Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

Conservatism: there are people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

“In the future, this lab will be a museum. don’t touch it.”

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

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

They were going to turn on one another at some point. It was inevitable.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Fight for a just cause, love your fellow man, live a good life.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

Spilling the end game before they can coat it in frankl luntz-approved dogwhistles.

Even though I know this is a bad idea, I’m off to do it anyway!

Fani Willis claps back at Trump chihuahua, Jim Jordan.

I was confident that someone would point it out and thought why not me.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

Somebody needs to explain to DeSantis that nobody needs to do anything to make him look bad.

Balloon Juice, where there is always someone who will say you’re doing it wrong.

If marriage is the equivalent of selling yourself into slavery, women with self respect should reject the offer.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

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Archives for May 2017

Something Is Happening At Buckingham Palace

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Just a few Twitter rumors for now, but it looks serious.

QUEEN Elizabeth II’s entire staff from across the United Kingdom has been summoned to an emergency meeting at Buckingham Palace in London today, according to reports.
Servants will be addressed by the Royal Household’s most senior officer Lord Chamberlain and Her Majesty’s Private Secretary Sir Christopher Geidt in just hours.

The only specific I’ve seen is that Prince Philip has died, but those tweets say that needs to be confirmed.

The Guardian had a long article in March on what will happen when Queen Elizabeth dies.

The United States doesn’t currently have an ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, rather a career foreign service officer is the chargé d’affaires.

I guess the twentieth century is finally ending.

 

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HRClinton — Can’t Win for Losing

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Dan Drezner, in the Washington Post:

… [W]henever this topic comes up, I feel like gouging my eyes out with a dull spoon there’s a key point that always goes unacknowledged: from the outset of the general election campaign, Clinton faced a more difficult challenge than is commonly understood.

As I pointed out last year and as the April 2017 issue of PS: Political Science & Politics notes, the fundamentals of the 2016 campaign had the race as pretty close to a toss-up. Economic growth in the first half of 2016 was pretty weak. The incumbent party was trying to win a third consecutive presidential campaign. Both of these facts meant that, despite Obama’s personal popularity, the fundamentals of the campaign were far from a Democratic cake-walk…

To be fair, the tightness of the fundamental race heightens the magnitude of each mistake made by Clinton and her campaign. But I think the general election polling numbers mistakenly gave the impression that Clinton’s victory was inexorable when the reality was more murky. Despite Obama’s personal popularity, the simple fact is that the same party has won three consecutive presidential elections only once since 1952. In 2000, Al Gore was running on a stronger economy and still barely eked out a victory in the popular vote. Clinton faced a more difficult path…

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We are all Gileadeans now

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I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that establishment media doesn’t give a fuck about this:

After failing to bring their Affordable Care Act replacement to a vote in March, GOP legislators have come armed with a new health care plan that may be even more heartless than their last.

According to Raw Story, the bill’s recently added MacArthur Meadows Amendment would ditch the ACA’s protections for preexisting conditions — sexual assault being one of them.

Under the amendment, states would have the all-clear to waive the ban preventing insurance companies from denying coverage to patients based on preexisting conditions. That means companies can also deny preventive health care services, like mammograms and gynecological exams, to these patients, which sexual assault survivors in particular rely on following an attack.

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Pay No Attention to the Optics (Racist Motherfucking Republicans)

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These guys can’t help themselves:

Last year, then-president Barack Obama vetoed a bill that would have curbed the pensions of former presidents if they took outside income of $400,000 or more.

So now that former president Barack Obama has decided to accept $400,000 for an upcoming Wall Street speech, the sponsors of that bill say they’ll reintroduce that bill in hopes that President Trump will sign it.

“The Obama hypocrisy on this issue is revealing,” said Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and sponsor of the 2016 bill. “His veto was very self-serving.”

Chaffetz and Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, the sponsor of the companion Senate bill, say they will re-introduce the Presidential Allowance Modernization Act this month. The bill would cap presidential pensions at $200,000, with another $200,000 for expenses. But those payments would be reduced dollar-for-dollar once their outside income exceeds $400,000.

It’s just a fucking coincidence this happened when we got a black President. It just fucking kills these guys he was President.

And the balls on Chaffetz, who just rushed to have government paid for surgery on a decades old injury before he leaves congress and tomorrow votes to remove pre-existing conditions protections for the rest of Americans.

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Open Thread: Margaret Atwood, Prophetess

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… Each of the three protesters faces up to 12 months in jail, $2,000 in fines, or both, depending on the outcome of a June 21 sentencing hearing…

In verdicts returned shortly after noon Wednesday, the jury also convicted two other activists in the group she was with, Tighe Barry and Lenny Bianchi, who were dressed as Ku Klux Klan members with white hoods and robes and stood up before the Jan. 10 hearing started.

In an April court filing, the office of the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia had argued that all three protesters shared a common goal to “impede and disrupt” the hearing. Ms. Fairooz, the office said, had “created a scene.”

It was early in the hearing when Senator Richard Shelby, Republican of Alabama, said that Mr. Sessions’s record of “treating all Americans equally under the law is clear and well-documented,” Ariel Gold, the campaign director of Code Pink, said on Wednesday…

The Malevolent Leprechaun will not be mocked!!!

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Cognitive Dissonance minimization or why I’m fighting

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In a previous thread, a troll was FIRST!! with the advice to “Just quit, we lost this fight in November”

I reject that.

We aren’t going to win often but we get to choose how to lose. We can roll over without trying to defend our values and our morals or we can fight as hard as we can to either get a policy win or inflict significant political costs on Republicans to increase the probability of future policy wins by either putting the fear of losing their seats into them which constrains future opportunity space or flipping those seats in 2018.

More subtly, we tell stories to ourselves. I want those stories that I tell to myself about me to be true. Defending and improving the ACA is one of those stories that I tell myself. The ACA benefits 2009 me far more than it benefits the 2017 me. It is a gut check. Am I full of shit or do I actually believe in what I think I believe in.

Let me digress for a moment.

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This Is News Only to the Media

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And yet they will ignore it:

Hillary Clinton would probably be president if FBI Director James Comey had not sent a letter to Congress on Oct. 28. The letter, which said the FBI had “learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation” into the private email server that Clinton used as secretary of state, upended the news cycle and soon halved Clinton’s lead in the polls, imperiling her position in the Electoral College.

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And yet, from almost the moment that Trump won the White House, many mainstream journalists have been in denial about the impact of Comey’s letter. The article that led The New York Times’s website the morning after the election did not mention Comey or “FBI” even once — a bizarre development considering the dramatic headlines that the Times had given to the letter while the campaign was underway. Books on the campaign have treated Comey’s letter as an incidental factor, meanwhile. And even though Clinton herself has repeatedly brought up the letter — including in comments she made at an event in New York on Tuesday — many pundits have preferred to change the conversation when the letter comes up, waving it away instead of debating the merits of the case.

The motivation for this seems fairly clear: If Comey’s letter altered the outcome of the election, the media may have some responsibility for the result. The story dominated news coverage for the better part of a week, drowning out other headlines, whether they were negative for Clinton (such as the news about impending Obamacare premium hikes) or problematic for Trump (such as his alleged ties to Russia). And yet, the story didn’t have a punchline: Two days before the election, Comey disclosed that the emails hadn’t turned up anything new.

Fuck you Chris Cillizza.

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