BREAKING: White guys w no education, infantile view of the world, & serial failed get-rich-quick schemes, like Trump https://t.co/FujI9nthSR
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) April 30, 2017
…not the case w these two guys. But I grew up around guys like them in white working class suburbs of Detroit (and it’s probably the same…
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) April 30, 2017
…if instead of Detroit it’s Milwaukee or Cleveland or St Louis): Detroit under white control remembered as idyllic, “then blacks ruined it”
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) April 30, 2017
A/k/a, “keeping those people in their place”…
Cynical Ankh-Morpork NYC resident Harry Siegel, at the NY Daily News, on Atty-Gen Malevolent Leprechaun’s “Law & order, real & imaginary“:
It’s sports-talk hour at the Justice Department.
“Violent crime is surging in American cities,” drawls longtime-caller Jeff from Mobile, though that’s not, y’know, true. In fact, crime is up sharply in a handful of cities, most notably Chicago, and flat or down in many others. After a quarter century of fairly steady decline, the national murder rate remains near a 50-year low.
Yet American carnage can be averted, United States Attorney General Jefferson Sessions wrote this month, sounding a lot like someone telling Mad Dog “you can’t measure heart,” if we “avoid harmful federal intrusion in the daily work of local police.”
In the real world, cops basically police themselves, for better and for worse, despite feeble efforts from Bill Clinton and Barack Obama to pretend otherwise. The feds don’t pay for policing. Don’t set or even track local standards. Don’t know how many people cops kill, or how many cops who get fired from one department end up back on the job in another one…
Here’s how the attorney general said it, in case you think I’m putting words in his mouth. After his flat, false claim of an urban violent crime surge, he pointed to real rises in Chicago and Baltimore to declare that “amid this plague of violence, too much focus has been placed on a small number of police who are bad actors rather than on criminals. And too many people believe the solution is to impose consent decrees that discourage the proactive policing that keeps our cities safe.”
He didn’t even give lip service to the question of what the right level of focus of would be, just insisted a “small number” (whatever that means) of bad apples won’t spoil the whole barrel…
So instead of staying focused on actual violent criminals, he railed about “lawless” sanctuary cities, blamed the courts that have halted Trump’s executive orders for blood on the streets by “restricting crime tactics” and continued his bizarre on-and-off feud with New York City officials who vow to use discretion — something southern law-and-order types are traditionally all about — in dealing with the feds as ICE ramps up its efforts to round up people here without papers.
The idea that America’s capital for immigrants, legal and otherwise, is also its safest big city is more than he can wrap his head around…
“Crime tactics” instead of “crime control tactics”. I believe that’s what poker-table psychologists call a tell…
Tilda Swintons Bald Cap
Oh fuck me with this shit, AGAIN. I don’t care what these two morons think about Trump or anything else. They have no thinking skills and cannot logically add 2 and 2 and get 4 as a result. I wish a motherfucker from the NYT would interview me. Goddamn it I am just going to drink a gallon of Draino. FFFFUUUUUUCCCCCKKKKK.
Patricia Kayden
Haven’t reports shown that both Baltimore and Chicago have abusive, corrupt police forces? Isn’t that part of the problem as to why those cities have higher than normal crime rates? It seems to me that the more abusive and corrupt the police force, the more dangerous the city is for average citizens. How many bad apples spoil the barrel, Mr. Sessions?
LAO
(from the opinion piece)
Damn! I miss Doris from Rego Park. She was the best Mets fan ever.
bemused
@Tilda Swintons Bald Cap:
These guys are so gullible like most Trump voters. If they had healthy bank accounts, it would be so easy for any experienced scammer to relieve them of their savings.
Tim C.
Hey look! It’s the Times normalizing Trump! Water is wet, high-fat foods are bad for you, and my kid would rather watch TV than eat vegetables.
khead
San Fransisco (City-data.com crime index 2015) = 527.6
New York = 229.3(!)
Baltimore = 776.3
Chicago = 426.4
Detroit = 759
Milwaukee = 715
US Average = 283.5
Meanwhile…
Beckley, WV = 804.7
Elkton, MD = 740.3
Shantanu Saha
If you want to fight crime, it helps to think like a criminal… or as some cops like to think, actually be a criminal.
Shantanu Saha
@Patricia Kayden: Isn’t that the point? Abusive police forces –> rise in violent crime and reticence of citizens to cooperate with police –> rise in arrests, people in the criminal justice system, and profits for the prison-industrial complex –> call for more “tough on crime” tactics by Republicans –> rinse and repeat.
Mustang Bobby
TPM quotes an interview with Trump where he misplaces his hero, Bloody Andrew Jackson, in history’s timeline.
The hell with the natural-born citizen requirement. The test for becoming president should be an 8th Grade history test.
