Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

Innocent people don’t delay justice.

Glad to see john eastman going through some things.

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

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

Baby steps, because the Republican Party is full of angry babies.

I conferred with the team and they all agree – still not tired of winning!

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

Fuck that bum, let’s go Joe!

with the Kraken taking a plea, the Cheese stands alone.

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

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

Marge, god is saying you’re stupid.

Found liable for massive fraud, is required to post a massive bond, gets a break, then files a *fraudulent* bond!

There are a lot more evil idiots than evil geniuses.

Come on, man.

ha ha ha! Nice try weird people.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

In after Baud. Damn.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

Can we lighten up on the doomsday scenarios?

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

So many bastards, so little time.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Because of wow. / Monday Morning Open Thread: Readership Capture, Vacation Edition

Monday Morning Open Thread: Readership Capture, Vacation Edition

by | 133 Comments

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Since it’s an extended weekend for some of us, and everybody could use a little break from the relentless Republican assault on everything worth anything.

Vacation planning or not, what’s on the agenda for the start of the new week?

***********
From the Washington Post (which also has photos) “Obama pushes tolerance, respect in childhood home Jakarta”:

… “I wasn’t worried about what was in the newspapers today,” former president Barack Obama said during a nostalgic visit to Indonesia’s capital, his childhood home. “What I was worried about was, ‘What are they going to write about me 20 years from now when I look back?’ ”

Obama was greeted by a crowd of thousands, including leaders, students and businesspeople, in Jakarta, where he opened the Fourth Congress of Indonesian Diaspora.

He reminisced about moving to Jakarta in 1967 when he was just 6 years old, shouting, “Indonesia bagian dari diri saya!” or “Indonesia is part of me!”…

Obama stressed the importance of stepping away from news sites where only like-minded views are shared, and he warned about social media giving rise to resentment of minorities and bad treatment of people.

He urged the country to be a light of democracy and to never stop embracing differences. Indonesia has faced a rise in Islamist radicalism and anti-gay attacks and was recently condemned by rights groups for jailing Jakarta’s former governor, an ethnic Chinese Christian, for blasphemy.

“The spirit of this country has to be one of tolerance. It’s enshrined in Indonesia’s constitution, it’s symbolized by mosques and temples and churches beside each other,” Obama said. “That spirit is one of the defining things about Indonesia. It is one of the most important characteristics to set as an example for other Muslim countries around the world.”

(I do believe this is one of the most sophisticated examples of ‘throwing shade’ it has ever been my pleasure to read… )

Reader Interactions

133Comments

  1. 1.

    Baud

    Obama stressed the importance of stepping away from news sites where only like-minded views are shared, and he warned about social media giving rise to resentment of minorities and bad treatment of people.

    Was he in Indonesia or Indiana?

  5. 5.

    Elizabelle

    @Baud: Yeah, really. Listen up, some of you Hoosiers. (There are smart Indianians too; the Pence act did not fool everyone.)

  8. 8.

    Baud

    @satby: You reduced the gap when you moved there, however. Now we need to just figure out how to do that about 2 million more times.

  9. 9.

    satby

    Unless they call and cancel my afternoon shift, I work today but am off tomorrow. Think I’m going to relocate one set of cats back upstairs now that we have a long spell of cooler weather coming and try to paint that bedroom. My house updating has seriously lagged behind Cole’s.

  10. 10.

    David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch

    ya know what’s great about this CNN thing is Trump is in office in large part due to billions of dollars they gave him in in-kind contributions.

    [Trump] got $4.96 billion in free earned media in the year leading up to the presidential election, according to data from tracking firm mediaQuant. He received $5.6 billion throughout the entirety of his campaign, more than Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio combined.

    It’s like the US pouring billions in support to Saddam Hussein and bin Laden and being shocked at the predictable blowback.

  11. 11.

    Another Scott

    Excellent.

    In other news, and as rhetorical ammo for the Obamacare battle in the Senate, take a look at this in case you haven’t seen it before.

