Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

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

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

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

You can’t love your country only when you win.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

“More of this”, i said to the dog.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

I did not have telepathic declassification on my 2022 bingo card.

A Senator Walker would also be an insult to reason, rationality, and decency.

The words do not have to be perfect.

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

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

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

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

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

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

You are here: Home / John Cole Presents "This Fucking Old House" / Bed Update

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129Comments

  10. 10.

    Mj_Oregon

    Beautiful four poster bed, John! Keeping my fingers crossed for good weather when you make the big move.

  12. 12.

    Another Scott

    What?!? No joke about “Bruce” getting the left side of the bed yet?

    Slackers!

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  16. 16.

    guachi

    My wife and I also did house stuff today! We went to the Antique Mall across the border in South Carolina and picked up some furniture we had previously purchased. And then, of course, bought more. So now we have a variety of Art Deco pieces – two wardrobes, a chest of drawers, a dining room table, and two buffets.

    So much fun seeing your house come together.

  17. 17.

    Calming Influence

    @WaterGirl:

    I’m a bit worried about the tall wooden objects on the corners of the bed that look like they could hurt a person who is so inclined.

    Hopefully John’s friends will wrap the tall wooden objects in thick foam before move-in day.

    Looks great, Mr. Cole.

  18. 18.

    SiubhanDuinne

    BTW, John, do not remove that mattress tag if you want to stay on the right side of the law.

  23. 23.

    WaterGirl

    @SiubhanDuinne: You laugh, but my older sister had me terrified as a child after I took the tag off my pillow. She had me convinced that the police were going to come and arrest me.

  26. 26.

    NCSteve

    Yeah, echo everyone else. Treasure that photo. It’s the last time you’ll see it unoccupied by 200 pounds of domesticated carnivores.

  27. 27.

    Bobby D

    Now all you need is a well hydrated Katarina Babushka to tie you to those posts and do bad, very bad, oh so naughty things to you.

    Nice thing about Ikea mattresses..they come rolled up, in plastic, about the size of a large area rug. No springs, they are all latex/memory foam based and use slats instead of box springs, fit in a Prius. Best sleep I’ve had was when I had a cheap-o Ikea latex and put a 4″ high-density memory foam topper on it. If you are a side-sleeper, these thick memory foam things are heaven. No more waking up with a dead shoulder/arm, or bad kinks in the neck. Can be a little warm in summer though.

  31. 31.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @WaterGirl:

    I’m a bit worried about the tall wooden objects on the corners of the bed that look like they could hurt a person who is so inclined.

    They’re sufficiently tall, I don’t think they’d be a problem unless one used that lovely new mattress as a trampoline.

    Do you want to come back to my place, bouncy-bouncy?

  33. 33.

    WaterGirl

    @SiubhanDuinne: ha ha. If I had a 4-poster bed, I would be continually running into the posts, so I am probably projecting. Hopefully that’s the first and last similarity between me and the piece of shit.

  35. 35.

    WaterGirl

    @JPL: I guess it can go either way. I like to rip those babies off as soon as I get the pillows (or whatever) home! But some of them are hard to get off, in which case I say fuck it and walk away.

  37. 37.

    Dog Dawg Damn

    Esquire reporting that Trump Admin is planning to evict Press corps from White House:

    http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a52301/trump-evict-press-white-house/

    According to three senior officials on the transition team, a plan to evict the press corps from the White House is under serious consideration by the incoming Trump Administration. If the plan goes through, one of the officials said, the media will be removed from the cozy confines of the White House press room, where it has worked for several decades. Members of the press will be relocated to the White House Conference Center—near Lafayette Square—or to a space in the Old Executive Office Building, next door to the White House.

    According the article, they are going to “spin” this as giving press more room because of all the requests to cover Trump.

    Hopefully people will begin to see through these tactics.

  39. 39.

    NotMax

    @Bobby D

    Treated the body to a memory foam pillow several years ago – not the regular rectangular shape, rather the type with a crescent-shaped cutout along one side – and aches, pains, cricks, kinks and other sundry woes have become a thing of the past.

  40. 40.

    WaterGirl

    @SiubhanDuinne: I’m the baby of the family!

    So tell me, did you ever have your 5-year old baby sister – who was wearing white shorts, white socks, white tennies and a sleeveless white short – lie down on the ground so you could run over her with your bicycle because you thought the tire marks would look cool? If so, was your baby sister as dumb as I was? By which I mean, did she lie down on the ground like I did?

  47. 47.

    Dog Dawg Damn

    @randy khan: Good point. Just the first step in what will be many over the years to eventually neuter press’s ability to hold him accountable.

    At some point, moderates will wise up to this and vote against him, I believe. He’s going to overreach.

