Well, it’s rainy here, anyway, so no birds to watch at my feeders. But here’s a handsome cardinal who stopped by a few days ago:
He’s definitely giving me the stink-eye. And here’s his lovely mate with a seed shell hanging out of her beak; she doesn’t look too happy about the paparazzi either:
I’d post a photo of my chickens, but they’re pitiful today. There’s plenty of covered space in their coop where they could stay dry, but they prefer to stand around in the rain and hate the world. I know the type!
Speaking of disgruntled clucking, looks like some former shitgibbon campaign staffers are sharing their tyrant toddler handling techniques with Politico. An excerpt:
President Donald Trump’s former campaign staffers claim they cracked the code for tamping down his most inflammatory tweets, and they say the current West Wing staff would do well to take note.
The key to keeping Trump’s Twitter habit under control, according to six former campaign officials, is to ensure that his personal media consumption includes a steady stream of praise…
The in-person touch is also important to keeping Trump from running too hot. One Trump associate said it’s important to show Trump deference and offer him praise and respect, as that will lead him to more often listen. And If Trump becomes obsessed with a grudge, aides need to try and change the subject, friends say. Leaving him alone for several hours can prove damaging, because he consumes too much television and gripes to people outside the White House.
Emphasis mine. Six campaign staffers? Good Christ. Four-point restraints would have been more effective. The portrait that emerges is of a sulky oaf whom a normal person wouldn’t trust to look after a potted fern. A fake potted fern, even. FSM bless us, every one.
Open thread!
eclare
Happy Birthday!
HeleninEire
At JFK headed back to Dublin. I had a great time in NY but I am looking forward to getting home. If only to detox after my fun week seeing all my friends.
Wheels up in an hour.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Good lord, are they talking about their crazy grandad or the President of the United States? That also explains all the nonsense out of Trump about how awsome his electorial win was.
aimai
Betty, you have been a light in great darkness these days. And the picture of the female cardinal is just beautiful.
Gravenstone
I’m sure this will elicit quite the tirade from Twitler (and his sycophants). US Congressman questions Trump’s mental state.. The fact that the rest of us have the exact same question is immaterial, this is going to be viewed as a direct attack on him and the response is likely to be epic.
fuckwit
FAUX “News” appears to be making a huge victory lap about the DOW being up. Supposedly this is good news for Orange Julius Caesar.
What’s up with that? Why are stocks on a rally?
Peale
I guess someone needs to step into the Colonel Parker role and make sure that the president is medicated into stasis and only revived as needed.
bystander
Happy Birthday, Betty!
@Gravenstone:
Yay! Every act of disrespect must take a toll. Here, Don, have another French fry.
Peale
@fuckwit: the economy is good. Homeowners bought more houses than a year ago. Bank stocks are up in anticipation of the fraud to come.
geg6
@fuckwit:
Irrational exuberance. They are busily celebrating being able to rip off old people, pollute whatever they want, beat up on people of color and get their taxes cut. As usual with Wall Street, it’s all about the short term. When it all comes crashing down, they’ll be wanting us to bail them out again.
ET
All that advice may work but it is a pathetic commentary on the current POTUS.
Gravenstone
@fuckwit: Today the Dow is up a whopping 0.15%! Yuuge! Unpresidented! Fuck Fox. They obviously have to latch onto something to try and fellate Dolt 45, and the Dow appears to be today’s shiny object. To call it a rally is ridiculous.
Major Major Major Major
Thought you guys might like this tip jar from a hot dog stand in Reykjavik.
ETA: oh, happy birthday apparently, Betty C!
japa21
Rainy day? Come to Chicago. Not a cloud in the sky and upper 60’s. IOW, about as unFebruary as it can get. Won’t last but it has been kind of nice.
Waynski
@fuckwit:
Because they are expecting Trumpf to drop a boatload of stimulus on the economy…. i.e. good for stocks.
The Moar You Know
@fuckwit: Economy is great and that will last at least another six months. Taxes are low. It’s great time to be a trader and gamble with other people’s money. Not irrational exuberance, not yet.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
Bubble inflation.
Brachiator
I don’t know if David Anderson had a post on this earlier, but a very quiet IRS decision may help cripple the Affordable Care Act. People who do not have health insurance should make an “Individual Responsibility Payment.”