Shantanu Saha
@khead: Knowing the kind of assholes NYC cops can be, I find it amusing that they might actually be the best-behaved big-city cops in the US of A. Makes me never want to go back to Baltimore, or visit Chicago, Detroit, or Milwaukee (except perhaps passign through their airports).
TenguPhule
I believe this policy is known as kill first, plant the evidence after the fact.
Elizabelle
Unbelievable! (And isn’t that one of Trump’s favorite words?)
And that’s the “soft-spoken college graduate” talking.
TenguPhule
@Shantanu Saha:
Wrong.
That would be our cops in Honolulu. Because most of them are not white nor (usually) entitled. And we have strict gun control here.
TenguPhule
@Mustang Bobby:
History class nothing. Basic IQ tests should be fucking mandatory.
TenguPhule
@Tim C.:
What the hell are you feeding him? I mean, have you seen what’s on TV these days?
Shantanu Saha
@TenguPhule: Ah, but that’s just an island in the Pacific, not a place our Attorney General considers America…
And anyway, isn’t Five-Oh almost all white? I see them like that on the TeeVee…
LAO
@Shantanu Saha: NYC cops may be better than Chicago cops — but don’t be mistaken, by and large, they’re still assholes.
Tim C.
@TenguPhule: More like he discovered MST3k and thinks the robots are really funny.
Jack the Second
The hilarious thing to me is this guy thinking politicians are bought for $50 million.
If you look at the contributions being made to Congressmen and Senators, it’s more like “here’s $10k to your re-election fund”, and that’s enough.
Yarrow
So…these old white guys liked it better when white guys of all ages automatically got the best jobs, best housing locations, and were treated better because they were white? That’s a shocker. Who could have imagined that being treated better and having more opportunities than others, without having to work for it, was something people liked?
patroclus
@Patricia Kayden: That’s part of the problem, but most of the shootings in Chicago are really confined to 3 neighborhoods which are gang infested and where the availability of guns is prevalent and where the local economies haven’t really improved much, if at all, since the 2007-08 recession. In most of the remainder of the city, crime is down. And it’s not that the cops are more corrupt and abusive just in those neighborhoods – in my view, they are equally corrupt and abusive throughout the city. Chicago needs more resources – particularly from the state and federal governments – to address the causes of crime, in addition to better policing generally.
Jeffro
@khead: I never did like Elkton much…
Jeffro
@Mustang Bobby:
Could we also slip a basic economics quiz in there?
Humboldtblue
Talk about unintended consequences. Local high schooler elated she got admitted to Berkeley, heart-broken they require students to be vaccinated.
khead
@Shantanu Saha:
I cited Beckley and Elkton because I know them quite well. The entire “violent crime surging in cities” meme is bullshit. You’d do fine in any city. Three cities spiked the national average last year.
Penn
The whole point of the bad apple analogy is that if you don’t deal with them immediately they will spoil the rest of the basket.
MomSense
@Mustang Bobby:
Fuck Andrew Jackson.
And LBJ.
The Moar You Know
@Jack the Second: You’ve really got to be a sucker to think that it takes that much to buy a politician, any politician. I can buy any US Senator’s vote on a given bill for five grand. Trump, I am sure, will sign anything for that. 50 million? You could buy all of Congress, but the real question is why would you bother?
TenguPhule
@Humboldtblue:
And she’s trying to infringe on the rest of the students’ right to not get sick and risk death from diseases she’s not vaccinated against.
khead
This should be a tag line for BJ front pagers.
TenguPhule
@Jack the Second:
Its like these idiots forget how rich people get and stay rich. It means they never turn down the money. Ever.
TenguPhule
@Tim C.: Ah, all is forgiven then. Razzing bad movies trumps just about anything green, red, purple or yellow.
The Moar You Know
@Humboldtblue: She’s obviously never been to the town. I wouldn’t take a walk down Telegraph without a trip to the doc for a full set of boosters. It’s just as well she’ll probably stay in the Green Triangle.
germy
Mnemosyne
@khead:
Violent crime is up in Los Angeles for the third year in a row, but is still far below its heyday. What it looks like is that we had an unusually low year in 2013 and we’re going back up to our new normal.
About midway through the article the writers point out that one of the big reasons for the increase is a sharp increase in homelessness, which leaves people vulnerable to being victimized.
Patricia Kayden
@patroclus:
I have to admit that before I visited Chicago, I had stereotyped the entire city as an insane war zone. I stayed in a nice hotel by the park and have to say that it is one of the most beautiful cities I’ve ever visited and my friends and I felt perfectly safe. Not sure what it is going to take to turn Chicago around so that you don’t have those nightmare stories of children getting shot down coming home from school. I know that Sessions and Trump won’t do anything to help with their “police are always right” mentality though.