  49. 49.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Dog Dawg Damn: And he’s announced his first foreign trip will not be, as is tradition, to Canada our largest trading partner. It will instead be to Russia. And he’d like to hold a summit, to deal with The Nuclear, in Iceland.

  54. 54.

    JPL

    ot. .Osweiler is really having a bad game. He’s been open most of the game and still throws interceptions.

  56. 56.

    Another Scott

    So, I’m reading the 2011 Jill LePore piece in the New Yorker that was cited in the NPR piece I mentioned in an earlier thread today. Lots of good-to-remember history. Like:

    [Cecile] Richards was nine in 1966, when Margaret Sanger died. The following year, Alan Guttmacher edited a book called “The Case for Legalized Abortion Now.” As a young intern in the nineteen-twenties, Guttmacher had watched a woman die of a botched abortion, and had never forgotten it. At Mount Sinai, he performed abortions until the hospital told him to stop. Laws liberalizing abortion in the nineteen-sixties and early nineteen-seventies were urged by doctors and lawyers and supported by clergy. Between 1967 and 1970, some restrictions on abortions were lifted by legislators in Alaska, Arkansas, California, Delaware, Georgia, Hawaii, Kansas, Maryland, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, South Carolina, Virginia, and Washington. Governor Ronald Reagan signed the California law. By 1970, the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion, established to help women find doctors who could conduct abortions safely, was offering services in twenty-six states.

    Women were not much involved in any of this agitation. Betty Friedan endorsed the liberalization of abortion laws at a meeting of the National Organization for Women in 1967, but women’s-rights activists really began to join this effort only in 1969, the year the abortion-rights group naral was founded, at a conference in Chicago during which Friedan declared, “There is no freedom, no equality, no full human dignity and personhood possible for women until we assert and demand the control over our own bodies, over our own reproductive process.”

    […]

    In 1969, in “The Emerging Republican Majority,” the Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips offered a blueprint for crushing the Democrats’ New Deal coalition by recruiting Southerners and Catholics to the G.O.P. At the time, prominent Democrats, including Edward Kennedy, were vocally opposed to abortion. Nixon’s advisers urged him to reconsider his position on abortion and family planning. In 1970, the year Nixon signed Title X, the Department of Defense adopted a policy that doctors on military bases could in some instances perform abortions. In 1971, Patrick Buchanan wrote a memo recommending that the President reverse that policy, as part of a strategy to insure that George McGovern (the candidate Nixon wanted to run against) would defeat Edmund Muskie for the Democratic nomination. Observing that abortion was “a rising issue and a gut issue with Catholics,” Buchanan wrote, “If the President should publicly take his stand against abortion, as offensive to his own moral principles . . . then we can force Muskie to make the choice between his tens of millions of Catholic supporters and his liberal friends at the New York Times and the Washington Post.” A week later, in a statement to the Department of Defense, Nixon borrowed the language of the Catholic Church to speak of his “personal belief in the sanctity of human life—including the life of the yet unborn.”

    “Favoritism toward things Catholic is good politics,” a Nixon strategist wrote in “Dividing the Democrats,” a 1971 memo to H. R. Haldeman: “There is a trade-off, but it leaves us with the larger share of the pie.” When a Nixon supporter balked, Buchanan held firm. Asked whether Nixon might go back to his original position, Buchanan mocked the question: “He will cost himself Catholic support and gain what, Betty Friedan?”

    Abortion wasn’t a partisan issue until Republicans made it one. In June of 1972, a Gallup poll reported that sixty-eight per cent of Republicans and fifty-nine per cent of Democrats agreed that “the decision to have an abortion should be made solely by a woman and her physician.” Fifty-six per cent of Catholics thought so, too. Blackmun clipped the Washington Post story reporting this survey and put it in his Roe case file.

    […]

    In the late nineteen-seventies, the Republican strategists Richard Viguerie and Paul Weyrich, both of whom were Catholic, recruited Jerry Falwell into a coalition designed to bring together economic and social conservatives around a “pro-family” agenda, one that targeted gay rights, sexual freedom, women’s liberation, the E.R.A., child care, and sex education. Weyrich said that abortion ought to be “the keystone of their organizing strategy, since this was the issue that could divide the Democratic Party.” Falwell founded the Moral Majority in 1979; Paul Brown, the founder of the American Life League, scoffed in 1982, “Jerry Falwell couldn’t spell ‘abortion’ five years ago.”

    (Emphasis added.)

    It was always about politics and defeating Democrats; it was never about “the unborn”.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  57. 57.

    satby

    @WaterGirl: true story, a kid in my grammer school was run over by a car at about age 8. She lived, though with bad enough internal injuries that she lost her spleen. Years later she used to get a kick over showing off the perfect impression of the tire tread across her stomach. I don’t know if it ever went away, that was at least 7 years later and it still looked like you could ID the tires by the imprint.