However, if people do not indicate on their tax returns whether or not they had health insurance coverage in 2016, the IRS will still process those tax returns.
It’s a health insurance version of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.
cope
Betty, great bird feeder pics. We have two hanging under the eaves of the front entry that attract any number of different kinds of birds.
I have NEVER successfully taken a picture of a single one because I try to shoot from inside the house through the window using auto mode and the auto focus always screws up and by the time I remember to switch to manual focus, the moment is lost.
Maybe these pics will make me think to switch to manual focus BEFORE I try to take a picture through a window, whether it is a visitor to one of our bird feeders or the bird bath in the front yard.
Thanks for the inspiration.
lgerard
While trump’s all day consumption of cable news is disturbing, it could be worse.
Imagine if he spent all day watching Judge Judy and The People’s Court
Roger Moore
Sounds like a toddler in a grown man’s body.
Brachiator
@Major Major Major Major: What’s the deal with the president of Iceland not liking pineapple pizza?
From Gizmodo
Iowa Old Lady
Happy birthday, Betty. Beautiful day here, though it’s supposed to turn cold tonight.
I see the police have moved in at Standing Rock. They announced it would be tomorrow and caught people by surprise.
Hal
A good, brief, summary of the basis for obstinence coming from republicans who cannot see Trump for what he is:
Ruckus
Betty, a perfect statement of the current Republican president.
I have seen in my travels potted plants that looked more life like and not even the worst one could do a lessor job of being president.
Gin & Tonic
@Brachiator: He’s 100% right, of course.
lgerard
@Brachiator:
Note that Iceland’s new President has a 97% approval rating.
Why can’t we have nice things?
stinger
@HeleninEire: Safe travels!
different-church-lady
Can’t someone just snuff him with a pillow and be done with it?
(Dear NSA: this is black humor…)
Peale
@Brachiator: I have eaten pizza in Iceland. They have no basis for making pizza comments. The only good thing I could say about it was at least it wasn’t their version of Chinese take out.
A Ghost to Most
Great pictures of the cardinals,and enjoy your festivities. Cardinals are one of the few things I miss from out east. Have yet to see one here in almost 8 years.
I also miss Snyders hard pretzels that haven’t had all the salt knocked off them on the way here.
schrodingers_cat
@Gin & Tonic: Agreed.
different-church-lady
@Hal:
They know perfectly well what he is. They only pretend they don’t because they think they can ride the monster.
? Martin
The Atlantic has a piece up on the effect of large corporations on the US economy.
I don’t disagree overall, but there’s a few challenges in that:
This isn’t false, but breaking those markets up wouldn’t have the effect people expect. Facebook and Google are businesses that modern monopoly laws and theory understand how to deal with. Antitrust theory always assumed that there was a non-zero marginal distribution cost to any product that provided an opportunity for competition. Further, distribution was assumed to be geographically constrained. In other words, people bought stuff close to them, and the cost to get a good to the consumer was non-trivial, which made opportunities for local competition.
Neither of those assumption hold with the internet. The internet is fully global – there are zero local advantages. Additionally distribution costs on the internet are zero. It’s no more expensive for Facebook to ship you a NYT article to NYC vs Bangkok. That’s why newspapers are failing. They were geographic monopolies. Getting a parcel of paper across the country within hours (because news goes stale quickly) and getting it widely distributed (via home delivery or newsstands) was prohibitively expensive, so local competition was viable. Now, the NYT can hire those local reporters and spin off a local online section and avoid the entire distribution issue. Advertising also worked the same way.
Facebook is a vexing problem. Facebook’s distribution network is ‘people who know other people’. If you break that up, so that only half the people are on the platform, then the distribution network fractures but it will repair itself – everyone will simply go back to one of the networks and the others will die. The reason for this is that the cost to join Facebook is $0, and there are no artificial limitations on capacity. The big national TV networks would have done a similar consolidation except that you could only broadcast 24 hours of programming in a day. If you had more, you had no choice but to spin up a new network. But with the internet, you can shove every program ever made through Netflix’ pipe. That’s completely new to economics.
The general way to handle these problems would be to abstract away the constraining variable. In some cases you can do that in the free market through regulation, but Facebook and Google are not geographically constrained to the US either. To what degree would the world tolerate if US antitrust law intervened on Facebook, which has 1.6 billion monthly users. These companies are largely above the capacity for any one country to regulate because they are truly international in a way that no company could be before.
