Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

Good lord, these people are nuts.

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

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

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

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

Not all heroes wear capes.

You can’t love your country only when you win.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

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

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

The words do not have to be perfect.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

I’m sure you banged some questionable people yourself.

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

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Duck & Cover (Open Thread)

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I took a road trip to the northern part of the state this weekend to visit my old grandma. Along the way, I saw this lovely wood duck:

Such a fancy head and markings! Here’s another shot of him, this time paddling toward me:

Interesting piece by Rebecca Traister: Can the New Activist Passion of Suburban White Women Change American Politics? She spent some time in the Georgia 6th with the women who are trying to get Ossoff elected. Here’s an excerpt:

Ann White, 63, is a former speech pathologist, the mother of teenagers, and a Democrat married to a Republican; she’s never been active in electoral politics before. “I just assumed that Hillary would win,” she said of the 2016 election. As the realization that Clinton had not won began to sink in, she felt herself changing. “The profanity filter on my mouth totally went away,” White said, describing a phone call days after the election with a like-minded friend from California. “I lost it, and my kids turned around and went ‘Whoa!’ Because they’ve never heard me say the F-word before.” White began to weigh the responsibility of taking a stand, “for people of color, for those who cannot afford health insurance, who are lesbian, gay and transgender, for immigrants. I’m a white older woman. There’s a lot of old white people that are [on the Republican] side right now. Well, I’m an old white person and I can be vocal too.”

[snip]

Women, said Stacey Abrams, Georgia’s House Minority Leader and a Democratic gubernatorial candidate, “understand that this has to be the beginning of something, regardless of what happens on Tuesday night. Because they’ve seen, for the first time, the real consequences of inaction. So you have women who are waking up and seeing that they don’t have the luxury of going back to sleep.” Abrams, who if elected in 2018 would be the nation’s first African-American woman governor, continued, “Among African-American women there’s been a long consistency of action, which has moved our communities closer and closer to political power over time. What you’re seeing in the suburbs now is a version of that. It is louder and more vibrant [right now] because there’s an election to circle around, but it’s not unlike black women who fought for civil rights, and women throughout the South who have pushed back on narratives about who we are and what we’re capable of accomplishing.”

The whole thing is worth a read. I’ve heard folks here and elsewhere express pessimism. Ossoff can’t win. We’ll never take back the House. Plutocratic influence and the conservative propaganda machine are too strong to counter. The election of Trump means all is lost.

I’ve succumbed to that brand of pessimism myself occasionally. It’s okay to lose faith from time to time; that’s what separates people who are capable of considering new information and imagining a variety of possibilities from closed-minded zealots.

But regardless, we’ve got to keep fighting. The people dragging us backward want us to feel dispirited and helpless. If that makes you angry, the best way to give them the bird is to keep resisting.

PS: I made my daily call this morning to Senator Bill Nelson to urge him to oppose the super-secret Obamacare repeal bill, which he will. Also called Lil’ Marco to register my objections to his upcoming cave on that same bill. All lines were busy. That’s a good sign.

Reader Interactions

100Comments

  1. 1.

    Corner Stone

    Here we go, Ossoff! Here we go! (repeat ad infinitum)
    An oldie but a goodie from youth baseball.

  2. 2.

    Corner Stone

    We’ve got a couple families of wood ducks that live nearby. You’ll see them winging it between watering spots throughout the day. I always get a kick out watching the goofy way they fly, but not sure why exactly.

  3. 3.

    Corner Stone

    Speaking of Ossoff, Nicolle Wallace went at him hard yesterday during his segment on her show. She was really dismissive of him after that interview ended, also too. It made me wonder if she had ever worked for Handel or what the deal was.

  4. 4.

    cope

    Nice duck pictures, he looks almost animatronic.

    I’m glad for the youngs who have the spirit and drive to push things forward. My own daughter has gotten herself involved in the precinct level where she lives.

    I’m old and tired and often depressed and most of my energy goes toward assisting mrs. cope recover from her liver transplant but I’m heartened to know that resistance is NOT futile.

    Fight the good fight.

  6. 6.