    Well done.

    Peoples lives are on the line.

    (via LOLGOP on Twitter)

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  12. 12.

    Baud

    I wonder what they’ll talk about.

    Former President Barack Obama will be in South Korea Monday, giving a speech at an international forum hosted by a local newspaper.

    The Korea Herald said Obama will also meet informally with former President Lee Myung-bak and current President Moon Jae-in.

    The meeting comes shortly after President Trump hosted Moon at the White House.

  14. 14.

    OzarkHillbilly

    One-armed Turkish protester denounces investigation against him

    “I’m a one-armed person, and there’s a teacher with a pacemaker, but our argument is strong and these people are obviously normal and innocent when the government tries to portray us as terrorists,” he said. “We are right, our argument is right, and they know that. Whenever we try to demand our rights, it ends in detentions, beatings, torture or death.

    “But I’m hopeful, that’s why I’m protesting,” he added.

  18. 18.

    Baud

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    Whenever we try to demand our rights, it ends in detentions, beatings, torture or death.

    Yeah, but do they have to face ugly unhinged tweets?

  20. 20.

    Kay

    Nearly 60 teenagers accepted diplomas from Bronx Preparatory High School there on Monday, amid all the usual trappings of a graduation ceremony. But for three men in their 40s who joined the teenagers onstage, wearing the same blue academic robes, the day was no less meaningful.
    They were Yusef Salaam, Kevin Richardson and Raymond Santana Jr., three members of the Central Park Five. Years ago, they missed the graduation ceremonies for their own high schools because they were in prison for a crime they did not commit.
    On Monday, they received honorary diplomas and the capped, gowned feting they had been denied.
    “Even though we were not able to go back and right the wrong of not getting our high school diplomas outside, here we are being honored in such a way in front of our family and friends,” Mr. Salaam said from the stage, smiling broadly. “This is a blessing.”

    Donald J. Trump rarely apologizes. When it comes to the case of the Central Park Five, he has never even come close.
    In 1989, after these black and Latino teenagers from Harlem were accused of assaulting and raping a white woman in Central Park, Mr. Trump spent $85,000 placing full-page ads in the four daily papers in New York City, calling for the return of the death penalty.
    “Muggers and murderers,” he wrote, “should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes.” Though he didn’t refer to the teenagers by name, it was clear to anyone in the city that he was referring to them.
    Incredibly, 14 years after their sentences were vacated based on DNA evidence and the detailed and accurate confession of a serial rapist named Matias Reyes, Mr. Trump has doubled down.

  22. 22.

    Phylllis

    @Another Scott: With Nikki, the old saying about not attributing to malice that which is easily explained by stupidity is the truest thing ever. Any random sack of doorknobs has more sentience than that one.

  25. 25.

    Kay

    @Baud:

    It’s good that people are still doing nice things in spite of the asshole spewing his hatred and bile all over the place. What a good idea to make sure they had a graduation! It wouldn’t have occurred to me.

  27. 27.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @Baud:
    Christ almighty. Foreign governments have given up on Trump and are going back to Obama instead. I can see it. He may not have power, but he can tell them what to expect and how to get the best international situation in both short and long run. It’s like negotiating with the presidency as an ongoing institution rather than the current occupant.

  29. 29.

    Kay

    @bystander:

    I thought it was a real injustice that his staffers were prosecuted and he wasn’t. Come on. Either drop the case against the underlings or get the big fish.

  32. 32.

    Kay

    Well, I have a very busy Monday. This is a weird holiday- a Tuesday off. What am I supposed to do with one day off in the middle of the week? :)

  33. 33.

    bystander

    @Kay: I don’t know enough about Jersey politics to know why, but I wonder if the failure to hold Christie accountable resembles why twitler is not being held to account.

  34. 34.

    TS

    President Obama is welcome anywhere in the world – the short fingered bully must be seething.

  35. 35.

