary Clinton, too, so I don’t know why the Bernie-philes have decided that his sweet angelic voice is so magically effective it makes more lasting converts than anyone else. And “political correctness” has nothing whatsoever to do with being inoffensive so as not to challenge power. He’s so unctuous and smug.

  258. 258.

    rikyrah

    Donald Trump’s German Debt Bomb
    “Could he continue in office while fighting a personal bankruptcy action?”

    by James Wimberley
    December 14, 2016 12:15 PM

    Deutsche Bank is in trouble. WSJ in September, December.

    The $14bn fine levied on the bank by the US Justice Department has exposed Deutsche’s thin capital cushion. It is retrenching, and struggling to avoid a bailout. The German government’s formal position is against bailouts. But that’s for show: you always deny these things to the last minute, like devaluations. In reality, it could not afford to let the country’s largest bank (and the 11th in the world) crash. We can safely assume Bundesbank and Finance Ministry officials are riding herd on the bank’s every move and keeping up the pressure.

    The bank is also the largest creditor of the Trump Organization, to the tune of $364 million. Which creates a very interesting situation for all parties, in the sense of the Chinese curse.

    The bank needs cash, lots of it, and therefore must realize some of its assets. Where do they look? Well, one place is high-risk loans to borrowers with a poor record – like Trump.

    You may object: these are not callable loans but fixed-term ones like mortgages. Here I call on apparently well-informed commenter MacK at LGM:

    In practice, since loan covenant breaches, even “technical” ones are so common, a lot of real estate loans can be called anytime. Now consider what that means for Donald Trump, a lot of whose net worth consists of his participation in big real estate projects. Trump has a bad reputation with lenders (they got burned 4 times) – Deutsche Bank was odd in that it was a major bank prepared to lend to Trump – but who knows the details, how the loan was syndicated.

    Trump’s wealth may very much depend on lenders on his projects, but also projects that just have his name on them, not “calling their loans.” Consider the leverage that may give the lenders over Trump.

    Calling the loans is very much an option. Since Deutsche is the largest creditor, it could spark a panic among other creditors, leading to the bankruptcy of several Trump Organization businesses and, if Trump has issued personal guarantees, of Trump himself. Could he continue in office while fighting a personal bankruptcy action? I doubt it. Ryan and McConnell have a nuclear weapon in that they could threaten to stand aside in an impeachment launched by Pelosi. The situation contains an existential danger to Trump.

  259. 259.

    NR

    @Gin & Tonic: It’s better than your utterly nonsensical “argument” that because someone worked for Putin on a contract seven years ago, that automatically means they’re an undercover operative for him for the rest of their lives. That’s some tinfoil-level shit right there.

  260. 260.

    Yarrow

    It really cracks me up that Donald Trump, who hosted Celebrity Apprentice, can’t find anyone above the D-list to perform at his inauguration. Despite offering bribes to their bookers.

    President-elect Donald Trump’s team is struggling so hard to book A-list performers for his inaugural festivities that it offered ambassadorships to at least two talent bookers if they could deliver marquee names, the bookers told TheWrap.

    The bookers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said they were approached by members of Trump’s Presidential Inaugural Committee in recent weeks with offers of cash or even plush diplomatic posts in exchange for locking in singers.

    The first insider said he was “shocked” at the proposal: “Never in a million years have I heard something so crazy,” he said. “That was the moment I almost dropped the phone

    .”

  261. 261.

    germy

    @Yarrow:

    SEN. BERNIE SANDERS (I), VERMONT: Well, I think, when you have the intelligence agencies saying that that happened, when you have John McCain, when you have Democrats, when you have a bipartisan effort saying that we need an investigation, because this is very serious stuff, I think we go forward.

    But I don’t want to go backwards. I think we have got to go forward. We have got to take a hard look at the role that the Russians played in this election process. We will see where the investigation goes.

    But for Donald Trump to summarily dismiss all of this makes no sense to me at all.

    (Sanders on Face The Nation)

    *EDIT:
    I stopped watching shows like Face the Nation after the November electoral decision, but I found the above after a quick online search.

  262. 262.

    Cacti

    And “political correctness” has nothing whatsoever to do with being inoffensive so as not to challenge power. He’s so unctuous and smug.

    Yep.

    The cry of “political correctness” is a snarl term from those who want it to be socially acceptable to punch downward.

