Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

One way or another, he’s a liar.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

It is possible to do the right thing without the promise of a cookie.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

You know it’s bad when the Project 2025 people have to create training videos on “How To Be Normal”.

Republicans got rid of McCarthy. Democrats chose not to save him.

You’re just a puppy masquerading as an old coot.

I might just take the rest of the day off and do even more nothing than usual.

America is going up in flames. The NYTimes fawns over MAGA celebrities. No longer a real newspaper.

There are more Russians standing up to Putin than Republicans.

One lie, alone, tears the fabric of reality.

The arc of the moral universe does not bend itself. it is up to us to bend it.

The lights are all blinking red.

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

Today’s gop: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

Just because you believe it, that does not make it true.

All hail the time of the bunny!

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

Marge, god is saying you’re stupid.

The line between political reporting and fan fiction continues to blur.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

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

The republican speaker is a slippery little devil.

“Loving your country does not mean lying about its history.”

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Excellent Links / Early Morning Cabin Fever Cranky Open Thread: Tell It!

Early Morning Cabin Fever Cranky Open Thread: Tell It!

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Infinite thanks to commentor Rikyrah for highlighting Awesome Luvvie’s latest extremely righteous twitter rant. Excerpts:

(And yes, I was reminded that I’ve been meaning to order a copy of Ms. Ajayi’s book I’m Judging You… )

Reader Interactions

24Comments

  1. 1.

    ? Martin

    Repost from below:

    So the plan in Oroville is to get the lake level down to 850′. It’s currently at 899, dropping at about 8′ per day. If everything goes well, and inflow to the lake continues to decline, and they can keep the main spillway going at 100K CFS without completely destroying everything, they might make it before the next big storm comes through. Apparently it’s supposed to be a bit colder than the last one, which would keep more of the precipitation on the ground as snow in the upper elevations which should help.

    The flash flood warning is scheduled to lift at 4PM tomorrow. Unclear what will happen with the evacuation order. If I had to guess, they’ll allow people back home tomorrow afternoon after they’ve had time to get a good look at things, and tell them to pack and be prepared to leave again later in the week when the storm arrives.

  3. 3.

    ? Martin

    Did a bit of math. The concrete structure that composes the emergency spillway is about 30′ high. If it were to fail, because the soil beneath it is eroded away, the lake would lose about 28 billion gallons of water in a matter of a few hours (they’re currently releasing about 750,000 gallons per second). The water structures downstream (levees, etc.) are rated for about 150,000 CFS. This would release 1-2 orders of magnitude more than that. Basically everything along highway 70 from Oroville to at least Yuba City would get wiped out, and flooding of some magnitude would probably reach Sacramento itself. Flooding like this tends to uproot trees and break apart structures like bridges and power pylons, washing them downstream where they get caught on other structures, causing the water to back up until it again bursts through.

    Anyone who lived in the low-lying areas near the feather river would have little time to evacuate. Flood rate from Oroville to Yuba City is about 6 hours. The moment water was released, thats how much time you have to escape. Prorate that based on how far north of Yuba City you are. If you’re in Oroville, by the time you reach your car it’ll be too late. So, worst case scenario, this is potentially a Katrina-level event for that area. Fortunately, things are looking steadily better for now, with the next storm being a giant fucking asterisk.

  4. 4.

    opiejeanne

    @? Martin: I have several friends in Auburn, about 70 miles south. I can’t figure out if they’re in danger or not.
    It looks like the river is to the west of Auburn, but i’m not sure what other waterways will be affected.

  5. 5.

    ? Martin

    And expect this story to blow up.

    More than a decade ago, federal and state officials and some of California’s largest water agencies rejected concerns that the massive earthen spillway at Oroville Dam — at risk of collapse Sunday night and prompting the evacuation of 185,000 people — could erode during heavy winter rains and cause a catastrophe.
    …
    The groups filed the motion with FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. They said that the dam, built and owned by the state of California, and finished in 1968, did not meet modern safety standards because in the event of extreme rain and flooding, fast-rising water would overwhelm the main concrete spillway, then flow down the emergency spillway, and that could cause heavy erosion that would create flooding for communities downstream, but also could cause a failure, known as “loss of crest control.”

