Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Happy indictment week to all who celebrate!

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

I’m pretty sure there’s only one Jack Smith.

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

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

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

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

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

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

Accountability, motherfuckers.

We still have time to mess this up!

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

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

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

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

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

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

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

If you’re pissed about Biden’s speech, he was talking about you.

“Squeaker” McCarthy

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Reader Interactions

160Comments

  2. 2.

    Major Major Major Major

    I spent all afternoon writing a giant regular expression. I am completely braindead! I can’t wait to get home and color in some ghosts I drew. Spoiler alert: there are ghosts in my horror comic.

    Actually I’m non-braindead enough to know that you used the wrong ‘imminent’, AL.

  6. 6.

    Elizabelle

    BJ is loading fine for me. Of course, I have AdBlocker.

    The Obama video is stunning for the lack of white male faces in it. Uh huh.

  23. 23.

    WaterGirl

    The news of the day has left me spiting mad, so I am going to self-depot from BJ for the evening. Somebody wake me if this has all been just a bad dream.

  24. 24.

    Raven

    Well , I got to my hometown about 4pm. I’ve driven around and seen most of what I wanted to including the house my dad grew up in. There’s supposed to be an informal gathering at tavern but no one is here so I guess it’s the Illini from Tampa!

  27. 27.

    Corner Stone

    @Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD): The whole thing makes me want to choke him to death but these two pull quotes:
    “The deeper I read into What Happened’s email chapter, the more convinced I became that the press was right to pressure Clinton on the story. She believes what she did was dumb. She believes she owns what she did. She takes responsibility. With all that being true, the press was right to make a racket about it.”
    …
    “But who fed the press corps’ appetite? Clinton. She stonewalled the press on the emails for five months, and that will make any reporter hungry. “

  30. 30.

    MomSense

    I miss Obama. I miss having that beautiful family in the White House showing the world Americans at our best.

  36. 36.

    ET

    God I miss him. I was watching videos of him on YouTube – the Joe Biden medal surprise, at a couple of schools, when he was having dinners with the raffle winners during the campaign and all I could think of was how I wanted a rational grown-up as president again AND IT HASN’T EVEN BEEN ONE FULL YEAR of him yet.

  38. 38.

    Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)

    @Corner Stone: He’s like Brendan O’Neill, only without the accent ever having left pretensions superficially interesting arguments…actually no, he’s exactly like Brendan O’Neill.

    You’ll be unsurprised to know he supported Bloomberg 2016 for reasons somehow even pettier than you were probably thinking of. How CNN (or failing that, the FTFNYT) hasn’t picked him up yet boggles the mind.

  40. 40.

    dm

    Listening to the Hillary interviews lately, I think — what a great commentator she would make. Looking forward to her replacing John McCain on all the talk shows. That’s what happens with failed presidential candidates, right? They show up every weekend on the news talk shows?

    ETA: strike-out “failed”. She won the popular vote, after all.

  41. 41.

    Corner Stone

    @Baud:

    This doesn’t come up as often, but I miss a Democratic Congress.

    I miss waking up on a day ending in Y and not having someone scream at me that I better call my elected officials or 30M Americans are going to die in the next 12 months. I know that’s their point but geez it is freaking exhausting to have to fight all three branches of government every day to keep them from hurting people.

  49. 49.

    NotMax

    Kind of amused at the tracking data for a package sent to just a hop, skip and jump outside NYC border this Tuesday. Within the span of less than 8 hours today, mostly during the wee post-midnight hours, it arrived at the “Metro NY Distribution Center” then was sent on to the “Nashua NH Distribution Center” and then from there to and arrived at the local post office at its ZIP code destination for final delivery.

    Not a rant, not a complaint, not a biggie; simply found the seemingly extra New England leg of its journey a small chuckle.

  51. 51.

    Bex

    “YOU may like” these awful ads, but I hate them. Cheap clickbait that I see on other sites. And I thought Larry King was bad. Tiger Woods? Gimmeafeckingbreak.

  59. 59.