  266. 266.

    hovercraft

    @Davis X. Machina:

    it’s my retirement project.

    You are very optimistic, some of us are preparing for a life spent working till we die. Or if we are lucky, standing outside of Trump Tower waiting for our daily sighting of the Emperor, when he throws down sustenance to the masses (Mad Max Fury Road, ref.)

    But if you do get to retirement, good luck with it, it sounds like a worthwhile project.

  268. 268.

    Brachiator

    @hovercraft: I don’t dispute the value of a college education. But this does not answer my question: Where are the jobs?

    And even looking at this study, there is evidence of wage stagnation.

    Taken together, these two facts—the growing economic return to a college degree and the larger share of college graduates in the Millennial generation—might suggest that the Millennial generation should be earning more than earlier generations of young adults.

    But they’re not. The overall median earnings of today’s Millennials ($35,000) aren’t much different than the earnings of early Boomers ($34,883) or Gen Xers ($32,173) and only somewhat higher than Silents ($30,982) at comparable ages.

    And the group that seemed to have the best shot at later economic success were science and engineering majors, a rarefied group. Jobs are disappearing, wages continue to stagnate and I don’t really see that either political party has a good answer to the problems presented by a post-manufacturing society.

    Thanks for the link, though. The info is useful,

  269. 269.

    Mnemosyne

    @Gin & Tonic:

    The reason Comrade NR is so adorbs when it comes to politics is that he has no idea that it’s all about personal relationships and who knows whom. He actually thinks that after Devine runs a campaign for someone, he cuts all ties with them immediately afterwards.

  271. 271.

    Mnemosyne

    @NR:

    Is that former boss offering me a moonlighting gig that would dovetail perfectly with my current job so I could make money doing both? And am I a political hack with no scruples whatsoever?

  272. 272.

    NR

    @Mnemosyne: The reason you’re so hilarious when it comes to politics is that you think your paranoid delusions constitute evidence of anything.

    Last night, you said that Putin put a few million dollars into a Swiss bank account for Tad Devine in order to get him to run Bernie Sanders’ campaign and do… something. Where’s your evidence that that ever happened?

  274. 274.

    hovercraft

    @Millard Filmore:

    Who is blackmailing McConnell into an investigation? The Chinese?

    I’m pretty sure Elaine Cho has ties to Taiwan, so I don’t think he’s working for the Chinese.

  275. 275.

    Chris

    @germy:

    Say what you want about Bernie Sanders, he’s still got his head screwed on a lot better than his diehard fringe of supporters.

  280. 280.

    Jeffro

    @Yarrow: Conspiracy theorists?!? Why…he isn’t calling out head Trump wackaloon Michael Flynn, I hope? Perish the thought!

    I love it when Dems remember how to throw a punch.

  281. 281.

    Jeffro

    @Millard Filmore:

    Who is blackmailing McConnell into an investigation? The Chinese? I cannot imagine that Russia or Trump wants an investigation, so why would they blackmail anyone to get it started?

    McConnell’s “investigating” to look like he’s doing something about this, hoping it will blow over until at least past the EC vote, much less the Inauguration. He’s doing it under regular (read: slow) order, not as a special investigation of Congress.

    ETA: ah, as usual I see someone else (Yarrow in this case) got there first.

  282. 282.

    Mike in dc

    @Brachiator:
    Hey, just wait until the Age of Robots arrives over the next few decades, wiping out half of all jobs. The pivot to a universal basic income will be protracted, awkward and painful. The cluelessness of the political class about what’s coming next is jarring.

  283. 283.

    Chris

    @Mnemosyne:

    You mean other than Putin’s history of secretly funding opposition parties all over Europe?

    Seriously: it’s not like there isn’t tons of tons of precedent. This is what Russia does.

  284. 284.

    hovercraft

    @Yarrow:

    The bookers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said they were approached by members of Trump’s Presidential Inaugural Committee in recent weeks with offers of cash or even plush diplomatic posts in exchange for locking in singers.

    The first insider said he was “shocked” at the proposal: “Never in a million years have I heard something so crazy,” he said. “That was the moment I almost dropped the phone

    Again with these lying media liars, this has already been debunked, last week they denied this story, they said they do too have A-listers lined up like umm, ….. we’ll get back to you on that. Hey who knows maybe that’s why Kanye was at White House NYC yesterday, he’s the headliner. The fact that he just got out of a mental institution can be used as cover with his fans, it was temporary insanity, it made me perform at the inaugural ball.