    Kay

    @bystander:

    2 years to take out two NJ political operatives. Seems like a lot of effort for not reaching Christie or really anyone with any real power.

  36. 36.

    Elizabelle

    @Frankensteinbeck: You are on to something. Would guess that’s correct. And what a way to get underneath Trump’s thin skin, and that of his crony capitalism administration. They are scoundrels, not statesmen. The rest of the world sees that. Clearly.

  38. 38.

    OzarkHillbilly

    ‘I was sold seven times’: the Yazidi women welcomed back into the faith

    Captured and raped by Isis fighters, Yazidi women fear rejection on their release. Now they are learning to heal thanks to a revolution in their religion

    A month later, after Nour refused to convert and marry Abu Orfman, he lost interest and sold her on. There was one more sale before a Yazidi ally, posing as a slave trader from Raqqa, bought Nour and her children freedom. “He looked like an Isis militant – he wore their clothes, and had a beard and something covering his face,” Nour remembers. But as he drove them away, he revealed he was taking them to her family. “I told him I couldn’t believe he wasn’t Isis, but he said: ‘This beard is fake. I only wear it to save women and girls.’”

    A voice message from her father finally convinced Nour that her ordeal was over. She remembers the fierce joy of that moment, but also the fear that replaced it as she sped away from Isis territory. Now that she had won the battle to survive, she faced the looming question of whether she would ever really be able to go home; under Yazidi religious law, the women seized and raped by Isis should be evicted from their faith and permanently ostracised from their communities.

  39. 39.

    Patricia Kayden

    So glad to see that President Obama and his lovely family are deserving a much deserved break from the U.S. Hope they stay as long as necessary to rejuvenate themselves after 8 arduous years in the White House.

  42. 42.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Kay: Drink beer, eat BBQ, piss off the neighbors with loud music and drunken family brawls, then finish by blowing off your fingers with illegal fireworks.

  43. 43.

    Patricia Kayden

    @Baud: Baud, you are so vicious!! LOL. Trump would have a breakdown right there in Parliament if that happened.

  45. 45.

    Hal

    How about appointing Barack and Michelle world ambassadors and they go in place of Trump on all overseas trips.

  47. 47.

    Iowa Old Lady

    Sadly, the Y is open this morning so I have to go to my aerobics class.

    Christie is just giving his constituents the finger. He’s what we thought he was.

  48. 48.

    MomSense

    @Kay:

    Same for me. It also meant going to the office this weekend to do the paperwork I would normally do on Tuesday.

  50. 50.

    Raven

    4:45 out here. On the rental shuttle to LAX 2.5 hrs early. I’m glad I came and glad to be headed home.

  54. 54.

    Amir Khalid

    Did the WaPo reporter get that one sentence in Bahasa Indonesia from a transcript, or did she write down what she heard? Or did Obama misremember his grammar? Because that’s not quite how we would say it in Bahasa Malaysia. We’d say, “Indonesia sebahagian daripada diri saya”.

    Yet again, Barack Obama humiliates Donald Trump. Every time Obama comes to Indonesia he is greeted by huge crowds as a long-lost son. Trump must plan to arrive in Britain, the country of his mother’s birth, in the dead of night, to avoid huge crowds of hostile Britons.

  55. 55.

    dmsilev

    In Boston with family. Father’s hip operation went well; he should be discharged from the hospital today, and then to a rehab place for a week or so, and then home.

  56. 56.

    dmsilev

    @JPL: You mean a worse breakdown than the extended six month and counting temper tantrum that we’ve gotten so far?

  58. 58.

    Raven

    @OzarkHillbilly: I know I shouldn’t be but I’m always surprised by these huge crowds at LAX in the early morning. The Soutwest self serve bag check with the boarding pass app worked like a charm.

  59. 59.

    Amir Khalid

    @JPL:
    It’s hard to imagine what Trump having a “breakdown” would look like, compared to his current behaviour.

  61. 61.

    magurakurin

    @JPL:

    If Donald Trump had a breakdown, would anyone notice?