    Elizabelle

    Go Ossoff go.

    And nice duck photo you got there. Will check in with you all for election returns tonight.

  7. 7.

    Corner Stone

    Abrams, who if elected in 2018 would be the nation’s first African-American woman governor

    First of all, that’s just astounding that it could be written and factually accurate in 2017/2018. Other than that, anyone from GA have any thoughts on Abrams actual chances?

  8. 8.

    rk

    We should be a country run by African-American women. 94% voted against Trump. The sanest group by far in the country.

  9. 9.

    David Stewart

    @Corner Stone: from Wikipedia: she served as Communications Chief during the presidency of George W Bush and in his 2004 re-election campaign.

  14. 14.

    Chris

    @rk:

    I realized not long ago that for pretty much all of American history (or least all of history during which they were allowed to vote), “who are the black people voting for?” is by far the most reliable litmus test in existence.

    (I’m not saying it’s infallible, but it’s still better than pretty much any other indicator I can think of).

  15. 15.

    WereBear

    @rk: We should be a country run by African-American women. 94% voted against Trump. The sanest group by far in the country.

    Seconded. The amount of shit being dealt with would be drastically reduced, in my experience.

  17. 17.

    Chris

    @rk:

    I realized not long ago that all through American history, or at least for all of it that they were allowed to vote, “who’s winning the black vote?” is by far the most reliable litmus test I can think of for whether or not to support a politician.

  19. 19.

    Major Major Major Major

    Go Ossoff! I am hopeful, although if he loses I’ll at least be treated to the very first “of course the damn everybody-gets-a-trophy generation can’t win actual contests” electoral think pieces.

  20. 20.

    hovercraft

    @Corner Stone:

    Nicolle Wallace went at him hard yesterday during his segment on her show. She was really dismissive of him after that interview ended, also too. It made me wonder if she had ever worked for Handel or what the deal was.

    At the end of the day, she’s still a republican who speaks of her old boss Shrub admiringly, both of his policies and his ‘dignity’. So yes we can applaud her for her brutal honesty when discussing the Orange Shitstain, but she also praises the likes of Tillerson and many of the Nat. Sec. team as people with ‘serious’ people with real policy chops who are being undermined by their boss. She’s described Spicey and others as people who were respectable serious people until the Orange menace destroyed them. Spicey was always a lying flack, he just used to be more subtle, all Twitler did was make him expose his lies as he told them.
    The media is describing Handel as a mainstream republican, not an extremist, this morning I heard them say that she’ll be more of a moderate, not Freedom Caucus material, in other words Nicole’s type of republican.

  21. 21.

    dww44

    Here’s another good reason Democrats need to gain traction here in the South,. DeKalb County is the more African-American populated of the 3 counties that make up the 6th:

    Voters at two polling locations in DeKalb County had slow check-ins this morning for the 6th Congressional District runoff, after officials discovered they had accidentally switched electronic poll books.

    The poll books contain electronic lists of voters for each of those locations, one at Livsey Elementary School and the other in Embry Hills at Holy Cross Catholic Church. Poll workers immediately switched to paper back-ups, and the correct electronic poll books are expected to be delivered at each location.

    Polls at each location still opened on-time at 7 a.m. this morning, but the mix-up may cause officials to seek extended voting time at both locations.

  22. 22.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Corner Stone: She was really dismissive of him after that interview ended, also too. It made me wonder if she had ever worked for Handel or what the deal was.

    She’s a lifelong professional Republican who, whatever her disgust with Palin or trump, described herself (on Letterman a couple years back) as really proud of having been part of the Bush administration. This was after Iraq, Katrina and the collapse of the economy.

  23. 23.

    schrodingers_cat

    Reposted from the dead morning thread
    What the Rs are doing is kinda expected, they have demagogued (sp?) ACA since its inception with an able assist from the media. Now that they are in power they are going to try and pass the repeal. No matter, what it does to the rest of us. They control all the levers of power in DC so their chances of success are high. Even so, we must fight every step of the way because giving up is not an option. That’s exactly what the Rs want us to do. Fight among ourselves, get dejected and do nothing. Our job is to stop them, if we can’t stop them then make their job difficult.
    I hope Ossoff wins but there is a high probability that he may not win Newt Gingrich’s old seat. We don’t give up if that happens, we fight another day. I don’t intend to make the Rs job easy for them by giving up. May be it is a futile battle but I want to do everything I can, otherwise I won’t be able to live with myself. 2018 midterms is our biggest opportunity to turn the tide. If we give up now, they win.

