Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

People are complicated. Love is not.

Come on, man.

Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

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

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

I did not have this on my fuck 2022 bingo card.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

It’s time for the GOP to dust off that post-2012 autopsy, completely ignore it, and light the party on fire again.

The revolution will be supervised.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

A dilettante blog from the great progressive state of West Virginia.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the GOP

Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

You are here: Home / Politics / Trumpery / Dolt 45 / Thursday Morning Open Thread: NOT Normal

Thursday Morning Open Thread: NOT Normal

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Look on the bright side: Imagine how much pleasure the President-Asterisk’s antics must be providing to other debased empires!…

Apart from reinforcing our work surfaces against further [headdesk]s, what’s on the agenda for the day?

Reader Interactions

52Comments

  1. 1.

    Baud

    WH form asking public how to fix government

    I don’t suppose a presidential resignation is one of the options.

  2. 2.

    satby

    The constant drumbeat of news isn’t having the intended effect of spurring me to action. It’s demoralizing and makes me want to just check out of politics entirely. And yes, I realize that’s counterproductive, but if I feel that way, I bet low info voters feel even less activated. And I suspect that’s the point, we’re being gish-galloped into subservience.

  6. 6.

    OzarkHillbilly

    McCaskill greets friendly crowds at town halls, takes shot at bashful Republican colleagues

    “There are ways to avoid looking the people you work for in the eye in this day and age,” she said. In an earlier stop in Jefferson County, she said anyone who dodged such meetings wasn’t qualified for office.
    ……
    “We take care of our constituents the way we feel is best, and Sen. McCaskill can do what she feels works best for her,” said Kristina Wegher, a spokeswoman for Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer, R-St. Elizabeth, Mo.

    Rep. Ann Wagner’s office had a sharper response: “I believe what makes you unfit for office is when you don’t represent Missouri values; and Sen. McCaskill’s vote against [Supreme Court] Justice Gorsuch last week told millions of Missourians that she simply doesn’t share their values.”

    Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., has been in smaller meetings with constituents over the Easter recess, his office said. “The senator is meeting with constituents back home throughout the state work period,” spokeswoman Katie Boyd said.

    Yeah, they’re taking care of us alright.

  9. 9.

    Major Major Major Major

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    Sen. McCaskill’s vote against [Supreme Court] Justice Gorsuch last week told millions of Missourians that she simply doesn’t share their values.

    Well, that’s true, but it’s hardly McCaskill’s fault that her constituents have shit for values.

  12. 12.

    Patricia Kayden

    Golfing while White is not a vice.
    Neither is costing the American taxpayers millions of dollars for three residences a vice when you’re White.
    It’s amazing what Trump can get away with.

  16. 16.

    satby

    @rikyrah: Thanks, I will. But this is a meh day. Surrounded in a red state by people who think Drumpf is just awesome and “hope he turns North Korea into glass”.
    Just can’t deal with the idiocy.

  18. 18.

    rikyrah

    @Patricia Kayden:
    White Privilege on complete display.
    They spent 8 years disrespecting 44 and his entire family. How “ungrateful” those Nigras are. This bullshyt with Melania and all that expense… They would have screamed bloody murder if Michelle had stayed in Chicago after the 2008 election.

  22. 22.

    tobie

    @satby: I know that feeling. I feel like the Grouch confirmation knocked the wind out of my sails, and now the avalanche of bad things that people like Sessions and DeVos are doing make me despair. It will be hard to keep up the fighting spirit till 2018 but we’ll just have to. I almost wish we could have sign-up sheets with each of us taking turns resisting, so none of us runs out of energy.

  23. 23.

    NotMax

    Wimps.

    Michigan’s capital on Wednesday reversed a decision to call itself a “sanctuary city” that protects immigrants, bowing to pressure from a business community concerned that the term would draw unwanted attention to Lansing from President Donald Trump’s administration and cost the city federal funding.