    I guess that will depend on how close you are to the respective Ground Zeros.

  62. 62.

    ?BillinGlendaleCA

    The Japanese Garden I visited yesterday is called Suiho-En, Garden of Water & Fragrance. I’m guessing the fragrance comes with the water from the sewage treatment plant next door.

    ETA: Again waiting for Android to optimize apps. I had to reinstall xpossed to get my tweaks.

  65. 65.

    debbie

    @dmsilev:

    Actually, Trump’s tantrum has lasted since the late 1970s, when he decided he wasn’t getting the attention he felt he deserved.

  66. 66.

    efgoldman

    He urged the country to be a light of democracy and to never stop embracing differences. Indonesia has faced a rise in Islamist radicalism and anti-gay attacks

    Can you imagine Amber Asswipe saying that in a speech, even if somebody else wrote it for him and he read it.

  70. 70.

    rikyrah

    Reminder:
    Your local Secretary of State office WILL be open today.
    So, please call and tell them that you do not agree with them cooperating with Dolt45’s Voter Suppression Commission.

  77. 77.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Raven: Obviously, your first name isn’t “Muhammad” and your last name isn’t “Ali”.

  84. 84.

    Jeffro

    Charles Blow, as usual, mincing no words in the NYT today:

    Every now and then we are going to have to do this: Step back from the daily onslaughts of insanity emanating from Donald Trump’s parasitic presidency and remind ourselves of the obscenity of it all, registering its magnitude in its full, devastating truth.

    There is something insidious and corrosive about trying to evaluate the severity of every offense, trying to give each an individual grade on the scale of absurdity. Trump himself is the offense. Everything that springs from him, every person who supports him, every staffer who shields him, every legislator who defends him, is an offense. Every partisan who uses him — against all he or she has ever claimed to champion — to advance a political agenda and, in so doing, places party over country, is an offense.

    We must remind ourselves that Trump’s very presence in the White House defiles it and the institution of the presidency. Rather than rising to the honor of the office, Trump has lowered the office with his whiny, fragile, vindictive pettiness.

    The presidency has been hijacked.

    So true.

    Apropos of nothing (except perhaps the prospect of losing the ACA in the next couple of weeks), I was picturing a GOTV ad that would show people marching, calling, faxing, emailing frantically…and then cuts to a spokesperson, who says to the camera, “OR, you could just make sure you, your friends, and family vote in every election.”

    Or one that says, “When you vote -> Obama
    When you don’t vote -> Trump
    Any questions?”

  85. 85.

    Spanky

    @?BillinGlendaleCA: I had a boss once who would bring a six-pack of diet Coke into the office every day. Never ate lunch, but he sure finished off that six-pack

    He is dead now.

  86. 86.

    Baud

    @Jeffro: Voting shouldn’t be seen as an alternative to the other things. Similarly, those other steps are no substitute for voting.

  88. 88.

    Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes

    What I love about the Obama vacations is that they’re adventurous and involve a lot of physical activity beyond rolling around in a goddamned golf cart on courses that you already know by heart.

    One of the things that appalls me as a man is his penchant to golf only on courses he knows – he appears unwilling to try it on a new place and post a card that would be deemed as “less than winning”. There is no joy in a new experience for the sake of an experience – he only wants to tick off a box or carve a mark on his bedpost. There is no “wow – the sand traps on this course really kicked my ass. I’d love to play it again to see if I can do better”, as that would take effort.

  89. 89.

    OzarkHillbilly

    Natural Disasters by Location: Rich Leave and Poor Get Poorer

    A couple of really interesting US maps at the link. The first one shows a belt of disaster prone counties thru the midsection of the country from Texas in the west to Florida in the east, north to N Dakota. The gulf coast is obviously hurricanes and moving north thru OK and AR into MO one has Tornado Alley (with flooding in the Ozarks) but WTF is up with ND??? One thing really jumps out at me: Both Alabama and Florida have nearly all deep red very disaster prone counties, but cross the state line into Georgia and “POOF” disasters almost disappear. It’s like they don’t have trailer parks in GA.