  24. 24.

    Quinerly

    Pulling for Ossoff. I’m hopeful. I do wish he had bothered to move to the district, though. Yes, I know his family is from there and he grew up there. He really should have moved there. Honestly, the living with the girlfriend in the next district sounds silly.

  25. 25.

    Gretchen

    @dww44: That’s what scares me. Supposedly the Russians got into the databases in this district, and they have the kind of electronic voting machines with no paper backup and no way to make sure they’re not flipping votes. So even if Handel wins, I won’t believe it’s a fair win.

  26. 26.

    Spanky

    @dww44: WTF? In Maryland the electric polling books contain the list of voters registered across the entire state. If someone shows up from another precinct they can vote provisionally, or they can be directed to their home polling place so long as they’re registered in the state. There’s no reason to limit polling books’ contents to a single precinct. Or district.

  27. 27.

    schrodingers_cat

    @Quinerly: Its always something isn’t it. Living in the next district, email server, being born in Hawaii. The Rs will demagogue anything and the MSM bots will sagely nod their heads. Meanwhile, T can call himself a working class billionaire and no one bats an eyelid.

  31. 31.

    eclare

    Posting again: AARP advocacy number: 1-844-833-9667. You enter your zip code and then it asks you to select which senator you want to speak to. Saw another AARP ad here in Memphis last night during Colbert to call Corker. I will be calling him and Alexander.

  33. 33.

    Ian G.

    On the topic of suburban white women, I was at a barbecue of the wife’s family this weekend, and one of her cousins (33 year old stay at home mother of 2 who lives in the very affluent town next to mine thanks to the investment banking job her husband has) told me that she’s volunteering as a petitioner for the Democratic Party when I asked, “what’s new with you?”

    I’ve seen a lot of this (anecdotally) on Facebook. Trump has woken something up in a lot of the white suburban 30something moms I know in and around New York. I don’t know if it’s a national trend, but given the subject of this post, I figure I’d contribute my $0.02.

  34. 34.

    Quinerly

    @schrodingers_cat: Yes…I know. This could have been corrected though. He should have moved. People are separated from their mates all the time…deployment, jobs, caring for family members…they make do. I hate saying this but he sounded a bit childish last night explaining it. In such a close election that may be decided by a few votes this could make a difference…”Why should I bother to vote? The guy didn’t bother to move.” Just saying…Fingers crossed, hope I’m not sending out bad vibes.

  35. 35.

    Kay

    Handel is one of the worst politicians anywhere on voting rights. An absolute horror. Go vote just because she doesn’t want you to:

    Let’s start with the purge. Weeks before the 2008 election, thousands of registered voters in Georgia had their citizenship challenged by the state, a policy spearheaded by Handel. One of them was Jose Morales, a student at Kennesaw State University, a legal permanent resident since he was a toddler who became a US citizen in November 2007. After filling out a voter registration form in September 2008, Morales received a letter from Cherokee County telling him that he must provide evidence of his citizenship in court or would be kept off the voter rolls.
    Morales drove 30 minutes from his home in Kennesaw to the Cherokee County Elections office in Canton, to give the clerk a copy of his passport. He was told that was sufficient evidence to prove his citizenship and received a copy of his voting card a week later. But a month before the election, on October 7, 2008, he received another letter saying he was still not qualified to vote and had to appear again before the Cherokee County Elections office to prove his citizenship again or else he would be purged from the rolls.
    At that point, the ACLU sued Georgia on Morales’s behalf, holding that the state’s citizenship verification process violated the Voting Rights Act and the National Voter Registration Act. “Despite all the steps he has gone through, Mr. Morales’ right to vote is still being threatened,” the lawsuit said. “Mr. Morales wants to vote, particularly in the upcoming election, and wants to make sure his vote is counted.”
    Handel criticized the lawsuit and spread unfounded claims about noncitizens voting. “Unfortunately, some groups appear to want to open the door to allow non-citizens to register and vote in the General Election,” she wrote.
    As Ian Millhiser of Think Progress noted, a panel of three Republican-appointed judges ruled against Handel and ordered her to “reasonably ensure that no voter is permanently deleted from the voter registration list.”
    However, despite the court victory, nearly 5,000 registered voters were told by the state they had to cast a “challenge” ballot at the polls. Congressman John Lewis called it “an attempt to take us back to another dark period in our history when people were denied access to the ballot box simply because of their race or nationality.” Of the 4,700 “challenged” voters, 2,700 never cast a ballot or had their ballots rejected, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
    After the election, the Justice Department said the voter purge violated the Voting Rights Act and was “seriously flawed.” “African Americans comprise a majority of the registrants flagged,” Acting Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Loretta King wrote to Georgia officials. “Hispanic and Asian individuals are more than twice as likely to appear on the list as are white applicants.”