LAO
@germy: I can’t even. >>>head hitting desk<<<
rikyrah
Mnuchin defends proposal to eliminate tax deduction that benefits Californians
by James Rufus Koren
Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin on Monday stumped for the Trump administration tax plan rolled out last week, saying that a simpler tax code and lower corporate taxes — combined with other Trump-backed policies — will lead to robust economic growth.
Speaking at the Milken Institute Global Conference, a Beverly Hills confab for investors, Mnuchin said he has been meeting weekly with House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) and others and believes a final tax plan will have the support of Congress — despite concern that it could add significantly the federal deficit.
“We absolutely share the same vision of what we’re trying to do,” Mnuchin said during an on-stage interview with Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo. “We’re all on the same page.”
The tax plan, as laid out in a one-page outline released last week, calls for what Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs banker and Hollywood film financier, said was “one of the biggest tax cuts in American history.”
……………………….
He maintained that the cuts can be paid for by eliminating deductions and by the higher economic growth they would spur. But he cautioned the plan remains a work in progress and that any estimates of how much the plan might add to the federal budget deficit are preliminary.
“When we come out with all the details, it’ll be scored,” he said.
He also defended the proposal to eliminate the federal deduction for state income taxes. That itemized deduction is something that residents of high-income states such as California rely upon to lower their federal tax rate.
……………..
“We don’t think it’s the federal government’s job to be subsidizing states,” Mnuchin said. “Some states have zero income taxes, some have high income taxes. … For people like me who live in California, you’re going to be stuck with higher taxes that you can’t deduct.”
But he added there were no plans to remove other cherished deductions.
“Charitable deductions, that’s something we support,” he said. “And mortgage interest, that’s kinda like apple pie.”
rikyrah
What say you, phony azz Ivanka?
CNN: Trump ending Michelle Obama’s girls education program
BY OLIVIA BEAVERS – 05/01/17 01:18 PM EDT
President Trump plans to end ‘Let Girls Learn,’ former first lady Michelle Obama’s girls education program, according to a Monday CNN report.
CNN exclusive: Trump administration ending Michelle Obama’s girls education program, effective immediately — via @Kevinliptakcnn
— David Wright (@DavidWright_CNN) May 1, 2017
“Moving forward, we will not continue to use the Let Girls Learn brand or maintain a stand-alone program,” an email from Peace Corps acting director Sheila Crowley to employees reportedly reads.
The Trump administration gave order to cease the program’s operation immediately, according to an internal document obtained by CNN.
Aspects of ‘Let Girls Learn’ will continue, although the brand name of the program will no longer be used.
The Obamas started the program in 2015. It aimed to increase educational opportunities for young girls in developing countries.
“‘Let Girls Learn’ provided a platform to showcase Peace Corps’ strength in community development, shining a bright light on the work of our Volunteers all over the world,” Crowley continued. “We are so proud of what ‘Let Girls Learn’ accomplished and we have all of you to thank for this success.”
rikyrah
@Humboldtblue:
Nope. Don’t feel bad one iota for her.
liberal
One thing I don’t get about the Congressional votes to avert a government shutdown…those are bills, right, that have to be signed by Trump? The news coverage I see don’t even seem to mention that, as if he’ll automatically sign them.
TenguPhule
@rikyrah: Mnuchin is determined to double down on the 2007 crash. Too stupid to live is an understatement.
NorthLeft12
@Yarrow: Those white guys are living under the illusion that affirmative action, equal pay, diversity initiatives, multiculturalism, etc. have somehow tilted the playing field against them. They know that it is harder for them and their kids now to succeed, so of course, lets blame the people [women and minorities] trying to move up instead of the guys ahead of them who are pushing them back.
They will never blame those guys ahead of them, because for some unknown reason they still believe that they are in that club or might someday join it. They need to acquaint themselves with George Carlin and his priceless riff on the club.
sukabi
@germy: nobody’s safe, but hey I’d like to invite Lil Kim to the White House
TenguPhule
@liberal: There should be a veto-proof majority in both houses. So we all hope he’s not insane enough to risk panicking the globe by forcing them to do it.
Yarrow
For anyone who hasn’t run across this yet, a March for Truth is being organized.
rikyrah
Tell that truth, Al
https://mobile.twitter.com/AlGiordano/status/859081487198670849
liberal
@Shantanu Saha: Cops are assholes everywhere. I mean, I’ve sometimes had pleasant interactions with them, but my default assumption is “fucking asshole.” And I’m a blue-eyed middle-aged white dude.
rikyrah
Trump walks away in middle of @CBSNews interview as soon as he gets pressed on his bogus Obama wire-tapping claims pic.twitter.com/JUD0wstZeI
— Aaron Vallely (@Vallmeister) May 1, 2017
opiejeanne
I don’t think I can do this today, at least not yet. Maybe later.