  90. 90.

    Amir Khalid

    @Spanky:
    As fond of Coke Light (Diet Coke’s international name) as I am, I would never drink two litres of it every day.

  91. 91.

    Patricia Kayden

    @Elizabelle: Trump was welcomed warmly in Israel and Saudi Arabia so he’s not universally hated. I’m sure he’ll get a warm welcome in East European countries including Russia of course.

  92. 92.

    Amir Khalid

    @OzarkHillbilly:
    Them who’s got, got out of town; them who ain’t got left to drown
    Tell me, How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?
    — Bruce’s take on Katrina

  93. 93.

    Patricia Kayden

    @Amir Khalid: Imagine having to sneak into an allied country because you fear protests. Trump is such a cowardly blowhard. He cannot abide criticism.

  95. 95.

    Immanentize

    @OzarkHillbilly: There is similar phenomena my friend researched in New Orleans for an environmental Justice initiative. Poor people lived in the lowlands while the rich took the high ground. The neighborhoods could look almost completely integrated, but they were fully segregated by altitude.

  99. 99.

    Immanentize

    @germy: Not surprising. But I really really hope he at least waits one more term for the mid-month elections…..

  101. 101.

    germy

    @Immanentize:

    Rick Hasen of Election Law Blog noticed this new clue hiding in an NPR story on Justice Neil Gorsuch that was published on Saturday. Nina Totenberg reported:

    But it is unlikely that Kennedy will remain on the court for the full four years of the Trump presidency. While he long ago hired his law clerks for the coming term, he has not done so for the following term (beginning Oct. 2018), and has let applicants for those positions know he is considering retirement.

    Clerk hiring can offer clues about whether a justice is mulling retirement. Current justices get four clerks each and retired justices get one, so sometimes justices only hire one clerk if they don’t think they’ll finish out their term. Though, as Above the Law’s David Lat explained, that’s not a hard and fast rule:

    Now, hiring clerks for 2017-2018 and 2018-2019 is not dispositive evidence that a justice will remain on the bench. There’s a nice tradition at the Court of justices picking up “orphaned” hires of their colleagues (which is what happened with Justice Antonin Scalia’s displaced clerks), so the clerks aren’t necessarily left in the lurch. But as a matter of collegiality and consideration — and whether or not you like his jurisprudence, Justice Kennedy is collegial and considerate — it’s not nice to impose upon your colleagues by hiring clerks you know will never work for you, putting pressure on these colleagues to sacrifice their own hiring discretion to scoop up your leftovers (because of SCOTUS tradition).

    Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who obviously does not want President Trump appointing her successor, has already selected her clerks through 2020. But as of March, there were plenty of other justices who, like Kennedy, had yet to make their hires for the term that starts in 2018.

    http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/justice-anthony-kennedy-retirement-watch-is-already-back-on.html

  102. 102.

    Brachiator

    I thought that everyone in my office would have the day off. I wuz wrong. And then it was too late to get the day off. Oh, well.

  104. 104.

    Laura

    @rikyrah: Good morning Rikyrah. Remember when our President was an elegant, decent and thoughtful man?

    Safe travels home Raven.

    I hope Satby’s afternoon shift is cancelled.

    Spouse is working today, so it’s me and Chet the weinie dog left to guard the fort. We believe it’s best done from the hammock. A day of blissful sloth is a rare bird event and we are stoked!

  105. 105.

    Jeffro

    @Baud: um, ok. If Democrats had won the presidency, House, Senate, what would we be marching for? And while I’m sure we would be getting in touch with our representatives from time to time, I doubt we would be calling faxing and emailing multiple times a day every day, trying to keep Congress from taking healthcare from tens of millions of people.

    I do agree with the latter part – there is no substitute for voting.

  106. 106.