  64. 64.

    hilts

    Cole,

    In honor of your new bed:

    AMPLE make this bed.
    Make this bed with awe;
    In it wait till judgment break
    Excellent and fair.

    Be its mattress straight,
    Be its pillow round;
    Let no sunrise’ yellow noise
    Interrupt this ground.

    h/t Emily Dickinson

  69. 69.

    NotMax

    @Dog Dawg Damn

    Dubya administration spent a cool $8.5 to refurbish and modernize the press room, unveiling the results in 2007. Cost of doing the same to a different space in another building? Much, much more, one surmises.

    Also too, the one in the WH is named for James Brady (cough – gun control – cough) so can see the Trumpistas wanting to sh*t on that.

    “Let’s name the new one the George Zimmerman room!”

  70. 70.

    JPL

    It’s past my bedtime, but I just watched the beginning of SNL. The show is just raining on Trump’s parade. There will be tweets.

  75. 75.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @JPL:

    Oh, goody! Will watch the opening sketch sometime tomorrow. I’m sure it will be readily available online.

  76. 76.

    Yarrow

    @Dog Dawg Damn:

    a plan to evict the press corps from the White House is under serious consideration by the incoming Trump Administration.

    I’ve commented on it a couple of times before, but when Trump ended that farce of a press conference he said, “Goodbye, everyone. Goodbye.” It sounded odd because most people would say something more like, “That’s all for now. Thanks, everyone.” But Trump always gives away what he means. And this time he meant “goodbye.” He doesn’t plan to talk to the press again.

    What I can’t figure out is if he’s thinking forward and doesn’t plan to hold press conferences ever again. Or, if at some level he knows his days in office are numbered, if he ever gets there at all, and won’t hold another press conference.

  79. 79.

    Yarrow

    @Omnes Omnibus: Doubt Iceland was consulted if it’s just something Trump’s team said. They tend to say things first and then figure out what to do about what was said second. Trump probably thinks he’s the second coming of Reagan so what better than to go to the location where Reagan got such good press for his meeting about The Nuclear. Wouldn’t surprise me if that was the level at which they work.

  81. 81.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Major Major Major Major: Its in the same article, which is in the Daily Mail, about British Intel Community’s fears that if they share anything with the US after next week it’ll be given to Russia.

    The first trip to Russia reporting is in The Hill.

  83. 83.

    Yarrow

    @Omnes Omnibus: It’s so exhausting to be ready for anything. I keep hoping something will happen and he won’t become president. Better yet, the entire GOP leadership gets exposed and can’t keep their jobs either.

  84. 84.

    ruemara

    It looks so nice. I daydream of a lovely bed like that. And a home. I really hope you’re happy there and you have lots of great memories ahead with dogs, cats, friends, & maybe one day a life partner.

  89. 89.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Mazel Tov Cocktail ‏@ AdamSerwer 5h5 hours ago
    No toddler ever has been as desperate for attention as Dinesh D’Souza has been his whole life

    For those not reading political tweets on this Saturday night, D’Souza is attacking not only John Lewis, but also, for reasons that make sense to the man Newt Gingrich thinks is an intellectual, Rosa Parks.

  93. 93.

    Yarrow

    @Omnes Omnibus: Being prepared for anything, or as you also said, “head on a swivel” can mean nothing more than being ready to dodge whatever is coming your way. Not a bad reaction but not necessarily a complete one. Anticipating what is coming, being prepared for various possibilities, is another way to prepare. The second option requires thinking through some options to make some decisions ahead of time rather than having “cat like reflexes” ready to jump at whatever comes. Both may be necessary.

  94. 94.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Yarrow: Head on a swivel is the phrase used in the training for patrolling in a non to semi permissive environment. It refers to being continually on guard and assessing the environment for clear threats, as well as ambiguities that could be threats. This training usually involves a lot of an instructor yelling “stay alert, stay alive!”

  97. 97.

    CaseyL

    @Omnes Omnibus: “Bruce” and “Armstrong” are the names written on the cardboard covering the frame at the head of the bed. I thought they were brand names, but who knows, maybe they’re place cards, like for formal seating.

    Gorgeous bed, John, and may it provide you (and Lily, and Rosie, and Steve, and Thurston) with restful dreamy sleep for years to come! But, um.., maybe it’s just the camera angle, but it looks to me like there’s not enough room between the bed and the dresser to open the dresser drawers all the way…?

  99. 99.

    Yarrow

    @Adam L Silverman: And as such it’s not something that most people can do 24 hours a day for years on end. It’s exhausting being that much on guard and constantly looking for threats for any length of time. Even the soldiers aren’t on patrol all day and all night every day for years on end without ever having a break.