Democrats need to really, really understand the underlying market forces here, which is hard because traditional economists barely understand them. The internet upended how modern economics operates.
different-church-lady
@Peale: Why would anyone go to Iceland for pizza?
Oatler.
“People will say I gave birth to the Twenty-first Century.”
-DJT
different-church-lady
@? Martin:
It’s the information equivalent of Carl’s Jr.
MomSense
Happy birthday, B Crack!
I heard birds today and was able to go outside wearing a sweater instead of a winter coat. I’m hoping for an early spring.
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
David did cover this.
It shouldn’t be that horrible for healthcare as not a lot of people know about it, if I understand it correctly what happens is that the return is not rejected, which would cause the return to be late and possibly causing a penalty, with fees and interest. If you check the box do they check on if you are telling the truth? I don’t have private insurance or Medicare, yet I can and did legally check the box. No one ever asked who is my healthcare provider.
West of the Rockies (been a while)
It’s an open thread, so I’d like to just say I think it’s terrible that we humans insult and make fun of people for things they really can’t control: height, weight, color, noses…
For me, it’s my eyes. When I was four, another little boy shot a thick chunk of glass into my eye with a sling shot. I have had three surgeries and wore a patch from pre-kindergarten until fifth grade. I was called a lot of names but developed, I hope, a sense of empathy. I can still see a bit out of it, but have what’s called lazy eye. It developed in my late 20’s. I consulted an ophthalmologist who told me nothing could be done, that the eye is a small area that you can’t keep operating on. More recently I’ve been told I now could have the surgery, but I’m not there financially at this point.
But comedians and TV shows and such all laugh at this defect. I had a stranger once ask for directions who fell away suddenly like Kramer in Seinfeld and loudly declare, “You only have one eye!”
Sometimes I’m astounded by the ignorance and rudeness of people.
germy
from NYMag:
Our RedStateRealAmuricans forget (or never knew) their favorite sports heroes and action movie stars are unionized and actually collect pensions. Not 401ks.
seaboogie
Sorry about your wet hens, Betty – but we are celebrating your birthday here in the SF Bay area with some sunshine finally! After all the endless rain, folks here are positively giddy when we see that bright star in the blue sky.
So, as the WH is preparing to announce that Trans kids peeing the the biffy of their choice at school is a state’s rights issue, Richard Linklater put together this ad that features Gavin Grimm as “that guy” – it’s great!
efgoldman
Are these the same klowns who are eventually going to be connected to Pootie Kazootie in Moscow?
efgoldman
@Gravenstone:
Of course it is. Why would anyone expect anything else?
germy
Will there really be a presidential library?
Elmo
@fuckwit: I can’t speak for stock traders, but my little corner of industry has been positively giddy since the election. Before the election, and especially during the primaries, industry conferences were all gloomy resignation coupled with horrified outrage that the Republican Party had gone clinically insane. Nobody thought that Trump was anything other than a carnival barker.
Now? Holy shit, they all imagine themselves as Scrooge McDuck, swimming in the vault. Dept of Labor? Toothless. The NLRB? Soon to be ours.
And these are the responsible industry players, who actually want to get it right but also don’t want to have enforcement penalties when they accidentally get it wrong. The Andrew Puzders of the world are walking on sunshine.
JGabriel
Betty Cracker @ Top:
Me too. I see that type everyday in my, um, watchamacallit … mirror.
trollhattan
@Gravenstone:
“vote for sanity over policy.”
Now that fits on a hat!
Elmo
@germy: Sure. You need a place to keep the DVDs.
les
@fuckwit:
Because the rich, who need a place to park the 90% of the world’s wealth that they control, know they will have more money to park under a republican tax cut. More money pursuing a fixed pool of assets.
efgoldman
@Waynski:
With what congress?
Major Major Major Major
@? Martin:
Oh horror of horrors, they’re acting like major publishing houses and Trader Joe’s.
We don’t have to pretend that the distilled essence of what they do is catastrophic and new to talk about the effects of doing it online and at scale, FFS.
efgoldman
@Brachiator:
Well over a week ago, one of his early morning posts.
germy
@efgoldman: I thought they were just thrilled with the disappearance of all financial regulations?