  285. 285.

    NR

    @tybee: There are elections in the future to think about, you know.

    Jesus, the ridiculous lengths you people will go to to shit all over Bernie Sanders are really something to behold. So now we shouldn’t bother talking to voters at all because we just had an election? Unbelievable.

  286. 286.

    Millard Filmore

    @Yarrow:

    McConnell determined that if he didn’t hold an investigation that McCain and Graham would do it instead.

    Ah! Ok. It all makes sense now. Thanks.

  287. 287.

    Roger Moore

    @hovercraft:

    Trump Team Disavows Request To ID Climate Staffers: ‘Not Authorized’

    IOW, they didn’t like getting caught. They’ll try again once the furor dies down, preferably when everyone is distracted by some bigger, more awful thing they’re doing.

  288. 288.

    Mnemosyne

    @Brachiator:

    I think reduced work hours would work for quite a while — there are still a whole lot of people out there working mandatory overtime because the company or government agency they work for can’t or don’t want to hire more people.

    If the standard work week went to 30 or 35 hours plus mandatory overtime for anyone who’s not a manager while increasing hourly pay so everyone stayed at the same income level or better, that would solve a lot of problems.

    There are a lot of ways to solve the problem, but very few that our current corporate oligarchy is willing to accept.

  289. 289.

    NR

    @Mnemosyne: Quit deflecting. Where is your evidence that Putin paid Tad Devine to do anything in 2016?

    Innuendo and “Boy, there are are a lot of coincidences around her, hurr durr!” don’t constitute evidence.

  291. 291.

    Mnemosyne

    @Chris:

    Seriously: it’s not like there isn’t tons of tons of precedent. This is what Russia does.

    Yes, but this is about St. Bernie the Incorruptible. It’s literally inconceivable that he could have been conned by Putin and Tad Devine. Sure, other people have been repeatedly burned by Devine, but not St. Bernie!

  293. 293.

    Jeffro

    @Yarrow: Wait…Ted Nugent and Kid Rock aren’t A-list???

    LOL

    The guy’s way underwater in approval ratings before he even gets officially elected, much less inaugurated, and now he can’t even get a few boy bands who need the dough. Love it!

    We should have a Lollapalooza-style band fest down at the Verizon Center on the same day – keep everyone warm and well-inebriated and listen to some good music too.

  295. 295.

    hovercraft

    @Brachiator:

    And the group that seemed to have the best shot at later economic success were science and engineering majors, a rarefied group. Jobs are disappearing, wages continue to stagnate and I don’t really see that either political party has a good answer to the problems presented by a post-manufacturing society.

    Sorry about that, I did actually answer that in a couple of my earlier replies that got eated. The world economy is changing all economies, automation/ AI is going to continue to eat away at the opportunities for our population, but not enough policy makers are ready to tell us all that we are going to have to look at alternate economic structures like the basic wage for all working age adults, or come up with something entirely new. But in the meant time, education is still the best way to positioning oneself in the best possible position. Wage stagnation is another long term project of the right that has worked out just as designed, with the blame going everywhere but where it belongs. Busting unions has produced a poorer more productive workforce, whose efforts have improved the profitability of corporations and caused top execs compensation to skyrocket, just as intended.
    Policy is what is needed to address both of these issues, but in the mean time, education will mitigate what is currently broken.

  296. 296.

    ribber

    @liberal: Point taken. Two half-hearted defenses: 1) I did call it gross oversimplification on my part. 2)The characterization of “unconstitutional” loses some of its rhetorical potency when Ukraine’s constitution appears to get ‘reformed’ with each change of government. I’m certainly guilty of selfishly thinking about this in terms of what it means for the US and less so for other countries. But yeah, valid point.

  298. 298.

    Brachiator

    @FlipYrWhig:

    As I said the other day, undecided debate-watchers came away liking Hillary Clinton, too, so I don’t know why the Bernie-philes have decided that his sweet angelic voice is so magically effective it makes more lasting converts than anyone else.

    You erroneously try to shift the terms of the debate. I said yesterday, and still maintain, that Bernie was more persuasive, using the example of a link that a poster provided. This is not the same thing as likability.

    Also, I am not a Bernie-phile. I decided fairly early on that he was not my candidate, but I saw that he connected to people, and not just young men, in California.