    If she gets to DC she’ll join with Sessions and the rest of the low quality Trump hacks to roll back voting rights which will make it very difficult to get rid of her once she’s embedded.

  36. 36.

    Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes

    My prediction is that Ossoff loses by 3 to 5 points. This loss won’t be because of any campaign faults of his (which there were some), but because of the organic stupidity, banality, selfishness and evil which is a deep part of what it is to be a conservative suburban/exurban Republican – particularly in the South.

    I think the polling is way off, and that has nothing to do with Russians or gerrymandering.

  37. 37.

    FlipYrWhig

    @hovercraft: Yeah, I noticed on MSNBC last night in reports from the district they kept saying things like that it was more of a mainstream Republican district than a Trump/Tea Party kind of district (paraphrasing). I seem to recall Price as a wackaloon and Gingrich more or less invented modern wackaloon-ism, so I’m not sure where they’re getting that, except by a mistaken assumption that a district with a lot of college-educated people _must be_ “moderate” or “mainstream.”

  38. 38.

    FlipYrWhig

    @Quinerly: Well, then he’d get “he only moved into the district to run for office there,” which is the same critique anyway, really.

  40. 40.

    schrodingers_cat

    @Ian G.: When I went to get a haircut last October, everyone in the salon was discussing how terrible T was and how unfairly HRC was being treated by the media. I have never heard politics discussed in the salon before the last elections, ever.

  42. 42.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @FlipYrWhig: Robert Costa said on MSNBC last night that Republicans he talked to are frustrated with trump not because of Russia or Comey or the fly-by-the-seat-of-your-sugar-addled-ADD foreign policy, but because trump, Ryan and McConnell haven’t cut their taxes yet.

    His co-panelist was an African-American poly-sci professor who was shadowing canvassers. Someone called the police because he was walking through their neighborhood. Economic anxiety, donchano.

  43. 43.

    hovercraft

    @JPL:
    Not only that, when she was Secretary of State, the was a pioneer of voter suppression:

    Soon after taking office as Georgia Secretary of State, Handel began a project to purge voter rolls.[15] The procedure involved matching data with information in various sources such as the Georgia Department of Driver Services database or the Social Security Administration database.[16][16] Some eligible voters were told that they were “non-citizens” although in fact they were citizens.[15] Voter suppression allegations were raised and the rule became the subject of a federal lawsuit by the ACLU of Georgia and MALDEF, which accused Handel’s office of engaging in a “systematic purging procedure” expressly barred by federal law within 90 days of an elections.[15][17]

    In 2009, the United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division (DOJ) ordered a halt to the state’s “voter verification” effort (denying it approval under the Voting Rights Act of 1965), determining that “thousands of citizens who are in fact eligible to vote under Georgia law have been flagged” and that the program was “flawed … [and] frequently subjects a disproportionate number of African-American, Asian and/or Hispanic voters to additional, and more importantly, erroneous burdens on the right to register to vote. This marked the first time since the 1990s that the Justice Department had denied approval to a change in Georgia election practice.[17]