Brachiator
@Ruckus:
Actually, information and mis-information about this is spreading like wild fire. And tax preparation companies had to react and are updating their software to make sure that they allow for this.
No. If the return was rejected, the preparer would have to correct it and either compute the Shared Responsibility payment or show that the taxpayer was entitled to an exemption from the penalty. A rejected return does not result in penalties, fees and interest unless you somehow end up filing the return past deadlines. Also, you get 5 days to correct a reject.
The individual mandate was significantly higher this year. If people think that they can get away without paying it, it’s as good as money in the bank.
tBone
Jesus. If they really want to locate the White House leakers, they should start with the chef; he probably gets incredibly offended when *’s handlers have to pretend his spoon is an airplane to get him to eat.
JGabriel
@fuckwit:
Because now many businesses, and many of the people who buy stocks, believe – now the Republicans are in charge of the Legislative and Executive branches – that they’ll be able to ripoff, con, poison, and screw the American people without any regulations or agencies acting like meddling kids to keep them from getting away with it.
germy
Major Major Major Major
@Brachiator: Iceland’s government is often, especially since 2009, made up of… interesting people. Also, one quibble with the quoted bit,
The first was solved almost five years ago and the second has never actually been a problem.
Brachiator
@efgoldman: RE: I don’t know if David Anderson had a post on this earlier
Anyone have a link for this?
AliceBlue
@tBone:
Okay, that made me laugh.
efgoldman
@germy:
“see Dick. See Jane. See spot. See Oangemandyas kick spot. See him leer at Jane….”
Elizabelle
Happy Birthday, Betty.
Glad to see a female cardinal looking good. They usually look a bit dowdy next to the flashy red guys.
She looks like a rockabilly cardinal. Name of Axel Sue.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@different-church-lady: Hey – howdy! Missed you lately.
Sandia Blanca
@tBone: That made me laugh out loud! However, by the looks of him, I doubt they have trouble getting him to eat.
I have been wondering about what the White House chef has been doing in this administration. If Agent Orange really only eats fast food, do they order it in for him? Make their own version of the Big Mac or KFC extra crispy? If I were on that staff, I would weep for the waste of my culinary skills.
Patricia Kayden
@fuckwit: That’s great and good for those of us who have investments but what has Trump done to make this happen? Funny how Fox News never gave any credit to President Obama for the roaring stock market and low unemployment rate. Trump inherited an excellent economy from President Obama. President Obama inherited a mess from Bush. Lest we forget.
Origuy
@fuckwit:
Stocks go up, stocks go down. You can’t explain why.
germy
@efgoldman:
Three or four copies of Penthouse & Playboy (with pages stuck together) and a DVD of hidden cam footage from beauty pageant changing rooms.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
Happy Birthday Betty, also, too.
different-church-lady
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): Thanks. I’m afraid I fell off the wagon. The only silver lining to the Trumpocolypse is my personal productivity got a big bump. I’m hoping for an intervention.
MattF
@germy: The concept of the Trump Presidential Library is making me dizzy. I need to lie down for a while.
Kay
No one knows anything until they see those returns. That to me will be the measure of whether it’s a credible inquiry or not. It would be good to get Kushner’s too. I know he’s not “officially” anything, but that’s bullshit and we all know it. They should be posted on the internet. It’s ridiculous what these people have been permitted to hide. No one knows any more about them now than they did last year.
different-church-lady
@JGabriel: Really, you can almost hear them thinking, “Anything short of nuclear holocaust means more money for us!”
seaboogie
@Sandia Blanca:
Apparently he has been making meat loaf, lots and lots of meat loaf.
Ruckus
@Sandia Blanca:
The chiefs have probably learned by now that anything fried with cheese works well. They are probably enjoying the time they can spend on cooking for each other.
different-church-lady
@Ruckus: Don’t forget: the White House chefs cook for the guests, not just the President.
Iowa Old Lady
@different-church-lady: Because a nuclear holocaust would be a holocaust like no other. Believe me. I’ve been briefed.
tBone
@Sandia Blanca:
I’d think that anyone on the White House staff, in any capacity, would weep for the waste of their skills. Unless, of course, their skills are evil fuckery.