P.S. Trump asked why we even had a Civil War, why couldn’t we just workk things out. He also noted that Andrew Jackson was very upset about the things that were happening in the Civil War. Jackson died in 1845.
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
@sukabi: One has the suspicion that should the actual Lil’ Kim be invited to the White House, the wingnutosphere would immediately take the position that (besides conclusively disproving Blithering Butthole’s racism) she was easily the most skilled rapper in Junior M.A.F.I.A.
liberal
@Jack the Second: Yeah…there’s some really great quotes about politicians selling themselves way, way too cheap.
liberal
@opiejeanne:
Heh. Well, there are a lot of (right-) libertarians who say the Civil War was an evil shedding of blood; the slaveowners should have been bought out.
liberal
@TenguPhule: Yeah, I know that’s one logical possibility, but why would that be true? The Freedumb Caucus guys don’t want the government funded anyway.
NorthLeft12
@germy:
Yeah, I heard a snippet of CEO Tillerson’s UN speech last week where it sounded like [to me] that it was critical that the UN act before North Korea obtained ICBM technology for their nuclear weapons and could strike at the continental US.
I found it interesting that NK’s ability to attack their neighbours NOW was not reason enough for action, I guess.
It is possible that what I heard was out of context and the CEO for Exxon had identified the threat to NK’s neighbours as well. But man, did that clip sound horrible.
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
@Shantanu Saha: ISTR LA (and of course Dallas) making good headway on similarly detoxifying its police force some time back.
TenguPhule
Trump lies about everything. Literally everything.
Solid proof that there is no god. Donald Trump should have had at least 1.21 gigawatts hit him when he said that.
TenguPhule
@liberal: The Freedumbs aren’t counted as veto votes. But the Republicans + the Democrats can override his veto on this spending bill. Just this spending bill.
liberal
@TenguPhule: I’m a little confused as to why no one has tried to advance the case that he’s the AntiChrist.
Humboldtblue
@TenguPhule: @The Moar You Know:
B-b-b-but she wrote a 4,000 word high school essay on the dangers of evil vaccinations! Her mother told her all bout how the corporations just stick you with any old stuff to make a buck!
We discussed this issue about two years ago in the threads and many folks were surprised the staunch anti-vaxxers were middle to upper middle class white folks from predominantly liberal areas. That still boggles.
Shantanu Saha
@TenguPhule: And what’s even worse is that UC punted.
So even though they know that vaccinations will reduce the number of preventable illnesses among their student population, they stood down in the face of anti-vaxxer poutrage. If I were Chancellor, i would say, ” you know, you don’t HAVE to go to the University of California. I’m sure there are other schools, like Trump University, which will gladly enroll you and serve your interests.” But then again, that’s probably why I’m not the Chancellor of UC.
germy
Have no fear…
Humboldtblue
@rikyrah:
No one outside the silly anti-vaxx community feels for her.
The Moar You Know
@liberal: My eyes are green, but yeah, all the rest. Been threatened with beatings twice. Had other cops intervene, twice. That’s pretty good considering.
It actually helped that back when I was in my twenties, I was playing music for a living and had long hair (late 1980s). They didn’t see me as threatening and I met so many of them during club sweeps that most of them knew who I was, at least in passing. But I (and they) were always very clear on one thing; they were not my friends and never would be. And cops nowadays are FAR nastier than they were back then. I’ve seen them beat on housewives, threaten to shoot a firefighter’s dog and cuff n’ stuff eighty year old rich white guys here, so it’s not like anyone is safe. Wish more whites would realize this: they ain’t your friends either.
My eighty year old rich white guy buddy who got the cuff n’ stuff treatment voted for Trump. Because Mexicans. You really can’t teach people anything.
Yarrow
@germy: Oh, for fuck’s sake. Ugh.
VOR
@TenguPhule: But the 2007 crash was lucrative for him.
Tilda Swintons Bald Cap
@germy: I see I will have to up my Draino intake.
Fair Economist
@patroclus: I suspect the gang problem is driven by drug smuggling, which is becoming a huge problem again now that the government is trying to cut back on opiate prescriptions.
TenguPhule
@Shantanu Saha:
Point of order, that’s already been shut down.
University of Phoenix online is the new grift.
Humboldtblue
@Shantanu Saha:
You know how I also know you’re not the president of the UC? You don’t have a $175 million slush fund stashed inside your office that was discovered by the latest audit. UC has raised tuition and fees three times in the past six years I think? And here’s nearly $200 mill that could have been used to offset some of that financial pain for students.
ruemara
@Yarrow: Certainly not white guys, who’ve earned all of that through merit.
@germy: Oh, fuck me running.