    The City Council voted 5-2 to reverse course just nine days after unanimously deciding to call Lansing a sanctuary. The term “sanctuary city” has no legal definition and varies in application, but it generally refers to jurisdictions that do not co-operate with U.S. immigration officials. Source

  24. 24.

    Quinerly

    @OzarkHillbilly:
    We were talking about his death on a night thread the other night. For fans of the band, check out Peter Wolf’s solo work in the last 15 years (especially his last 3 albums) Mostly back to the band’s Blues roots….plus a lot of duets with the likes of Steven Tyler, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Merle Haggard, etc. There’s a great interview with Terry Gross that put Wolf back on my radar a few years back.

  25. 25.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    Some years back, we were surveying a Crawford Co cave some co-conspirators of mine had found. We could not decide on a name for it and after some discussion settled on “M & J’s Love Cave” for the purposes of survey, at least. Over time the name got shortened to just “Love Cave”, which was rather appropo because it turned into all possible cave and everyone knows that

    Love hurts
    Love scars
    Love wounds and marks
    Any heart not tough or strong enough
    To take a lot of pain, take a lot of pain
    Love is like a cloud, it holds a lot of rain
    Love hurts

    Any calls for a trip to survey started with the words “Love Hurts”. From the very beginning of it’s tight, ugly, twisted, keyhole of an entrance, it was nasty, maximum muddy, wet, crawling thru razor sharp chert encrusted passages for 3,000′ until… it suddenly busted open to 100′ wide passages with 40-60′ high ceilings and it became the Energizer Bunny of caves (until it ended of course, all caves end)

    On one particularly memorable survey trip, some folks were headed in and they found the entrance blocked by a dead bobcat. My oldest son had to crawl over and thru the foul smelling, rotting corpse and then push it back up and thru the hole to the others to get it out of the way. From that point on, we all knew for certain sure that

    Love Stinks.

  26. 26.

    Hal

    I had a patient in my clinic comment months and months ago how shocked she was that Obama had cost taxpayers 60 million for his vacations, according to her. I just ignored her, but I wonder now what she has to say about Trump.

    Several conservative friends on Facebook who were outraged about everything Obama did are so fucking silent now, also. Not a peep out of them. I jokingly said recently Facebook should introduce a feature that lets you remove any sign of Trump support from your timeline. In a couple of years that feature will probably get an enormous amount of use.

  27. 27.

    Quinerly

    @OzarkHillbilly:
    Wolf has a great updated version on his latest solo CD. Check out his Book of Faces page..nice picture of the band with words about Geils’ death. Wolfe tours…but does stay mostly around Boston, NE. Did see him here in St. Louis several years back, though. Guess you know he’s Faye Dunaway’s ex. His only marriage…mid ’70’s.

  29. 29.

    efgoldman

    @Baud:

    We’re a post-post-racial society.

    Orange Shitgibbon is turning us into a post-society society.

  32. 32.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Major Major Major Major:

    didn’t they discuss this in the guest thread and find that claim rather lacking?

    I don’t know, I never read old threads. I only come here in the mornings, I go thru the previous days above the fold posts and skip the rest (I don’t have time to read them all). As to the above claim I cite, I am of course exaggerating, but the point remains that they don’t need nukes to kill a whole hell of a lot of S. Koreans, just the usual stuff will do very nicely.

  34. 34.

    MattF

    Love that video clip. Epitomizes the relation between Trump, facts, ‘facts’, and ”facts”.

  35. 35.

    Quinerly

    @satby:
    @#2…Unfortunately, I’m with you on this. Have felt that I’m in a fog on overload. It still hits me at the oddest times…can’t believe the country elected him….and I think to myself “What’s going to happen to us?” See him/hear him and cringe. It’s not one thing everyday; it’s at least 10 things everyday…plus then I spiral and fret over what’s going on with the stuff we aren’t hearing about. Smaller things that normally wouldn’t bother me like the travel, Mar-a-Lago, Trump Tower residence send me in a rage. Now EPA Chief Pruitt is requesting a budget for round the clock security; DeVos is costing us millions in security. Small in the scheme of things… all can be easily reversed under another pres. but I get so angry thinking about how the Obamas were treated…every little thing….and all the made up shit.