    And I don’t know that it would have made a difference in the past election, but I wish that Clinton had changed up her message and campaigned harder in the swing states that she lost. I noted that this election was and always will be strange, but that obviously Hillary connected well with a majority of voters, but could not reach that needed electoral sliver.

    Finally, it is not Hillary v Bernie anymore. Hillary is done as a presidential candidate. Bernie is too, even if he doesn’t realize it yet. Anything to be learned about trying to connect to the voters is for a future Democratic Party nominee.

  299. 299.

    Mnemosyne

    @NR:

    Sure, let’s look at the evidence:

    It is well documented that Putin has been secretly funding opposition organizations all over Europe, especially (but not only) right wing ones.

    It is well documented that Tad Devine worked for Putin more than once.

    It is well documented that most of the people surrounding Trump — including Devine’s old boss, Paul Manafort — have strong ties to Russia.

    It is well documented that Russian hackers meddled in the election, and that their “revelations” were mostly about how the DNC was totally in the bag for Hillary and mean to Bernie.

    And you still think it’s a total coincidence that one of those Russian-tied campaign operatives just happened to show up to run Bernie’s campaign? Not just run it, but run it on a message that Hillary and the DNC were totally corrupt and couldn’t be trusted, the exact same message that Manafort was broadcasting through Trump?

    I would ask you what you think 2 and 2 add up to, but I’m pretty sure at this point that you don’t know what numbers are.

  300. 300.

    Gin & Tonic

    @NR: You really think Vlad’s Quickbooks ledgers are going to come to light on this? “Evidence” is hard to come by. But say, hypothetically, that you’d paid a consultant, oh, $12M in cash over the span of a few years, cash payments which could get said consultant in a lot of hot water with consultant’s national tax authorities and both you and consultant knew that, and then you needed another favor and reached out to said consultant with a proposition: do this for me or evidence of my cash payments to you will be leaked to the WaPo — what do you suppose consultant does?

    Do you know how much a house on Block Island costs?

  301. 301.

    Barbara

    @Gravenstone:

    They want a simplistic, labor intensive manufacturing based economy.

    But they don’t even really want that. Most people outside of the construction industry don’t really do physical labor any more. We couldn’t actually provide the labor necessary to sustain those kinds of industries, like high volume clothing manufacturing. For many Trump voters, the value of their skills has gone way down, precisely because “hard labor” is not really required any more and they don’t have the alternative skills that are valued. I think what they want are the union protections that went with their manufacturing jobs. They have conflated the protections they received with the types of jobs that they were doing, and the two were never the same. I can’t blame them for that, but Trump is practically the last person in the world who would make that a priority.

  302. 302.

    hovercraft

    Oh look they’re cooking something up before Cooper gets in there.

    NC Legislature Calls Mystery Special Session With Just Hours Notice

    The North Carolina state general assembly on Wednesday called an impromptu special session, but lawmakers did not specify what legislation they would convene to discuss.

    State lawmakers finished up a different special session on Wednesday after passing disaster relief legislation, which was the initial reason lame duck Gov. Pat McCrory (R) called the session this week, according to the News and Observer. Then the legislature immediately went into the mystery special session.

    Senate leader Phil Berger (R) announced the surprise session midday, which was convened by the legislature, not McCrory. However, he would not say what legislation lawmakers would consider, and the proclamation establishing the impromptu special session stated that the general assembly would consider “bills concerning any matters the General Assembly elects to consider.”

    “There are a number of things that have been talked about,” he said, according to the News and Observer. “I am not in a position at this point to list or specifically articulate what they are because no decisions have been made, finally as to what exactly will be brought up.”

    House Speaker Tim Moore also declined to specify the measures North Carolina lawmakers would discuss.

    “We’re looking at two bills at this point, but it depends what other bills folks file,” he said, per the News and Observer. “I can’t (explain) until it goes through the caucus process. Some of the ideas that we were discussing at the end of the last session are some of the ideas that you may see come up today.”

    The mystery special session follows speculation that North Carolina Republicans could use a special session to expand the number of seats on the state Supreme Court before McCrory left office. In the November election, the court flipped to Democratic control. By adding two seats to the court, legislators would give McCrory the ability to appoint two conservative justices before he leaves office, restoring the Republican majority.

    Moore has said in the past that the state legislature will not consider a court-packing scheme, and he repeated that on Wednesday.