The Moar You Know
@Humboldtblue: I was undoubtedly one of those not surprised, because I live pretty close to SoCal’s ground zero for antivax, and my area, while not especially liberal, is pretty fucking wealthy. And has some of the lowest vax rates in the state. And had, at that time, the pertussis epidemic in the schools to prove it.
I have a very bad feeling that CA is going to throw in the towel and let them back into the schools. When rich white people want something done, it tends to get done, even if it’s a bad fucking idea.
TenguPhule
@Humboldtblue:
Far left and far right. Some think the evil pharma are conspiring against their precious snowflakes, while others thinks government mandates are anti-freedom. Some even manage both at once.
The thing they have in common is being selfish assholes.
Ohio Mom
We won’t know the most interesting part of the saga of those two guys from Pittsburgh, which was when they read the comments from the NYT readers.
The comments I skimmed through were 100% well-deserved put downs of those two numbskulls.
What must it be like to read pages and pages of people pointing out in detail, with collaborating facts, that you are a lazy sucker?
And to know that those comments are being read by gazillions of people all over the world, and are now part of the permanent archives of one of the world’s most prominent newspapers?
Even if you keep muttering to yourself, “dumb libtards,” it has to sting.
It’s the not very nice side of me but boy does that lift my mood.
liberal
Hmm…when I search Google news, it appears that yes, Trump is signing these budget bills.
TenguPhule
@The Moar You Know:
Doubtful. They’d have to pass a new law undoing the prior one which did away with most of the worthless exemptions. Anti-vaxxers lost a lot of ground after the Disney incident and it hasn’t been long enough for the public to forget.
liberal
@The Moar You Know: I’ve never been beaten or anything. But their manner is very threatening, at least much of the time.
The cops in my current town seem pretty nice, but it’s a very wealthy MA town, and I “look” like I fit in.
liberal
@TenguPhule: In many ways, pharma is evil. This just isn’t one of them. In fact I thought they’re not much interested in vaccines since they’re not all that profitable (in the current regulatory environment etc).
Ohio Mom
@TenguPhule: Yes, there are plenty of anti-vaxxers on the right, and they include autism parents who hold a grudge against Hillary for her FLOTUS campaign to ‘Vaccinate by Two.” Without their bellyaching, no one would remember that campaign.
rikyrah
@NorthLeft12:
they long for the delusional days of Mad Men…when all you had to be was WHITE
Humboldtblue
@The Moar You Know:
Nah, anti-vaxxers made a lot of noise because in the northern part of the state they are almost all wealthy (poor people take advantage of easy precautions like vaxxes because it makes sense to avoid serious illness while being poor) and Tengu pointed out that they have a lot of heavy lifting to do to get it back into the legislature and then to round up anyone willing to support going back to the old way.
germy
from the SUNY website:
TenguPhule
@liberal:
They’re not. Vaccines are a steady but small profit with a lot of safety regulations. No big sexy repeat business from the same customers for the same problem like regular drugs.
germy
And a different campus, december 2016
Steve in the ATL
OC peeps: what do you know about Phil Janowicz, who is running for congress?
SFAW
@Shantanu Saha:
Fucking morons. I used to have some respect for Berkeley. The proper response to the vaxxer (or is it anti-vaxxer?) snowflake, similar to your own, would be “The health and well-being of the 1,000-or-so OTHER entering freshman is a metric shit-tonne more important than allowing your parents’ (and your) insane conspiracy theories to compromise it. Don’t like it? Fucking sue us, see where that gets you, you fucking moron.”
And, no, I wouldn’t clean it up.
Jeffro
In case you need a grin this Monday afternoon, here’s Josh Marshall and others, busting the Mango Mussolini’s chops:
TenguPhule
@SFAW: Of course, part of it would be for her own safety since most of the unvaccinated students on campus are from other countries who are unable to do full service. But again, that’s the whole point about herd immunity, to avoid goddamn outbreaks.
Jeffro
Whoops…link to the above article (mod help, please?) is here at TPM
SenyorDave
EW, please shut up about Obama:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/warren-calls-obamas-message-touch-everyday-americans-162640482.html
Starting to get into Bernie territory.
zhena gogolia
I still couldn’t bring myself to read the article, but the comments are indeed epic.
I wish the NYT would just turn over the writing of the articles to its commenters. They are stratospherically above the reporters in intelligence.
SFAW
@TenguPhule:
There’s probably a joke about “sheeple” to be made, but I can’t glom onto it at the moment.
Mike in DC
White males over the age of 50 are by far the most reliably Republican voters. And the racial grievance stuff is never more than one layer under the surface.
TenguPhule
Guess who said “The Republicans have clearly thrown their lot in with the rich and the powerful, but so have a lot of Democrats.”