    She was one of the first to use Crosscheck. She was elected back in 2006, this is how they used it last year:

    In an on-the-ground report from the battleground state of Ohio, investigative reporter Greg Palast has uncovered the latest in vote suppression tactics led by Republicans that could threaten the integrity of the vote in Ohio and North Carolina. On some polling machines, audit protection functions have been shut off, and African Americans and Hispanics are being scrubbed from the voter rolls through a system called Crosscheck. “It’s a brand-new Jim Crow,” Palast says. “Today, on Election Day, they’re not going to use white sheets to keep way black voters. Today, they’re using spreadsheets.” . . .

    GREG PALAST: Reflecting Trump’s claim of multiple-voting Democrats, GOP-controlled states have purged nearly 1 million voters accused of voting or registering in two states. Ohio’s Republican secretary of state has a secret list of a whopping 497,000 double-voting suspects. We got our hands on this confidential list, including such would-be criminal voters as Donald Alexander Webster Jr., who supposedly voted a second time in Virginia as Donald Eugene Webster Sr.

    GREG PALAST: In fact, nearly 2 million voters on the list, called Crosscheck, have middle names that don’t match—like this one: Maria Isabel Hernandez is supposed to be the same voter as Maria Cristina Hernandez. Who’s on the list? Names like Hernandez, Wong, Garcia, Jackson.

    Our experts have calculated that fully one in six voters of color are on the Republican blacklist.

    I wasn’t saying she’s a moderate, the villagers on TV were. She came onto my radar with the Planned Parenthood debacle, which is what endeared her to the crazies, she’s a martyr for unborn babies.
    That she can be considered a “mainstream” republican just goes to show how fa to the right the GOP has gone, she is a radical evangelical, period.

    I haven’t seen any real talk about her record, all the “analysis” has been about what it means and what it will do to the agenda, and bullshit who’s up and who’s down, nothing about the candidates and what they plan to do or have done in the past.

  45. 45.

    Quinerly

    @FlipYrWhig:
    Not looking for an argument. I’m a dyed in the wool Dem who would vote for a rabid raccoon with a D after its name (Personally, I think we need more rabid raccoons in office!) But I find it troubling that he didn’t make the effort to move and his explanation when questioned on it is that “people respect me for supporting my fiancee in medical school so she can walk to class.” I’m paraphrasing but I did a double take last night when I heard him. Honestly, haven’t followed it as closely as I should have. Is this the answer he gives all the time when asked?

  46. 46.

    Kay

    There’s a hearing tomorrow on Russian interference in the 2016 election(s). Recall it wasn’t just Trump- congressional Democratic candidates were targeted too. The public only found out after the election.

    They’re supposedly calling state elections officials so maybe we’ll actually get some real information even with all the Trump hires stonewalling. The US AG is apparently too busy launching another ridiculous and ruinously expensive 1980’s -era “war on drugs” to bother with protecting US elections systems, but we’re the voters who rely on the systems. We can insist the Trump appointees do their jobs even if that puts them or Mr.Trump in legal peril. Their personal legal and ethical problems are not the priority issue here, despite the non-stop coverage that focuses exclusively on their career prospects and well-being.

  47. 47.

    hovercraft

    @schrodingers_cat: @Quinerly:

    Yes he could, but as he said last night on The Last Word, his fiancee is attending medical school at Emory, and they moved there so that she could walk to school. He grew up in the district, and now lives about two miles outside it in order to be supportive of his partner. I’m sure this has been explained to voters, but as usual the republicans are using it to distract from the fact that this should not even be competitive, and she’s a horrible candidate. I guess we’ll find out tonight, but there is a school of thought that thinks that Ossoff is going to do very well with white women, so all that initial optimism on the republican side about the large turnout by white women in the early vote, my turn out to be misplaced. Ossoff standing by his woman I think speaks well of him.

  49. 49.

    hovercraft

    @FlipYrWhig:
    Exactly, Newt and then Tom Price, that’s not moderate in my book. The fact that they barely went for the mental patient in the White House does not speak well of them for me. When push came to shove they still went for him, so it’s very much an up hill battle.