    “I do not expect to see the court packing that people are talking about,” he said, according to the News and Observer.

    On Wednesday afternoon, state Rep. David Lewis (R), chair of the House Rules Committee, hinted to local reporters that lawmakers will consider legislation regarding the governor’s power.

    These fuckers just don’t give up.

  304. 304.

    Brachiator

    @hovercraft:

    Policy is what is needed to address both of these issues, but in the mean time, education will mitigate what is currently broken

    We agree more than we disagree, but I am seeing jobs going away at a faster clip, and education provides some flexibility in being able to get a job in different industries, but a college degree does not ensure stable long term employment.

    And the reality is that not everyone wants to go to college or is suited to college. Hell, a chunk of people in college and who get degrees are essentially faking it, which may actually be a useful job finding skill. It does not work to insist on a single thread approach to future success.

  305. 305.

    NR

    @Mnemosyne: Again: None of that is evidence that Putin paid Devine to do anything whatsoever in 2016. Devine worked on the Gore and Kerry campaigns, so it’s not like he came straight out of Russia, walked into the United States, and got a job with Bernie.

    What evidence do you have that Putin paid Devine to work for Bernie Sanders? Not innuendo. Not “Hey, look at all these coincidences!” Evidence.

  306. 306.

    NR

    @tybee: The tell for what, exactly? That I like that there are people winning Trump voters over to our side? Oh no, how horrible!

  307. 307.

    Gin & Tonic

    @ribber: Not a “valid point,” IMO. I’ve long disagreed with “liberal” on the history of events in Ukraine in the fall/winter of 2013-2014 that led to the change of government, but calling it a “coup” misses the point completely. It was a mass popular movement with very broad-based support, which culminated in events over about 48 hours in the period from Feb 18-20, 2014, that made Viktor Yanukovych’s position untenable, and he fled the country in the dead of night. Nobody in his circle was arrested or shot, and some of his associates and supporters remained in the successor government, so not even that much of a revolution.

  309. 309.

    glory b

    @NR: I’m not talking about the forum, I’m talking about Sanders actually speaking to a group of African Americans during the primary. His inability to connect was more than obvious. He couldn’t figure out that this wasn’t what they wanted to hear? Participating in one march a few decades ago wasn’t impressing anyone.

    Also, On msnbc, Katie Tur noted that Sanders rallies were about as diverse as Trump’s. We weren’t feeling him.

  310. 310.

    glory b

    @NR: And he wasn’t overwhelmingly successful during the forum either.

    And he just ought to do something, considering the damage he’s done

  311. 311.

    Barbara

    @Brachiator: We are at a distinct disadvantage in coming up with practical approaches because of the likelihood that tracking into something less than the highest academic level will be heavily influenced by race. I think the most practical solution is to heavily fund community college and make it dynamic in terms of implementing training programs that reflect local economic needs. That way no one is locked into a long term path that can’t include a four year university but a lot more resources are devoted to developing current skills without requiring students to take on debt. Retraining should take place as a matter of course, not as a last resort. I find listening to displaced workers sneer at retraining to be incredibly offputting, especially when I know so many people who have devoted so much energy and took the risk of going into something new.

  313. 313.

    glory b

    @NR: Actions are greater than words, and he ain’t done much, considering the damage he did to a party he wants to control but not take responsibility for.

    He said people of color will BE FINE once whites are economically moer secure. We’ve been there ourselves and know it’s not true.

  317. 317.

    NR

    @glory b:

    Actions are greater than words, and he ain’t done much, considering the damage he did to a party he wants to control but not take responsibility for.

    You want to talk about damage to the Democratic party? This is what the states looked like in 2009.

    And this is what they look like today.

    Bernie Sanders didn’t cause any of that damage. That is 100% owned by the neoliberal Democratic party leadership. They’d done far, far more damage to the party than Bernie Sanders ever has, or ever will.

    Your anger is misplaced.

  318. 318.

    Brachiator

    @Barbara:

    I think the most practical solution is to heavily fund community college and make it dynamic in terms of implementing training programs that reflect local economic needs.

    This sounds good. Very creative if implemented correctly.

  319. 319.

    glory b

    @NR: No, it means Putin is a client of the firm and goes back when he needs Devine’s services, just like any law firm.

  323. 323.