Yes, we have a circular firing squad problem in the actual Democratic party itself. And quotes can be taken out of context in light of the rest of an interview.
TenguPhule
@Mike in DC: I blame mandatory vaccinations that allowed them to avoid the leading causes of death for their age group.
Mnemosyne
@germy:
The one nice thing about a mumps outbreak among young adults is that it’s a Darwin Award for the young men: mumps frequently causes sterility for men. In fact, it’s one of the theories about why George Washington never fathered any children since he’s documented as having had a case of the mumps as a young man.
SFAW
@TenguPhule:
I wasn’t aware that an anti-stupid vaccine existed.
germy
TenguPhule
@SFAW: Touche.
germy
germy
Brachiator
@opiejeanne:
At least Frederick Douglass is still alive.
TenguPhule
@germy:
That’s normal at Fox.
Mnemosyne
@SenyorDave:
Warren has been getting bullied pretty hard by the ‘Bros, so I’m not that surprised, unfortunately.
SFAW
@germy:
No shit. Nor do any of your brethren and sistern. But that’s because you’re right-wing asshole morons, not because the grapevine doesn’t reach you.
efgoldman
@bemused:
They’d be enrolled at T***p U and eat T***p steaks for lunch in the school cafeteria
efgoldman
@Shantanu Saha:
I think it’s likely that Dallas and/or Boston are at or near the top.
TenguPhule
@Mnemosyne: To give her her due, she was pretty good for the rest of her interview. But this reflexive “both sides” needs to be trained out of elected Democrats when prepping.
Brachiator
@SFAW:
Sheeple who need sheeple are the luckiest sheeple in the world.
Elizabelle
@germy: Ah. So that fancy lunch at the Manhattan restaurant with Father Rupert was not enough to stave off fate.
Please, let Sean Hannity exercise his “key man” clause and descend into a circle of hell. Never to be heard from again.
No matter how loudly he shouts.
SFAW
@efgoldman:
And wash it all down with Shitgibbon Piss (a/k/a “T vodka”)?
The cool thing is, if someone told him they named it “Shitgibbon Piss” because people would think the name sounded like Stoli, he’d believe it. And if that “someone” were Ivanka, just before she went back to Jared for the rest of the night, even better.
Spanky
@germy: Whatever. Has MSNBC announced he’s been hired yet?
Jeffro
J-Rubs w/ the KO here today: Trump is a Guilty Pleasure for Low Info Conservatives (and some High Info Ones too), Like Watching Crappy TV.
So many great little points here…
?BillinGlendaleCA
@SFAW:
Probably closer to 5000.
germy
@Spanky: Maybe a bidding war between MSNBC and CNN? /
SFAW
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
Yeah, I figured it was significantly larger than what I wrote, but I was too lazy to look it up. Thanks for the correction.
jacy
@Tim C.:
My Nick is 11. He loved the old MST3K, but loves the new one more. “Mom! I finally get the jokes!”
efgoldman
@Humboldtblue:
Boo fucking hoo. So she’ll lose her right to infect a whole dorm with something.
Tilda Swintons Bald Cap
@SenyorDave: Like I said and will say everyday there is one person responsible for weaponizing the Wall Street attack against certain types of Democrats. One person and one person only. BTW, I saw a story that the number of folks who switched from Obama to Trump in 2016 did not trust the Democrats to have their economic interests, I wonder where they got that idea.
The Moar You Know
@SFAW: Why? The school is grossly overrated and the town is a complete shithole (unless you have money and live in the Hills. The Hills are AWESOME).
rikyrah
@germy:
TEE HEE HEE
The Moar You Know
@Jeffro: I don’t want to like Jennifer Rubin. She is vile. And yet…she is telling the truth like virtually nobody else in America is willing to.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@SFAW: My incoming class at UCLA in the late 70’s was around 5,000 students.
SFAW
@The Moar You Know:
I was under the impression that their Engineering grad school was pretty decent. Is it not?
patrick II
@opiejeanne:
Trump
Rodney King
I think it is the same answer for both.
SFAW
@The Moar You Know:
No kidding. If someone told me two years ago that I’d actually appreciate anything Rubin wrote, I’d either think they were nuts, or would have envisioned a “2012” [i.e., the movie] scenario. Unfortunately, it’s a lot closer to the latter.
randy khan
@The Moar You Know:
Ahem. Chez Panisse.
lgerard
@germy:
LOL at Rupert
randy khan
@Shantanu Saha:
The official Five-Oh team has two Asian Americans, one black, one guy whose character’s last name is Ortega, and two white guys (who are the leads, but you can’t have everything). The subsidiary characters who show up regularly include an older Asian American man (usually good for one or two lines per show), a youngish Asia American man, and an Asian American woman (the ME, who replaced an Asian American man). It doesn’t exactly look like Hawaii, but it’s closer than a lot of other shows.