  50. 50.

    Betty Cracker

    @Kay: That explains why Fox News is pushing a laughably shoddy new “study” that claims 5M+ undocumented immigrants voted for Obama and probably even more for Clinton. I don’t watch Fox News, but I follow them on Twitter to see what they’re up to. They are pushing this lie hard and not giving links to the source. But if you bother to look it up for yourself (which 99% of Fox viewers won’t do), you can easily see what a bunch of hooey it is. So, I guess they’re prepping their audience against any possible alarm from committee findings that the Russians meddled with our election. [insert eyeroll emoji here]

  53. 53.

    Kay

    Ugh. Jared and Ivanka are going to China as US representatives. We won’t know one fucking thing about any deal these two cut – but in 6 months we’ll find out how it benefitted the Trump/Kushner families.

    Just gross how they’ve turned the Presidency into a some banana republic family enterprise. Have you noticed there’s less and less transparency? They do more and more in the dark. I don’t even know if Jared and Ivanka are subject to any rules since these nepotism positions were created just for them. It makes me sick. This is the new normal.

  55. 55.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Kay: China (Gzhyn-nah, per Alec Baldwin) has been cozying up to Princess Tackycrap and the Tackycrap products for months. Don’t worry, I’m sure Chris Cillizza and Andrea Mitchell are on it.

  56. 56.

    Quinerly

    @Kay:
    Gross is the word. I never had said that word so much in my life. Now, it’s at least 10 times a day.

  57. 57.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @JPL: I’m tired of it, and the incessant 10 emails a day from the DCCC begging for money.

  58. 58.

    Iowa Old Lady

    My only previous awareness of Handel came from when she destroyed the brand of the pink ribbon people. I’m not sure they’ve recovered yet. I, for one, won’t donate or buy their merchandise. There are plenty of other places to send my money.

  60. 60.

    Kay

    @Betty Cracker:

    Megyn Kelly has been magically rehabilitated into some kind of “journalist” but she was one of the worst Foxxers with bullshit voter fraud claims. It’s hard to stand out in that crowd but she managed. I love how it’s perfectly acceptable in media circles for this hack to “rebrand” herself to pull in another multi-million paycheck. Maybe if they stopped paying these people at the top so much they could hire someone who knows how elections work. They could pay a poll worker 75 dollars a day and that person would know more than any Fox news celebrity.

  61. 61.

    RedDirtGirl

    Open thread? It’s my birthday! Took the day off work, went shopping for healthy groceries to start a cleanse tomorrow, getting a haircut, pedicure, maybe going to the NYC Parks & Rec center in Red Hook for a little exercise, and then making a rhubarb crumb cake to go with the dinner my boyfriend of 10.5 months is making for me! It’s looking like a good start to my 53rd year!

  62. 62.

    Corner Stone

    @Quinerly:
    It’s got a groove, it’s got a meaning
    Gross is the time, is the place, is the motion
    Gross is the way we are feeling

  63. 63.

    Alternative Fax, a hip hop artist from Idaho

    I love your nature pictures! That is a lovely wood duck indeed. Thanks for the nature breaks from the shit show that is our current political reality. Which of course sadly affects the rest of our reality in a very negative way.

  65. 65.

    Chris

    @Betty Cracker:

    The GOP base has committed itself hard to voter suppression – it’s something I’ve noticed in the last decade. It’s no longer something Republican officials do behind the scenes. “We’re a republic not a democracy” is the publicly acceptable version of this, that and studies like the one you’re mentioning. But behind closed doors, they’re perfectly comfortable with suppressing the “wrong” votes.

  66. 66.

    schrodingers_cat

    @Kay: I have been saying this that we need our own media. The MSM and RW news service Rs, not us. I don’t want a propaganda operation just a place for straight news without either RW bias or both-siderism, that somehow favors only one side.

  67. 67.

    Quinerly

    @hovercraft:
    I guess that’s the interview I saw/heard. Back ground noise last night. I think I was discussing Malibu Coconut Rum with Baud at the time on a BJ thread.? And, yes, the Repugs are beating him over the head with it. I hope the not moving doesn’t cost him the election. As I hinted at, I don’t think people will vote for her b/c of it but there could be a chance that potential Ossoff voters might not vote at all because of it.