    “A loss of crest control could not only cause additional damage to project lands and facilities but also cause damages and threaten lives in the protected floodplain downstream,” the groups wrote.

    FERC rejected that request, however, after the state Department of Water Resources, and the water agencies that would likely have had to pay the bill for the upgrades, said they were unnecessary.

    That’s precisely, to the letter, what is happening.

  6. 6.

    ? Martin

    @opiejeanne: Yeah, they should be just fine. They’re up above Folsom Dam – up over 1000′. They’ll have people evacuating toward them, and may have some trouble getting to places west of them, but they’re in no danger.

  7. 7.

    Joyce H

    Meanwhile, CNN has a report that Trump got the news of the North Korean missile launch while at dinner at Mar A Lago. Did he step away from the table to deal with the matter? No, he did not. He stayed there, receiving reports and strategizing with his aides and the Japanese Prime Minister while the wait staff removed the salads and brought the main courses, and the first ladies talked amongst themselves, at the dinner table which was smack in the middle of the dining area.

    “As Mar-a-Lago’s wealthy members looked on from their tables, and with a keyboard player crooning in the background, Trump and Abe’s evening meal quickly morphed into a strategy session, the decision-making on full view to fellow diners, who described it in detail to CNN.”

    Mar A Lago situation room

    And I’ll bet he loved every minute of it – ‘hey everybody, look at me getting Very Important Reports and making Very Important Decisions because I am a Very Important Man’. I swear, every time I think it’s simply impossible for me to have any MORE contempt for this ridiculous little poseur, it’s like he goes, ‘oh, yeah? watch this!’

  10. 10.

    ? Martin

    @amk: Sure. To start with, most of the people were there before the dam was built. But more notably, the dam can be controlled. In fact, that’s the very point of it – to help control the rate of flow down the river to make it safer for people to live there.

    This isn’t a natural disaster – it’s a man-made one. Maybe one that couldn’t have been foreseen, but more likely it could have been, as the article I reference notes. How much would it have cost to make the changes indicated? A fuckton less than it’ll cost to clean this whole mess up, I can assure you.

  11. 11.

    Kat

    Yesterday, a BJ commenter posted the url to this, without the headline or content. I think it deserves some front page attention.

    The Spy Revolt Against Trump Begins
    02/12/17

    …The president has frequently blown off the [President’s Daily Brief] altogether, tasking Flynn with condensing it into a one-page summary with no more than nine bullet-points. Some in the IC are relieved by this, but there are pervasive concerns that the president simply isn’t paying attention to intelligence.

    In light of this, and out of worries about the White House’s ability to keep secrets, some of our spy agencies have begun withholding intelligence from the Oval Office. Why risk your most sensitive information if the president may ignore it anyway? A senior National Security Agency official explained that NSA was systematically holding back some of the “good stuff” from the White House, in an unprecedented move. For decades, NSA has prepared special reports for the president’s eyes only, containing enormously sensitive intelligence. In the last three weeks, however, NSA has ceased doing this, fearing Trump and his staff cannot keep their best SIGINT secrets.

    Since NSA provides something like 80 percent of the actionable intelligence in our government, what’s being kept from the White House may be very significant indeed. However, such concerns are widely shared across the IC, and NSA doesn’t appear to be the only agency withholding intelligence from the administration out of security fears.

    What’s going on was explained lucidly by a senior Pentagon intelligence official, who stated that “since January 20, we’ve assumed that the Kremlin has ears inside the SITROOM,” meaning the White House Situation Room, the 5,500 square-foot conference room in the West Wing where the president and his top staffers get intelligence briefings. “There’s not much the Russians don’t know at this point,” the official added in wry frustration.