? Martin
Per capita murders:
Louisiana: 10.3
Alabama: 7.2
Mississippi: 8.7
South Carolina: 8.2
Tennessee: 6.2
Oklahoma: 6.0
Arkansas: 6.1
US: 4.89
California: 4.8
New York: 3.1
Massachusetts: 1.9
New Jersey: 4.1
Washington: 2.9
tobie
@SenyorDave:
Warren has always been there. I hope left-wing populists will think long and hard about what Corbyn has done to the British Labour Party, which is heading for a historic defeat. I’m so sick of the populist critique of globalization without any suggestions about what kinds of manufacturing an advanced economy can still do. Bitching about neoliberalism just doesn’t cut it, and while Warren is more informed than others on the populist left, she’s given to her own kind of demagoguing.
Mnemosyne
@randy khan:
I somehow ended up watching an episode of “Superstore” yesterday with G and, wow, that’s a seriously diverse cast. Because I don’t usually watch the show, I didn’t realize that one of the supporting actresses is half-Asian until they had her talking in Korean to some of her relatives at her wedding.
And the sweetly romantic moment was between two middle-aged Asian-American actors. Nice job, casting directors and showrunners!
Mnemosyne
@? Martin:
In other words, Trump voters perceive the world as dangerous because they live in high-crime areas but project that problem out to the rest of the country while denying it’s a problem in their city or state?
Yeah, sounds about right.
TenguPhule
@Mnemosyne: I find the premise of that show too depressing to enjoy the humor.
Mnemosyne
@TenguPhule:
Well, the wedding episode involved the final breakup of the America Ferrera’s marriage, so, yeah. Along with a subplot about the store manager desperately trying to prevent his boss from laying people off.
But at least there’s a show that actually shows this stuff and doesn’t pretend that everyone works a professional job and lives in a 6-bedroom mansion in Southern California.
ThresherK
Sports yakkers get.called out by their.peers for being wrong on their predictions in a way that Paul Krugman is not allowed to.address Bobo, and in a way that Douthat would never dream of doing to Friedman.
SFAW
@Mnemosyne:
Well, when the only reference point is BillInGlendaleCA, I can see how we East Coasters might get that impression.
TenguPhule
@Mnemosyne:
Our networks need to take a page from the British and do a full on black comedy Black Adder Style riff on corporate megaculture. Sitcom soft peddling should have died in the 90s and stayed dead.
Tim C.
@jacy: It’s weird to watch episodes where there are cultural jokes from the 21st century.
TenguPhule
@Tim C.: Member rotary dials?
ruemara
@Mnemosyne: I love Superstore. The diversity, the quirky characters, America Ferrera. I just don’t have time to watch it much.
Mnemosyne
@TenguPhule:
“Blackadder” is a sitcom. It has half-hour episodes.
They tried to do a corporate parody with “Better Off Ted,” but it wasn’t very good.
@ruemara:
I haven’t been watching much TV since I’m focusing on fiction right now. It turns out I can do either fiction or screenplays, not both, and TV and movies distract me from fiction.
randy khan
@Mnemosyne:
We watch Superstore, and the diversity of the cast is pretty amazing. It’s strange how funny it is even though a lot of what it’s portraying is horrible.
(Also, they had an episode earlier this year in which they introduced Amy’s parents, and the dad was played by the guy who played the father on Ugly Betty, which was a hoot.)
drdavechemist
@Humboldtblue:
Let’s do some math here. $200 million may sound like a lot of money, but divided by a system enrollment (not just UC Berkeley but the entire UC system) of over 200,000 students it works out to less than $1000 per student. Divide that by the six years of tuition increases you mention and it’s down around $150 per student per year.
One can argue about whether the university president should have such a “slush fund” as opposed to having everything on budget, but I don’t find it unreasonable for an organization with an annual budget of around $28 billion to have something less than 1% on hand as an emergency reserve or to take advantage of unexpected opportunities.
When dealing with big numbers, it’s usually important to think about what other numbers you should be comparing to–otherwise it’s just a big number.
Shantanu Saha
@randy khan: You’re talking about the “new” Five-Oh. I’m talking the classic Five-Oh. Square-jawed Steve McGarret always telling his second-in-command Daniel “Dano” Williams to book the scumbag, usually one of them Asiatic types or an Anglo working with one. And though their underlings were mostly native Hawaiians, you always knew the white guys were in charge.