Patricia Kayden
@Kay: Trump has lied about his taxes being under audit for the last couple of years to avoid releasing them to the public. Collins and her Republican colleagues should lead the way in forcing Trump’s hand. They know he’s lying and has something to hide. I’m glad to see that her voters are forcing her to address this issue so Trump and his sycophants can’t argue that only the media wants to see his taxes.
Major Major Major Major
@tBone: Doesn’t the president provide their own staff, as Trump learned the hard way? I imagine they’d be used to it.
Ruckus
@different-church-lady:
Oh I know but how many real guests has he had? And I can not imagine that anyone in his family has what could be termed a fine palate. I do understand that staff can eat in the cafeteria or eat out. Not exactly state dinners.
Lyrebird
@MomSense: Hi MomSense, I am not really into pink, but I was so pleased to click your link! I think your ever so charming hat model attended or has a shirt from a school I useta teach at, a little south of you. But what a great smile. Good smiles are like beautiful cardinals, good to see.
(And yes it’s none of my business, and yes I’m wondering if y’all are related.)
? Martin
@different-church-lady: Well, Facebook simply reflects what users ask for, for good or bad. It used to be that you had a bit more heterogeneous interaction because who you interacted with was again geographically bounded. You probably couldn’t afford to give up your conservative acquaintances. But Facebook erases that, and combined with it being a place where users put forward the most managed version of themselves tends to cause people to filter out those they disagree with and then reinforce their place in the group by more aggressively backing ideas that they previously would have been more cautious with.
Facebook doesn’t shape what you see – you shape what you see.
Ruckus
@Major Major Major Major:
Judging by the staff he now has I’d say not only used to it but likes it.
rikyrah
@HeleninEire:
Have a safe trip
efgoldman
@Kay:
Suzie Q is always open to talking about stuff. Let’s see how she votes.
[Spoiler: She’ll vote for it only if her vote doesn’t matter.]
StringOnAStick
@fuckwit: A for why stocks are rallying, the sector that is up the most is the financials. The reasons I’ve heard are that companies are bringing money home because the shitgibbon has promised a tax repatriation holiday, and that 1/3 of the money that’s come back has been via Goldman Sachs. I haven’t looked any deeper lately but one way to see if a bull run is weakening is if the number of up sectors starts to narrow down to fewer and fewer. The financial sector seems to be up because of the looting and gaming that mango moron has signaled is allowed, and some think that getting rid of regulations is going to unleash a tsunami of profits. These are the same folks who I suppose aren’t hip to the concept that too much radical and traumatic change in the economy leads to it faltering.
I have a patient who is a hedge fund manager and we always talk markets when he comes in. I saw him last month and he said he was not at all bullish now, that the market’s had a very nice run but we are due for a recession. i know he’s an old style country club republican so he never said anything bad about the shitgibbon, but what I read between the lines is that too much disruption and dislocation in the economy thanks to all the crazy shit that keeps coming from the WH is inherently destabilizing. Destabilization does not a bull market make. I’ll bet he couldn’t bring his self to vote for the shitgibbon, but he reflexively couldn’t vote for for Hillary either.
Kay
@Patricia Kayden:
Of course he lied. And he’s so determined not to release them you know they’re damaging. Come on. Every other President does it. Why should there be special rules for the sleazy Trumps?
We don’t know anything about any of these people without the ordinary records that everyone else has to provide. They think they’re special, that we’re just supposed to take their word for what they own and owe. That’s insane. No one else gets that kind of deference. They’re bending every rule to the breaking point because they believe they are special. That’s a bad precedent to set! Ordinary people have to turn over all kinds of documents in the regular course of their lives. That the Trump’s get to stonewall and release nothing to anyone is outrageous.
I want to know what they owe. Of course it matters! If they can be manipulated based on debt we’re all vulnerable. It’s simply now fair to ask us to share their risk.
? Martin
@Elmo:
Yep, finally they are unshackled from the constraints that Obama imposed that was preventing them from giving Americans the raise, healthcare, and pension they were clamoring for.
Kay
@efgoldman:
I agree but I’m always interested in what they feel they have to say. She thinks she has to say that there will be a real inquiry. That all by itself indicates she knows that seeing business records of a sitting US President is a perfectly valid and reasonable request by the public.