    None of this has happened in Washington before. A White House with unsettling links to Moscow wasn’t something anybody in the Pentagon or the Intelligence Community even considered a possibility until a few months ago. …

    As if the IC’s take on the new administration isn’t enough, here’s a view of it from the inside – that has me asking myself, ‘Why aren’t all these people just beet-red in embarrassment at their own incompetence? Did shame go out of style?’
    Turmoil at the National Security Council, From the Top Down

    By DAVID E. SANGER, ERIC SCHMITT and PETER BAKERFEB. 12, 2017

    WASHINGTON — These are chaotic and anxious days inside the National Security Council, the traditional center of management for a president’s dealings with an uncertain world.

    Three weeks into the Trump administration, council staff members get up in the morning, read President Trump’s

    Twitter posts and struggle to make policy to fit them. Most are kept in the dark about what Mr. Trump tells foreign leaders in his phone calls. Some staff members have turned to encrypted communications to talk with their colleagues, after hearing that Mr. Trump’s top advisers are considering an “insider threat” program that could result in monitoring cellphones and emails for leaks.
    […]
    This account of life inside the council — offices made up of several hundred career civil servants who advise the president on counterterrorism, foreign policy, nuclear deterrence and other issues of war and peace — is based on conversations with more than two dozen current and former council staff members and others throughout the government. All spoke on the condition that they not be quoted by name for fear of reprisals.

    “It’s so far a very dysfunctional N.S.C.,” Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said in a telephone interview.

    In a telephone conversation on Sunday afternoon, K. T. McFarland, the deputy national security adviser, said that early meetings of the council were brisker, tighter and more decisive than in the past, but she acknowledged that career officials were on edge. “Not only is this a new administration, but it is a different party, and Donald Trump was elected by people who wanted the status quo thrown out,” said Ms. McFarland, a veteran of the Reagan administration who most recently worked for Fox News. “I think it would be a mistake if we didn’t have consternation about the changes — most of the cabinet haven’t even been in government before.”

    There is always a shakedown period for any new National Security Council, whose staff is drawn from the State Department, the Pentagon and other agencies and is largely housed opposite the White House in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

    President Barack Obama replaced his first national security adviser, Gen. James Jones, a four-star former supreme allied commander in Europe, after concluding that the general was a bad fit for the administration. The first years of President George W. Bush’s council were defined by clashes among experienced bureaucratic infighters — Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell among them — and by decisions that often took place outside official channels.

    But what is happening under the Trump White House is different, officials say, and not just because of Mr. Trump’s Twitter foreign policy. (Two officials said that at one recent meeting, there was talk of feeding suggested Twitter posts to the president so the council’s staff would have greater influence.)

    A number of staff members who did not want to work for Mr. Trump have returned to their regular agencies, leaving a larger-than-usual hole in the experienced bureaucracy. Many of those who remain, who see themselves as apolitical civil servants, have been disturbed by displays of overt partisanship. At an all-hands meeting about two weeks into the new administration, Ms. McFarland told the group it needed to “make America great again,” numerous staff members who were there said.

    New Trump appointees are carrying coffee mugs with that Trump campaign slogan into meetings with foreign counterparts, one staff member said.

    Nervous staff members recently met late at night at a bar a few blocks from the White House and talked about purging their social media accounts of any suggestion of anti-Trump sentiments.Mr. Trump’s council staff draws heavily from the military — often people who had ties to Mr. Flynn when he served as a senior military intelligence officer and then as the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency before he was forced out of the job. Many of the first ideas that have been floated have involved military, rather than diplomatic, initiatives.

    Last week, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis was exploring whether the Navy could intercept and board an Iranian ship to look for contraband weapons possibly headed to Houthi fighters in Yemen. The potential interdiction seemed in keeping with recent instructions from Mr. Trump, reinforced in meetings with Mr. Mattis and Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson, to crack down on Iran’s support of terrorism.

    But the ship was in international waters in the Arabian Sea, according to two officials. Mr. Mattis ultimately decided to set the operation aside, at least for now. White House officials said that was because news of the impending operation leaked, a threat to security that has helped fuel the move for the insider threat program. But others doubt whether there was enough basis in international law, and wondered what would happen if, in the early days of an administration that has already seen one botched military action in Yemen, American forces were suddenly in a firefight with the Iranian Navy.