MCA1
@NorthLeft12: Precisely. For over a quarter century now they’ve had their fears alternately stoked and soothed and their emotions about the 21st century cynically elevated. They inhabit a mythological world where they’re more worthy, they work harder and are overtaxed for it (all of which are false), and others are getting handouts and unfair advantages. We can point out the red state/blue state gulf in terms of federal taxes paid vs. received and it doesn’t compute. We can talk gini coefficients and wealth concentration and decreasing social mobility until we’re blue in the fucking face. All the decay they see in their little shithole towns in rural Ohio are not the fault of the moneyed class or an advancing world that’s left their hamlet behind – they’re the fault of immigrants and minorities stealing their jobs. They feel this and they believe this and they’ve internalized this and will not be dissuaded.
No one else has ever been faced with the choice of retaining the “way of life” their parents lived and falling behind economically, or facing a changing world and uprooting themselves – only them. Their cousin moved to L.A. and had a friend who got mugged but there’s no meth crisis here in central Pennsylvania.
It’s impossible to compete with an alternate reality, whatever we may feel about the Democratic Party’s complicity in losing some of the constituencies that have traditionally supported it. The Dems are the only party that gives a rat’s ass about the economic wellbeing of post-industrial, rural Americans, unions and those left behind in the transition to a more international, service-based economy. But the other message – you’re the salt of the Earth, you’re smart, you work hard, and there’s a horde of undeserving people being intentionally given a leg up by Democrats who sneer at you and laugh at your traditional, real American values and are the cause of all your troubles – that’s an irresistible drug and the GOP’s been slinging it for a generation now. They’re hooked on it, ergo Cleek’s Law and the rock-solid belief that “political correctness” is a far bigger problem than the possibility that the President of United States is a tool of a hostile foreign power. This is the basic dynamic of American politics now and it’s hard to see what can break it.
The End.
All of the endless permutations of the “Who are these Trump voters” stories are nothing but navel-gazing by a punditariat writing its own obituary.
randy khan
@Shantanu Saha: @Shantanu Saha:
Sorry for any confusion. I didn’t know the old HF0 was being aired anywhere.
SFAW
@MCA1:
Would that it were so.
SgrAstar
@khead: @The Moar You Know: you are so wrong about Berkeley! Consistently ranked in the top 4 or 5 universities globally- above Oxford, Yale, Princeton, CalTech…etc. Fantastic, dedicated faculty and serious, motivated students. Forbes just awarded Berkeley “top ROI among US universities” for undergrads. You should really get to know UCB. Incredible, vital research is going on there every day. Anyone can wander into Wheeler Aud to hear Alex Filippenko holding forth…try it and you’ll be blown away.
Signed,
Devoted Cal alum and volunteer- on campus all the time.
TenguPhule
@Mnemosyne: But Black Adder threw those punches without padding. We’ve been cursed with “and that’s terrible” lame sitcoms since the 80s.
SgrAstar
@SFAW: Berkeley Engineering/Computer Science is excellent. Berkeley is ranked #1 in the world in Natural Science and Mathematics (arwu.org). At the departmental level: #1 in English, History, Physics…I’m not a particular fan of university rankings, but at least the arwu rankings aren’t commercial and depend entirely on faculty achievements. Berkeley has more Pell Grant students than the entire Ivy League, combined. Go Bears!
SFAW
@SgrAstar:
@SgrAstar:
I get the point, but dial it back a little, OK?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
trying to respect on-topickery, so waiting for a living open thread, but this article by Ryan Grim suggests that pretty much every conspiracy theory you’ve ever had about the last two years of MSNBC are true
Andrew Lack has quite a history
ChristianPinko
@TenguPhule: I will never understand the American people’s childlike belief that rich people are not interested in acquiring more money.
randy khan
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Coincidentally. I’m sure.
randy khan
@ChristianPinko:
It actually makes perfect sense to me. A very high proportion of the population imagines suddenly having, oh $100 million, and says “I’d be set for life.” While they see money as a way of keeping score, they also believe that it doesn’t matter after you hit a certain level. A key part of that mindset, of course, is that they can’t imagine earning that much money – it would have to be a windfall of some kind, and so there wouldn’t be any way to keep generating more. (This is somewhat akin to the rich child problem – if the money’s just *there,* it’s not the same as if you made it on your own.)
A lot of rich people see it much differently – they have “earned” it (and they certainly see it that way), so of course they want more just the same way regular people want more money to buy a better car, take better vacations, send their kids to better schools, etc.
SFAW
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Typical Rethug: Lack’s guiding principle is not that different from “Government is working fine, so elect me to destroy it.”
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@randy khan: The problem is Trump isn’t really rich, he just has a very large line of credit so he needs 50 million to service it. That’s what the Chine figured out.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: So what, is the majority of the baby boomer going to have to die before companies start making rational business decisions again? I mean it’s been pretty obvious for a while that the Conservative news is over saturated and yet they just keep on trying to add more.
Mike G
Translation:
“Jeff’s pants-pissing fear of brown people is surging in Mobile.”