  68. 68.

    hovercraft

    @Kay: She became an independent “journalist” when she got into her spat with Twitler. The network execs were all pushing the line that she was a journalist because her contract was nearly up ans he was number one in primetime at the time. Sadly after Andy Lack gave her 17 million a years, he’s discovered that it was a captive audience that was watching her, and Tucker is getting almost the same numbers as she did, and she’s losing to re-runs of 60 Minutes and America’s Got Talent.

    I will never watch or respect her, she pimped the “knock knock game” bullshit and the New Black Panther stories for all that she was worth, fuck her, one a bullshit mountain denizen always a bullshit mountain denizen, it’s just that she’s decided to take her bullshit somewhere new.

  70. 70.

    MCA1

    @Quinerly: I’ve found myself partial to “shabby” lately. That and “tacky.” As in, it’s embarrassing the extent to which they’ve made all of American democracy appear shabby and tacky. “Gross” works, though, too. :^)

  71. 71.

    rikyrah

    @Kay:

    Ugh. Jared and Ivanka are going to China as US representatives. We won’t know one fucking thing about any deal these two cut – but in 6 months we’ll find out how it benefitted the Trump/Kushner families.

    to be honest..we already know the deals, Kay.

  72. 72.

    low-tech cyclist

    Betty – very nice pix of that wood duck. Clearly carved and painted by someone with great familiarity with the real thing, and a lot of talent and skill to boot.*

    Why a duck?

    And apropos of what a bunch of people have said upthread, calling someone a ‘moderate’ who is as horrible in so many ways as Handel is, shows you just how crazy things have really gotten.

    *I kid, I kid!

  74. 74.

    Corner Stone

    @hovercraft: So happy she is getting buried. Just wondering what could be the next possible step down for her to interview?
    I am never watching a minute of her on air, no matter where they try to prop her up.

    It’s a fucking disgrace they’d trade out Tamron Hall for this POS.

  77. 77.

    rikyrah

    Former AG Eric Holder: ‘Now is the time to be heard’
    06/20/17 10:50 AM—UPDATED 06/20/17 11:16 AM
    By Steve Benen

    Former Attorney General Eric Holder has been making a variety of public appearances lately, including delivering a speech to the Virginia Democratic Party last weekend. Before his remarks, Holder spoke with NBC News about a recent trip he took with Barack Obama, and the discussion the two had about redistricting reform.

    In fact, Obama asked Holder to lead a new organization, the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, “to prepare Democrats for 2020, when states will redraw the boundaries of their legislative and congressional districts for the first time in a decade.”

    Holder joked, “Part of my job is to make redistricting sexy” for Democrats.

    As it turns out, that may not be the only job the former attorney general has in mind. Yahoo News published an interesting piece this morning, noting that Holder is “re-entering the political fray,” perhaps with a national campaign in mind.

  78. 78.

    rikyrah

    @hovercraft:

    I will never watch or respect her, she pimped the “knock knock game” bullshit and the New Black Panther stories for all that she was worth, fuck her, one a bullshit mountain denizen always a bullshit mountain denizen, it’s just that she’s decided to take her bullshit somewhere new.

    PREACH!!!

  79. 79.

    Applejinx

    @rk:

    We should be a country run by African-American women. 94% voted against Trump. The sanest group by far in the country.

    You know I would be absolutely okay with that. Bring it. I’ve now voted for one of each, for President, and twice it worked, too.

    Bring ’em, I’ll vote for ’em. I am done with these pasty white faces extolling market capitalism and identity politics that mysteriously doesn’t extend to THEM getting the hell out of the way. Bring it.

  81. 81.

    Geeno

    @rk: As a pudgy, pasty white middle-aged dude, I, for one, would welcome our new black female overlords (overladies? whatever).

  83. 83.

    bemused

    Where does the flipping the bird gif come from, a movie? My long passed away mother would be shocked at how much I am loving this gif.