    Ms. McFarland often draws on her television experience to make clear to officials that they need to make their points in council meetings quickly, and she signals when to wrap up, several participants said.And while Mr. Obama liked policy option papers that were three to six single-spaced pages, council staff members are now being told to keep papers to a single page, with lots of graphics and maps.

    “The president likes maps,” one official said.

    Paper flow, the lifeblood of the bureaucracy, has been erratic. A senior Pentagon official saw a draft executive order on prisoner treatment only through unofficial rumors and news media leaks. He called the White House to find out if it was real and said he had concerns but was not sure if he was authorized to make suggestions.

    Officials said that the absence of an orderly flow of council documents, ultimately the responsibility of Mr. Flynn, explained why Mr. Mattis and Mike Pompeo, the director of the C.I.A., never saw a number of Mr. Trump’s executive orders before they were issued. One order had to be amended after it was made public, to reassure Mr. Pompeo that he had a regular seat on the council.

    White House officials say that was a blunder, and that the process of reviewing executive orders has been straightened out by Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff.

    Still, Mr. Flynn presents additional complications beyond his conversations with the Russian ambassador. His aides say he is insecure about whether his unfettered access to Mr. Trump during the campaign is being scaled back and about a shadow council created by Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s top strategist, who was invited to attend meetings of the “principals committee” of the council two weeks ago. For his part, Mr. Bannon sees the United States as headed toward an inevitable confrontation with two adversaries — China and Iran.

    Mr. Flynn finds himself in a continuing conflict with the intelligence agencies, whose work on Russia and other

    issues he has dismissed as subpar and politically biased. Last week, in an incident first reported by Politico, one of Mr. Flynn’s top deputies, Robin Townley, was denied the high-level security clearance he needed before he could take up his job on the council as the senior director for Africa.

    It was not clear what in Mr. Townley’s past disqualified him, and in every administration some officials are denied clearances. But some saw the intelligence community striking back.

    Two people with direct access to the White House leadership said Mr. Flynn was surprised to learn that the State Department and Congress play a pivotal role in foreign arms sales and technology transfers. So it was a rude discovery that Mr. Trump could not simply order the Pentagon to send more weapons to Saudi Arabia — which is clamoring to have an Obama administration ban on the sale of cluster bombs and precision-guided weapons lifted — or to deliver bigger weapons packages to the United Arab Emirates.

    Several staff members said that Mr. Flynn, who was a career Army officer, was not familiar with how to call up the National Guard in an emergency — for, say, a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina or the detonation of a dirty bomb in an American city.

    At the all-hands meeting, Mr. Flynn talked about the importance of a balanced work life, taking care of family, and using the time at the council to gain experience that would help staff members in other parts of the government. At one point, the crowd was asked for a show of hands of how many expected to be working at the White House in a year.

    Mr. Flynn turned to Ms. McFarland and, in what seemed to be a self-deprecating joke, said, “I wonder if we’ll be here a year from now?”

  12. 12.

    Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism

    @amk: This question arises with every major flood. The answer is yes, they should be allowed to settle there. Since the news reporting I can find so far is not intended for civil engineers, I have no idea what year flood this could turn into, or what year flood the dam was designed to handle, but think about it. Would you be willing to settle in a place that has a 1% chance every year of being flooded? How many people do you know who would take those odds?

    Now, what do you think the odds are of a dam failing?

    Thank you, Martin, for your updates. Just having the CFS numbers is a balm to this erosion control designer’s soul. I’d love to know the general soil information for the area and how they cleared the emergency spillway; I’m assuming they had enough sense to cut the trees and leave the stumps.

  13. 13.

    dianne

    A little aside on the news last night said that Shasta Dam is at 97% capacity. That is the biggest dam in Ca and is the head of the Sacramento River. If they have to start releasing water from there in addition to the Feather River releases we are really in big trouble in Sacramento. Levees are all that hold the water back although we have a system of weirs that allow for releases of water above the Sacramento area.

  15. 15.