    Spanky

    Well,now waiting at the vet with 3 yowling cats. Two for well-check and shots. Archie for x-rays of his guts to help pin down his puking problem.

    Good times.

  108. 108.

    Randall S Bott

    My vacation plan is to head to Las Vegas in a few days to play in The World Series of Poker Main Event. I won a seat!

  109. 109.

    Elizabelle

    @Raven: Happy jet trails, Raven. Glad you got a few ocean dips this trip.

    I booked my return flight today, and laid on an LA trip. Watch out Juicers!

  111. 111.

    Karen

    @OzarkHillbilly: North Dakota, in Great Plains get horrendous hail storms, in dry years fires, in winter blizzards; not a people friendly place which is why there are so few up there.

  114. 114.

    Raven

    @Elizabelle: yea, I got down there yesterday morning and forgot my towel so I trecked up the hill to Vons and bought one just so I could catch one last wave!

  115. 115.

    ewrunning

    How’s this for some 110 year-old shade throwing?

    In working my way through the last volume of Mark Twain’s autobiography, I came across something he quoted from an August 22, 1907 speech by a progressive Republican Congressman from Massachusetts (and later governor of the Commonwealth) named Samuel Walker McCall. Twain thought it applicable to then President Theodore Roosevelt. It seems to me much more relevant to our present situation. In a somewhat longer excerpt of the speech on the web I found out that the speech’s primary subject was government involvement in fixing rail carriage rates. In the context of expressing concern about excessive executive power at the expense of the Congress, McCall said the following:

    “But if your government is imaged in one man there will be grave danger. It will reflect all the extreme qualities of the man.

    “You are liable some day to have a President supremely lacking in the qualities of a statesman, and one who is egotistic, impulsive, of immature judgment, a mere glutton of the limelight, ready to barter away prosperity and even his country’s freedom for momentary popular applause.

    “If he is an autocrat, such as he is, such for the time, will your country be. Instead of a mighty nation, great in her physical strength and greater in her moral qualities, you may have a strutting, confiscating, shrieking, meddling America. God save us from such a day!”

  118. 118.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Karen: So do Montana and Minnesota and S Dakota (if you look at the map you can see the high disaster zones leak into MN in the counties along the Red River, so that explains those) It’s just weird, and one has to look to governance for some of the differences, just look at Alabama/Florida/Georgia. Something is going on there and it’s real. I’ve never yet seen a tornado or a hurricane that stopped at state lines.

  121. 121.

    d58826

    (I do believe this is one of the most sophisticated examples of ‘throwing shade’ it has ever been my pleasure to read… )

    Obama has been criticized for not coming full out against Der Fuhrer. Obama seems to think that the ‘I shall not criticize my successor’ is a norm worth saving. But he does seem to show up in places (Berlin, London) or make statements like in Indonesia that on the surface seem like Obama talking about something of interest to him, yet the shade is thrown.

  122. 122.

    MoxieM

    The Botanical Gardens in Bogor are A-maze-ing. I’m guessing that’s the golf cart beezwax. (Also a –former?–Indonesian Presidential palace there.) It’s much cooler up in the hills. Wasband & family and all the expats would decamp from Jakarta to Bogor in the summer to escape the summer heat and pollution. Colonial, what what!?

    However, it is a fantastic corner of the world just gorgeous and beautiful.

    But yes, now I have to watch the Year of Living Dangerously again. Wasband was a child when all that went down (well, in fairness he’s still a child, ba da bum!). Then in the civil “unrest”, aka wars, of ca. 1998 2000 his parents had a tank parked in front of their house, and would send servants out with tea for the Marines.

  125. 125.

    MoxieM

    Am here, unpacking, housesitting sister’s house in Hamp (thank goodness I have a civilized place to escape to!).

    You live somewheres out here in Paradise Valley, correct? Would be nice to have a meet n’ greet. I am still barely human having only just moved over the weekend …. but soon!

    Let’s figure out contact, etc.

Comments are closed.