  104. 104.

    Yarrow

    @Adam L Silverman: Yes, of course. Superhuman feats and all when absolutely necessary. But most people can’t sustain them over a longer length of time. How long that length of time is would vary by person and situation, I guess.

  105. 105.

    Adam L Silverman

    @sukabi: Actually, drug testing:
    https://twitter.com/maggieNYT/status/820487328472977408

    Follow

    Maggie HabermanVerified account
    ‏@maggieNYT
    Drug testing floated for White House press corps via @PageSix

    http://pagesix.com/2017/01/13/drug-testing-floated-for-white-house-press-corps/

    One proposal on dealing with the media that was pitched to President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team calls for drug testing the White House press corps.

    Trump’s attacks on the mainstream media were a cornerstone of his campaign and last week he called BuzzFeed a “failing pile of garbage,” but forcing reporters to undergo random drug tests would provoke a media meltdown.

    The pee-in-a-cup proposal (yellow journalism indeed) was one of 13 ideas one candidate for White House press secretary wrote in November in a confidential memo to members of the Presidential Transition Team’s Executive Committee.

    He didn’t get the job, and I am not naming him because his proposal could harsh the mellow of his fellow journalists.

    Sean Spicer, who was spokesman for the Republican National Committee, is Trump’s press secretary, and told me, “I support whatever security measures are recommended by the Secret Service.”

    “Journalists who are at the White House more than one day per week should be subject to drug screenings to occur no more than twice a year at random times,” the memo states. “Refusal to comply should exclude them from credentialing entirely.”

    The job applicant also proposed taking away the right of the White House Correspondents’ Association to control reporters’ seating arrangements in the press briefing room.

    The current system favors TV networks and certain newspapers at the expense of more ideologically diverse Web sites, bloggers and podcasters.

    The Trump administration, the candidate wrote, “should clear a path to communicate more directly with the people and end White House press practices that serve no useful purpose other than feeding the beast.”

  108. 108.

    Mike J

    @Adam L Silverman: This would get decent people up in arms. This will make the WH press corps even more docile.

    I thought the story during the Bush years was that the WH correspondent’s association handled credentials. That’s what they said when Bush brought in the gay hooker to “ask him questions”.

  109. 109.

    Yarrow

    @Adam L Silverman: Have to say, forcing the WH press corps to undergo mandatory drug testing would be kind of funny. Wrong and stupid, but funny nonetheless. Bunch of fawning toadies having to be drug tested to get the chance to play stenographer. Too funny. Maybe they’d decide to commit some real journalism if that came to pass.

  110. 110.

    mai naem mobile

    How about we get Lumpy to undergo drug tests ? I am 75 percent sure he would fail a drug test for controlled substances.

  114. 114.

    NotMax

    @Yarrow

    And they’ll be dunned the cost of both the test and the cup. With a suitable ‘national security’ mark-up, natch.

    Now, if there’s a picture of you know who’s face printed on the bottom of each cup…

  115. 115.

    Adam L Silverman

    @sukabi: I don’t know for sure how it works for the political appointees, but they should be subject to the same rules for random drug testing as everyone else with a clearance.

  118. 118.

    Aleta

    @Yarrow: Improvisation is more useful as a survival skill. Getting along with very different people, adapting to changing environments, no constant need to control, flexible, the way we played as kids.

  120. 120.

    Major Major Major Major

    So I was complaining yesterday about the hatchet job our useful idiots pulled on Booker, managing to turn the news from being him doing good anti-Trump/Sessions testimony to the news being him voting against the drug reimportation thing. Today I shared an article about how more Dems need to rally around Lewis, and the preview picture on FB was Lewis and Booker sitting together. One of my friends from college, no idiot, commented “not looking too good sitting next to Booker there.”

    About JOHN LEWIS.

    Ugh!

  121. 121.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @efgoldman:

    Jinx.

    Hannity is certainly the kind of petty authoritarian who would come up with a drug-test-for-reporters suggestion. And I can easily picture him just yearning for the press secretary job.

  122. 122.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Adam L Silverman:

    I started writing my #121 before efg’s #120 posted, and I started writing my #125 in response to him before your #123 posted. I don’t care for the lag time, so am going to bed now.

  128. 128.

    HeartlandLiberal

    I watched the David Tennant Doctor Who episode yesterday where he helped Madame Pompadour in the Palace of Versailles. Now why did I think of that when I saw that bed???

    Actually, it is rather nice. Looks antique, actually.

  129. 129.

    laura

    Get a waterproof matress cover asap.
    Orherwise, what everyone else has said, it’s lovely and should harbor all manner of creatures big and small.

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