  87. 87.

    acallidryas

    I got through to Rubio’s Orlando office. The person who answered the phones said that Rubio doesn’t have a comment on the bill since it’s incomplete and I said I wasn’t asking for a comment on the bill, I wanted his commitment to force hearings on the bill and ensure the public knew what was in it before it came up for a vote. Then they rushed me off the phone. But keep calling!

  89. 89.

    dww44

    @Gretchen: Yes, I’ve been begging for paper trails for years and just get blank looks from the poll workers. Brian Kemp, the Secy of State and candidate for governor in 2018, is NOT to be trusted. He is not an objective impartial official. Without the paper trail we will have no assurances about the integrity of the election outcome. Other than his word.

  91. 91.

    dww44

    @Kay:

    Maybe if they stopped paying these people at the top so much they could hire someone who knows how elections work. They could pay a poll worker 75 dollars a day and that person would know more than any Fox news celebrity.

    This is another reason why everyone should watch this Charlie Gibson interview of David McCullough at the JFK Library broadcast on C-Span Book tv this past weekend. McCullough has lots to say about the sorts of people for whom we ought to be building statues to honor and writing books about. The unsung and unrecognized in our society. Though an hour and a half long, it’s well worth anyone’s time. This is a link to the You Tube version. McCullough is not young any more and we should all listen to him every opportunity we get. Rest assured, as far as I know, he’s perfectly healthy and continues to write.

  95. 95.

    D58826

    @Corner Stone: Well she is an R. But Katy Tur was being beaten up yesterday because she didn’t go after Der Fuhrer more.

    Personally I would like to see tough. probing questions, with follow up as need be. No cheap gotcha stuff. If the pol can’t stand the heat from Wallace then how will they do in DC??? And I suspect it is inevitable that some one left of center is going to look at Nicolle Wallace’s questions a bit differently than some one right of center. I doubt that the right of center crowd much likes Chris Hayes or Rachel when they question a R.

    Now Megyn Kelly can take a long walk off of a very short pier. And she can take her old playmates Hannity/Carlson along for company.

  96. 96.

    D58826

    @rikyrah:

    Jared and Ivanka are going to China as representatives of Trump Inc. Fixed that. Only relation to

    US representative

    is the taxpayer will be paying the bills for the trip.

  97. 97.

    D58826

    @hovercraft: While I would love to see Ossoff win, I’m not sure if it says a lot about the long term prospects for the D’s in 2018. If he loses it is a deep red seat in a deep red state. If he wins it might be a statement
    about Der Fuhrer or just a fluke. If the economy is booming in 2018 then the R’s will win even if Der Fuhrer shoots a lot of people in Time square. If the economy is in the tank then the R’s will be in trouble regardless of who is in the WH.

    I think the real significance of his winning is that it will scare the GOOPPERs S*less at least for a few weeks. Maybe just long enough so that the D’s, along with a couple of R’s who stop by “RENT-A-BACKBONE’ for some vertebrae, can kill Trumpcare. Even if he turns out to be a one hit wonder in 2018, if his victory can derail Trumpcare then he has earned an extra 15 minutes of fame.

  100. 100.

    JR in WV

    We live in hilly country, with little creeks everywhere, mostly beside the roads. One morning, back in the 1990s, on my way to work I was driving down the hollow, with a little creek beside me.

    A wood dock was spooked by my vehicle, and launched from the tiny creek like a mortar bomb. It scared me a little, and if it hadn’t been ruler straight beside our bottom, I might have run off the road into the creek.

    I know it was a woods duck, because that’s the only sort of duck we have here in the wooded hills of western WV. On the big rivers I’m sure there are lots of sorts of ducks, but not around here.

    I also saw a Great Blue Heron one night on the way home. Also spooked, launched almost vertically, but huge compared to the wood duck. My headlights were shining on the Heron’s belly, the pale nearly white side of the big bird.

    But the wood duck was way faster, and launched away from my direction of travel. Hard to describe the experience, but it was cool. We also have King Fishers, which I heard of, because as a kid, I grew up on a ridge top. No creek birds, no frogs, a few toads.

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