    Gin & Tonic

    @NR: Of course I do, which is why I said “hypothetical consultant.” Are you sure Tad Devine did not also get large cash payments for his work? If Manafort did, why wouldn’t Devine also?

  329. 329.

    Gin & Tonic

    @NR: Let’s say I’m remodeling my office. I need a carpenter and an electrician. At the end of the job, if I wire the electrician’s payment from my business account to his business account, what’s the likelihood that I pay the carpenter with an envelope full of non-consecutive 50’s?

  332. 332.

    agorabum

    There is no peak wingnut. The tide only ebbs and then rolls in higher.

    The election of Bush over Gore was tragedy. This is both tragedy and farce.

  335. 335.

    Brachiator

    @Mnemosyne:

    I think reduced work hours would work for quite a while — there are still a whole lot of people out there working mandatory overtime because the company or government agency they work for can’t or don’t want to hire more people.

    I don’t think that this semi-job sharing will solve the problem. I also don’t think that there is a lot of mandatory overtime happening in private industry.

    The California minimum wage is a little higher this year. One company I do business with has eliminated overtime for all customer support positions. They also eliminated a number of key sales jobs to save money (the sales staff also helped with support). The result will be degraded customer service, but management has decided that this is acceptable. The loss of the sales jobs has also eliminated a step up to higher wages for many of the remaining staff. I see similar moves in other companies.

    The other part of the problem, along with the loss of jobs, is the fact that the cost of living is increasing for many people in California, even though the official inflation rate is low. Reducing hours doesn’t work, and you really cannot impose mandatory overtime on private businesses.

    There are a lot of ways to solve the problem, but very few that our current corporate oligarchy is willing to accept.

    This is not just a problem for evil corporations. Small businesses have to deal with staff and payroll issues as well. Any company would be resistant to proposals that increased their overall payroll costs if it also did not increase revenues.

  336. 336.

    Mnemosyne

    @NR:

    Yes, I’m just imagining all of the stories about Russian meddling in the election. I’m imagining that Tad “Our Brand Is Crisis” Devine worked for Putin. I’m imagining that Putin has a long history of secretly financing the opponents of people he doesn’t like.

    I must have a pretty powerful imagination to have the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Guardian all willing to publish stories solely based on my delusions.

  337. 337.

    azlib

    @Chris:

    You are probably correct about there are no more Reds or Fascists – they have all become authoritarians and they will cut deals with each other if it serves their own purpose until the deal does not serve their purpose..

  338. 338.

    NR

    @Mnemosyne:

    I must have a pretty powerful imagination to have the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Guardian all willing to publish stories solely based on my delusions.

    Really? All of those newspapers published stories confirming that Tad Devine was an agent of Putin in the 2016 election? I must have missed all those stories, could you provide some links?

  339. 339.

    Mnemosyne

    @Brachiator:

    I also don’t think that there is a lot of mandatory overtime happening in private industry.

    I see you don’t work in the same industry I do. Mandatory overtime is standard here, and not just in production. The finance people routinely work until midnight year-round.

  341. 341.

    Steeplejack (phone)

    @Barbara:

    They have conflated the protections they received with the types of jobs that they were doing [. . .].

    Excellent point.

  342. 342.

    Mnemosyne

    @NR:

    That’s right, comrade. No need to look at the evidence of the many, many other instances of Putin acting to influence elections and political parties in other countries when you just feel that it can’t be true about Tad Devine, because he’s so well-known to be ethical and scrupulous in all things. Don’t let any pesky facts get in the way.

  343. 343.

    NR

    @Mnemosyne:

    Don’t let any pesky facts get in the way.

    What facts? You have offered no facts whatsoever to support your contention that Devine was paid by Putin to act as his agent in the 2016 election. You just feel that it must be true because he worked for Putin once upon a time, and you hate Bernie Sanders, and that’s enough for you. Well guess what? The real world doesn’t work that way.

  344. 344.

    Diana

    @Davis X. Machina: actually, it was not so much the discovery of the similarities of Sanskrit to Latin (the Jesuits had discovered those in the 17th century) as the disconcerting revelation that they were much more similar to each other than either was to Hebrew, which was supposed to be the ur-language that all the descendants of Noah spoke.

  346. 346.

    divF

    @Roger Moore: The clown who ordered this was an idiot, given that the American Geophysical Union fall meeting (20000+ attendees) from all over the world is being held this week in San Francisco. There is no way this isn’t going to get lots of attention.

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