  37. 37.

    satby

    @Quinerly: it’s just numbing. And part of me looks at these idiots (the ones who spout this stuff in my hearing) and I just start thinking they want it, let them have it in spades.

    Edited to add: and if course MORE people who don’t want it will suffer than just those, so I get a grip.

  39. 39.

    Quinerly

    @satby:
    It is numbing. I guess I have been very lucky in my life..very little tragedy, sickness, death. I’m an only born of two only children, so really no family upheavals/drama…except my parents’ deaths. Next to theirs deaths (recently lost my very political minded 92 year old mother), I don’t ever recall feeling like this. It’s like I’m in mourning and am struggling to snap out of it. I was better when I was driving around for those 6 weeks…I wasn’t ignoring the news, though. Seems like it’s all coming at us at a faster pace in the last couple of weeks. Or maybe reality has finally set in for me.

  40. 40.

    Ohio Mom

    @satby: I feel the exact same way, getting so angry that I half-wish everything would fall apart just so I could say, “I told you so!” Then I remember how me and mine would suffer.

    I still try to do a couple of things a week (phone calls, letters, the local Indivisible group) and give myself credit for doing so but it isn’t gratifying at all, feels like a chore.

    Some of the domestic damage should be fixable but it’s getting to the point where I’m wondering how Trump’s successor is going to be able to undo the foreign relations and trade fiascos. Why should China, for example, want to give up any of the goodies Trump is handing over?

  41. 41.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Ohio Mom: @Quinerly: @satby:

    In any case, Republicans now get that if people get hurt on their watch, it’s on them. The idea that the hurt may come from within the evolution of the Obamacare program and thus the blame fall on a Democratic President and Democratic Congress, neither of which are in office any more, only works on a very convoluted logic. In any case, we don’t have the rely on logic. There’s polling on this. And those polls show overwhelmingly that Republicans get blamed.

    What all of this amounts to is that Trump is threatening to torch more House Republicans in newly marginal seats. And he believes that inflicting electoral damage on Republicans will coerce Democrats into negotiating the repeal of their law. That really makes very little sense.

    Of course, the damage Trump threatens to inflict on innocent Americans is real. But Democrats, already seeing the President weakened, must realize that holding tough and not breaking ranks is the best way to protect ordinary people from the President’s cruelty and wrath.

    There’s a simple truth here. The President is not only flailing. He is unable to grasp the political reality he faces – indeed, the one he in many ways created – and is thus making nonsensical threats. He is essence putting a gun to House Republicans heads and telling Democrats, don’t make me do it. His threats are risible and thus counterproductive. Things will grow more chaotic and disordered than they already are.

    – Josh Marshall

  42. 42.

    catclub

    @MattF: Trump is getting huge credit for recognizing facts on a par with – ‘the earth is round’,

    E.g. NATO is no longer obsolete,
    China is not really a currency manipulator (Their currency had been falling the past three years, and hey have been propping it UP to the benefit of the rest of the world.)
    High interest rates and a gold standard would actually do bad things to the economy.

    Who knew that health care was so complicated?

  43. 43.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @satby: That’s because the news isn’t fear based. Got to look at the positive; Trump has it handed to him on a gold platted platter and he’s screwed it up royalty because the man is the ultimate conservative; a rich damn fool. The frustrating thing to me isn’t if Trump is going to forced to resign by the Republicans, it’s why won’t they just get it over with already. But for all the pain in the next four years I am going to believe that utter failure that is Trumpism is going to be the end of the conservative moment, that after that they will be just like hippies and Neo-Cons to the main stream.

  44. 44.