    Percysowner

    @amk: I admit I bought a house in a flood zone. At the time I bought it was a flood zone one which meant it had 1 in 1000 (.01) chance of ever flooding, but it’s near enough to a creek that it is a flood zone. Last year, possibly after looking at the weather changes caused by global warning, my flood zone became a flood zone 2 which means there is between a 1 in 100 to a 1 in 1000 chance of being flooded. Would I have bought in a flood zone 2, well I would have thought about it really hard, but since I can’t pick up my house and move it, here I am. OTOH, there is at most a 1% chance I’ll get flooded and at least a .01%. It’s not that risky. I keep up my flood insurance which went up 200% this year because of the change, and have weather alerts enabled on my phone and computer weather apps. If they say evacuate, my daughter ends up with me, 2 dogs and 2 cats.

  16. 16.

    imonlylurking

    Thanks for the reminder to follow her on twitter. We need a Tweet roll so I can find all the juicers.

  17. 17.

    chris b

    Uhh…did what she could? fought hard? She lost to Donald Fucking Trump. She ran a pretty uninspiring campaign, for which she bears responsibility. Yea…media/emails, Comey….but she lost states she never should have lost, including PA (where I voted for her). Acknowledge and learn from or lose again…

  18. 18.

    kindness

    @amk: The entire Central Valley in California is a flood plain though. 150 years ago the whole valley would flood every winter. Wasn’t deep. A few feet but the valley made one big lake. Which is why it is flatter than Kansas (the silt settling) and such good farmland (the silt again).

    Suggesting that no one live in the whole of the Central Valley isn’t going to fly anywhere. You can ask if it’s prudent to live there but 6 million people live there now. They aren’t moving. They’ll just build higher and better levies.

  19. 19.

    kindness

    Saturday I was traveling north on 99 from the south to Sac. Above Galt and below Elk Grove the flooding was such that they closed many of the exits off the freeway. Water was only a few feet below the roadway, This morning coming into the bay Area I took route 132 in. Where the San Joaquin meets the Stanislaus river the water was about a foot below the roadway surface. I haven’t seen it that high since 96. If it tops the road (the road is the levee along that stretch) they’ll have to close it. The loose dirt making up the banks of the levee won’t last at all.

  20. 20.

    Ruckus

    @kindness:
    Aren’t there many places in the entire world where there are many reasons not to live, possible flooding, possible earthquakes, possible volcano eruption, possible fires, possible tornadoes, possible lightning strikes…….
    I’ve lived in several different places over the years and have lived or still live in places where one or more of those events are possible most any time. One can rarely escape the earth being the earth, we can work towards mitigating the dangers but there is no place that’s totally safe. What was funny was living in OH where major earthquakes have happened, where a girl I worked with had been struck in her car by lightning, twice, (I’ve driven home from work through lightning storms) and tornadoes had damaged houses within just a few miles of mine, and while I didn’t live in a flood zone, there was a major one less than a mile from my house that caused problems on a semi regular basis and people asked me how could I possibly live in CA with all it’s natural disasters.

  21. 21.

    Ruckus

    Annie
    Thanks for posting rikyrah’s comment. Several of us responded and it is an awesome comment and very, very appropriate.

  22. 22.

    ruemara

    I have to admit. I do want to drop-kick people saying this. Including people showing up to claim it wasn’t inspiring and she lost PA but utterly silent about gerrymandering, voter suppression and the white nationalist turnout. So fuck off, Chris.

  23. 23.

    Msb

    What Awesomely Lovie and Ruemara said.
    Hillary could have beaten garden-variety misogyny, 2 decades of Republican smears, voter suppression, Russian hacking, oh-but-emails or the director of the FBI, but she failed to beat them all in combination. She has nothing whatever to prove to me. I remain proud to have voted for her.

  24. 24.

    chris b

    Ruemara – Go ahead, argue that Clinton ran a great, inspiring campaign across the entire country – a great 50-state strategy that made the progressive case in full. Argue she couldn’t have done anything better – she was without flaw and it was everything else that led to an electoral college drubbing. Of course she was up against the shitstorm of opposition you mention, but if you don’t place ANY blame – not a single shred – on Clinton for losing, you are a fucking moron that can “drop-kick” yourself and “fuck off” because you will continue to lose, as Clinton did vs. both Obama and Trump.

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