Demanding Trump release what anyone else would have to release is ordinary. It’s not unusual scrutiny to see someone’s tax returns. Ordinary people turn them over all the time. He should too.
rikyrah
@Hal:
That, in conjunction with knowing that the Tea Party was a Dick Armey/Koch brothers astro-turfed invention.
delk
Good news: The pituitary MRI I had last week turned up no abnormalities.
Bad news: The bone scan shows that my osteoporosis has gotten considerably worse.
Oh well, at least it’s ridiculously warm outside right now. I’ll worry about icy sidewalks another day.
trollhattan
@MattF:
It will be yuuge; it will be klassy; it will be gold as all fvck; it will be a giant store filled with his ghost-written books for sale. That’s your Trumpllbrary.
efgoldman
@Kay:
Not exactly. They’re doing it BECAUSE THEY CAN GET AWAY WITH IT AND NOBODY’S EVER TOLD THEM “NO” IN THEIR WHOLE MISERABLE LIVES.
Anyway, look at their political examples: The Republiklowns. Why shouldn’t they feel they can get away with it?
trollhattan
Here’s a charming Rainy Day open thread item to ponder.
Rain + quake? Totally can’t happen.
different-church-lady
@? Martin: Entirely incorrect: Facebook takes an active role in the KIND of information you see, and encourages you to push information in certain ways. And the vast majority of those ways are shallow, and encourage conflict. Thus, my analogy to fast food: empty, harmful calories.
Yes, you can force your way through Facebook’s prods and limitations into something more substantial, just like you can order salad at McDonald’s. That doesn’t forgive either organization for what they choose to push and how they push it.
ETA: I did some work for a toy company many years ago. Their justification for EVERYTHING they did was, “Well, kids loved it in testing!” Like they had zero responsibility.
efgoldman
@Kay:
Sorry. I’m not buying it. We’ve been watching this act for too long. She and Grandpa Walnuts (and to a lesser extent Little Lindsay) stand in front of cameras and microphones and express “doubts” and “concerns”, and then when the vote comes, do whatever Yertle McTurtle wants them to do, which usually means the party line.
Her votes against a couple of the cabinet nominees were free – Yertle had the votes for confirmation and he knew it. He can count.
When she actually takes a contrary vote that matters, I might believe it.
zhena gogolia
@West of the Rockies (been a while):
People are scum sometimes!
Svensker
@delk:
Glad to hear the good, sorry about the bad. Be careful!
And happy birthday, B.C.
StringOnAStick
@West of the Rockies (been a while): I am sorry you’ve dealt with discrimination or just plain rudeness because of damage caused by a childhood accident. People can be so insensitive. You didn’t chose to have this forced upon you, but it seems like the experience has made you a better person than anyone who reacted negatively to it.
I think that is one of the reasons I never got into Seinfeld; too much of the humor was at the expense of others and by people who were lacking in empathy, and people loved them for it. I think that’s how I finally swore off all sitcoms – the humor was too often just insult and put down humor; not exactly a model for graceful human interaction.
zhena gogolia
@delk:
I’m glad about the good news!
Aleta
No one could have predicted. Thousands of emails detail EPA head’s close ties to fossil fuel industry I couldn’t hate these Republicans more, and every day I grow to hate them more.
zhena gogolia
@StringOnAStick:
I felt the same way about Seinfeld.
West of the Rockies (been a while)
@zhena gogolia:
Thank you. I just wanted to vent a little. Maybe I shouldn’t have… didn’t want to make people uncomfortable, and i was beginning to think that perhaps I had.
ruemara
@Brachiator: I may amend mine since I take a tax hit due to my insurance supplement. Maybe.
zhena gogolia
@West of the Rockies (been a while):
We know lots of people are needlessly cruel — just look at who’s president. He didn’t get there by himself.
I hope you have some kind interactions today!
West of the Rockies (been a while)
@StringOnAStick:
Thank you for your kind words. Seinfeld, while funny quite often, was all about the Id. Kind of an Ayn Rand fuck everybody else show in its way. The main group was always first and foremost looking out for themselves.
Damned at Random
I’ve been living in the West for 30 years now and I really miss the cadinals. Thank you for the beautiful photos
debbie
@Gin & Tonic:
Pickle pizza’s pretty good.