    MattF

    @OzarkHillbilly: And, to repeat what everyone knows by now– The vocalizations emitted by Donald J. Trump have no relation to reality. None. Zip. Nil. Nada. Anyone who bases a political analysis on those vocalizations is chasing an imaginary flock of wild geese.

  46. 46.

    Ohio Mom

    @Quinerly: I know some people think JMM is too long-winded but like you, I visit him almost daily.

    That PhD in history does give him a longer perspective, and it is good to be reminded of that do thanks, Ozark Hillbilly.

  47. 47.

    Kay

    I just love Talking Points Memo for focusing so much on voting rights. They’ve been doing this for years, and if you’ve been following it for years people really are getting better at understanding it.

    When the GOP voter suppression stuff really ramped up under Bush (it goes back further than that- there are consent decrees from the 1990’s) so many people had all kinds of basic misunderstanding of voting process. They would regularly conflate voting and registration. A dead person on a state voter registry was proof positive that dead people were voting. They would make pronouncements like “everyone has ID!”- this wasn’t just ‘the public’ – it was Supreme Court justices. They would see that someone was registered in 2 states (REALLY common – people move and residency is oddly vague) and immediately jump to accusations they VOTED in two states.

    It’s gotten so much better because some news outlets just kept hitting it over and over, explaining over and over, and people started to get it. Talking Points Memo was one of them.

    There was a huge change just between 2008 and 2012 when I would talk to Democratic voters. In 2008 there was a lot of waving it away as unimportant but by 2012 they were like expounding on the Voting Rights Act and things.

    Voter education is the best protection against voter suppression because if you have to jump thru hoops to vote you have to understand the process BETTER than people who are NOT targeted. You have to be vigilant.

    Good work! They should be proud over there :)

  48. 48.

    Kay

    This is the Indiana case that went to the Supreme Court and landed us in this voter suppression mess.

    It’s a study in elite cluelessness about low income people. The factual basis is moronic. A muni ct judge would know more about poor people and ID than these people did. Any random poll worker would have done better.

    So that’s what we had to work with – these supposedly smart lawyers were this dumb.

  49. 49.

    comrade scotts agenda of rage

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    Feckless Claire has shown willingness to snipe at her GOP Senate colleagues, that’s unlike her usual tepid approach to all things with any hint of going out on a political limb. She does this just often enough to make crawl over glass Dems like me give her the benefit of the doubt. I’m sure next week she’ll let some of her “inner Claire” words bubble to the surface and she’ll go back to being good ole Feckless Claire again.

    That being said, from the article:
    “McCaskill tried to emphasize that her tour of the state Wednesday included eight stops in counties that overwhelmingly went for Trump.”

    She learned the hard way during his ass kicking when running for governor is that statewide Dems like her have to go to those places where she’ll never win. It sends a clear message to Dems and left-leaning independents that translates into them coming out to vote. What she did yesterday was simply Step 1 in her reelection campaign. I’ll give her this, she’s learned how to get what rurl votes she can and not simply sit in STL and KC hoping those areas will swing things her way. They won’t anymore.

    @Major Major Major Major:

    Well, that’s true, but it’s hardly McCaskill’s fault that her constituents have shit for values.

    Obviously not all of them (raises hand). I think folks outside this largely backass state need to realize is that Missouri politics is a hellhole of racism, arrogance, machine influence, christian fundies and outright crazy people. Claire’s biggest political problem is that she still thinks the racist, christian fundy crazy people will vote for her. They won’t and yet she continually trips over whatever Dem bona fides she has when attempting to woo them.

  50. 50.

    Aleta

    Need billboards up showing the ever-growing dollar amounts of T’s weekend travel costs and security for each family member. The latest: Tiffany out shopping.

  52. 52.

    Spaniel

    A hell of a sentence: “For Trump, one bright spot was the decision to launch 59 missiles in Syria last week.”

    For some reason, I thought it was eating a slice of chocolate cake.

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