Major Major Major Major
@West of the Rockies (been a while): Oddly enough, as mentioned in an unrelated post in this thread, Bannon has a stake in Seinfeld.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@germy:
To think, we passed on having the Baud! Presidental Porn VHS tape collection for this.
Brachiator
@ruemara:
I don’t think an amendment would work if the original return shows an individual shared responsibility payment. The amended return would have to show that you qualify for an exemption.
debbie
@West of the Rockies (been a while):
I had that operation in sixth grade and disappointingly, it’s wearing off. Nothing lasts forever, I guess. One of my brothers had the same surgery when he was in his 30s and it was a lengthy, painful recovery (worse than knee surgery, which he also had in his 30s).
debbie
I missed the announcement, but happy birthday Betty! May your feeders always be filled with pretty birds!
West of the Rockies (been a while)
@Major Major Major Major:
True. And, man, Michael Richards sure revealed an ugly aspect of his personality. Did he ever believably apologize for that outburst (in a way that was not about damage control)?
Patricia Kayden
@Kay: Now NY has to be going after Ivanka for not paying taxes on her jewelry line. I JUST CANNOT with these freaking people and their entitlement complex.
West of the Rockies (been a while)
@debbie:
That’s disheartening… I’d been told the surgery was now an out-patient event, less invasive and disruptive than it used to be.
Van Buren
@geg6: It’s all about anticipating deregulation and sleeping watchdogs. And when the inevitable crash hits, they’ll blame Carter/Clinton/Obama. And the Washington branch of Goldman Sachs-AKA the Treasury Dept.. will engineer a rescue of the billionaires, to”save the economy”
Why yes, I do have a time machine! How did you guess?
debbie
@West of the Rockies (been a while):
Well, it might not be as invasive as back when I had it, but they still need to cut muscle and everything around the eye is so sensitive. I know when I had it, it took a couple of weeks for the bloodshottedness to go away. I remember being teased about that. I didn’t mean to discourage you.
Barbara
@fuckwit: Why are stocks on a rally? According to my adviser, the United States is still the least worst place in the world in which to place one’s money for investment. Moreover, right now, with the likelihood of increases in interest rates by the Fed, bonds are not a good buy (anything you buy now is likely to lose value in the short term because everyone will want the bond with the higher rate that is coming down the pike). That makes stocks more popular right now. As bond rates do move up, expect some fall off in that department. The places that should be next in line to the U.S. — large market economies — exhibit self-inflicted wounds (EU) or are still not entirely trustworthy or transparent (China). Brexit has probably stanched a good bit of what had been emerging optimism, but his “people” think that the EU will ultimately pick up because there is so much pent up energy. Nonetheless, it should always be borne in mind that the stock market is not the economy.
Hoodie
@West of the Rockies (been a while): I believe that was a conscious point of the show, a bunch of self involved people who view others as merely props. The characters are funny, not admirable. The twist was that they were aware of their self-involvement but didn’t do anything to change it.
ruemara
@Waynski: He’s not going to spend money on the economy. They’re celebrating lack of regulations and oversight.
liberal
@Barbara: Fed really only directly impacts short term rates. Though you’re probably right that bonds should be viewed with caution.
The Lodger
@Elizabelle: She looks like a rockabilly cardinal. Name of Axel Sue.
I’d love to hear the rest of those lyrics.
West of the Rockies (been a while)
@Hoodie:
I think you’re right. But it’s a bit like Beavis and Butthead… some viewers thought they were to be emulated for their wit and attitude, not to be mocked.
liberal
@StringOnAStick: That’s silly. I think it’s an extremely funny show, and at the same time I didn’t admire the characters antisocial tendencies.
Laughing at them, not with them.
The Lodger
@trollhattan: So, the Donald J. Trump Presidential Gift Shop and Library.
Brachiator
@The Lodger:
Or the Donald J. Trump Presidential Grift Shop and Library
Villago Delenda Est
@Patricia Kayden: These people need to be made an example of. Like the Bourbons.
liberal
@efgoldman: Right. Also, Trump thinks “stimulus” means “tax cuts for the rich and businesses”, which are poor means of creating stimulus.
SiubhanDuinne
@The Lodger:
@Brachiator:
Or the Donald J. Trump Presidential Grift Shop and Liebrary.
liberal
@Hoodie: yep.