    SiubhanDuinne

    I can’t stand how much I miss Barack Obama, President of the United States of America.

    So much miss.

  60. 60.

    japa21

    @NotMax: That happened to me recently. It was delivered to the distribution center 10 miles from my house, then suddenly it showed up 100 miles away in Wisconsin, then back to the earlier distribution center than to local office , then delivered.

  63. 63.

    efgoldman

    @?BillinGlendaleCA:

    there’s Sen. Graham’s amendment to the Defense Authorization Act that lets the Sec. of DHS strip people of their citizenship.

    As noted a thread or two back, probably unconstitutional, and probably subject to filibuster.
    Here’s what Wiki says:

    The Fourteenth Amendment does not provide any procedure for revocation of United States citizenship. Under the Supreme Court precedent of Afroyim v. Rusk, loss of 14th-Amendment-based U.S. citizenship is possible only under the following circumstances:[29]
    Fraud in the naturalization process. Technically this is not loss of citizenship, but rather a voiding of the purported naturalization and a declaration that the immigrant never was a U.S. citizen.
    Voluntary relinquishment of citizenship. This may be accomplished either through renunciation procedures specially established by the State Department or through other actions (e.g., treason) which demonstrate an intention to give up U.S. citizenship.[30] Such an act of expatriation must be accompanied by an intent to terminate United States citizenship

  68. 68.

    Kay

    @Corner Stone:

    “But who fed the press corps’ appetite? Clinton. She stonewalled the press on the emails for five months, and that will make any reporter hungry. “

    Obviously. Look how they’ve followed up on Trump’s tax returns!

  71. 71.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @?BillinGlendaleCA:

    Strike-out is “[del]…[/del]”.

    (Of course replacing brackets with greater-than, less-than’s.)

    Can also use [strike]…[/strike], replacing square brackets with angle brackets.

  72. 72.

    TenguPhule

    So now the auto-playing ads are back AND We’re stuck with Taboola on the site?

    Alain, why do you hate us so?

  75. 75.

    TenguPhule

    @Baud:

    This doesn’t come up as often, but I miss a Democratic Congress.

    Hell, I miss a working government not embroiled in a sea of fraud and scandal.

  76. 76.

    Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.)

    Since this is an open thread… My wife was flicking through the television and stopped on a channel where a guy was at the Frankford Car Show, and I said to here, “That seems like a weird place to have a car show.” And she said, “Germany?” And I said, “No, northeast Philadelphia. Wait, Frankford or Frankfurt? Oh, maybe that makes more sense.”
    Sometimes I don’t know what the hell is going on…

  78. 78.

    Teddys Person

    Feeling a little hopeless today. I think what sent me over the edge was my hairdresser informing me that there is no racism in the country. The MSM is just making it up and BLM is a Soros org just stirring up trouble. Sigh, I’m going to have to find a new hairdresser. To make myself feel better and off set the money I put in my asshole hairdresser’s pocket, I donated to the United We Dream DACA Renewal Fund.

  82. 82.

    Kay

    The deeper I read into What Happened’s email chapter, the more convinced I became that the press was right to pressure Clinton on the story.

    No one has ever said they shouldn’t have “pressured” Clinton on the story. People are looking for an admission that it was ridiculous and insane to cover emails and nothing else for 16 months.

    Also- the tax returns really are a double standard. They shut up about Trump’s tax returns because he told them to fuck off. They dropped it because he ordered them to drop it.

  85. 85.

    Kay

    I must say I love Nate Silver for periodically reminding them of the truth on the emails. They never dispute his facts, they just get all huffy and flounce away. I swear he has it calendered. Once a month. Forever, hopefully.

  87. 87.

    TenguPhule

    @Kay:

    People are looking for an admission that it was ridiculous and insane to cover emails and nothing else for 16 months.

    Her Emails and Clinton Foundation and Wall Street Speeches.

    Oh and she hurt their feelings by calling some of them deplorables.

    It actually was a sea of sewage, but the emails just got the most publicity.

  90. 90.

    Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)

    @Teddys Person: A few months ago, an LGM commenter recounted an anecdote about his father’s barber, who would always rail against miscegenation – shit like, “you don’t see crows and parrots mixing together, do you?” Eventually his dad got fed up with this and one day blurted out, “Frank, you know those are different [species of] birds, right?”…which had apparently never occurred to Frank before.

    [insert “Elmo in hell” gif]

  93. 93.

    Kay

    That’s why it’s important to tell your side of the story. They don’t want anyone contradicting the story they want to tell.

    Tough shit. She was there and her account is a valuable addition to the record.

  96. 96.

    TenguPhule

    @Kay:

    They shut up about Trump’s tax returns because he told them to fuck off. They dropped it because he ordered them to drop it.

    Worse. They bought the “under audit line” and never fucking followed up on it.

    Then he told them they were never going to fucking see them.

    And they just bent the knee and took it.

  98. 98.

    Kay

    @?BillinGlendaleCA:

    38 years of tax returns.

    Well, you can forget that. We’ll never see another politicians tax returns. Why should they? Trump didn’t and they dropped it.

    Who knew it was so easy?

  99. 99.

    TenguPhule

    @Major Major Major Major:

    it’s also a swipe at Bernie, given that it was introduced by my state senator who feels suchwise.

    I wrote him off at that point in the campaign.

    Its not that fucking hard a thing to do. Unless you have something to hide.

  103. 103.

    Kay

    @TenguPhule:

    My absolute favorite was when the Trumps appeared with those ridiculous empty file folders and they all played along.

    Remember that? Blanket coverage of that bullshit. It worked! He literally couldn’t have done it without them.

  104. 104.

    TenguPhule

    Oh FFS, They’re targeting the National Arctic Wildlife Refuge AGAIN?!

    I thought we’d staked this vampire back in the Bush junta.

    The Trump administration is quietly moving to allow energy exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for the first time in more than 30 years, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post, with a draft rule that would lay the groundwork for drilling.

    Congress has the sole authority to determine whether oil and gas drilling can take place within’s the iconic refuge’s 19.6 million acres. But seismic studies represent a necessary first step, and Interior Department officials are modifying a 1980s regulation to permit this initial activity.

    The effort represents a twist in a political fight that has raged for decades. The remote and vast habitat, which serves as the main calving ground for one of North America’s last large caribou herds and a stop for migrating birds from six continents, has served as a rallying cry for environmentalists and some of Alaska’s native tribes. But state politicians and many Republicans in Washington have pressed to extract the billions of barrels of oil lying beneath the refuge’s coastal plain.

    These are the same bright lights that were trying to sell off the national oil reserve at record low prices.

    I fucking hate Republicans.

  106. 106.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @?BillinGlendaleCA:

    [strike]…[/strike] is deprecated and may not be in future specifications of HTML.

    Fuck that shit. If I feel like using [strike]…[/strike] I will use [strike]…[/strike]. Deprecated, schmeprecated.

    (Scuse my nastiness. Not directed at you.)

  108. 108.

    TenguPhule

    @Kay:

    My absolute favorite was when the Trumps appeared with those ridiculous empty file folders and they all played along.

    Remember that? Blanket coverage of that bullshit. It worked! He literally couldn’t have done it without them.

    Oh yes, I remember. I believe that was when I finally started coming around to Village’s point of view of just executing the media en masse because trials would be a waste of time. They’re too stupid to live.

  111. 111.

    Corner Stone

    @Kay:

    We’ll never see another politicians tax returns. Why should they? Trump didn’t and they dropped it.

    Another R politician’s to office above school board. Every D down to the proverbial dog catcher will be *ahem* dogged for full disclosure.

  116. 116.

    TenguPhule

    Wow, Good news on a Friday.

    U.S. Senators Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) introduced the Freedom from Equifax Exploitation (FREE) Act on Friday with the goal of giving control of credit and personal information back to consumers.

    Both were prompted by news of the Equifax hack announced last week, which compromised the personal information of as many as 143 million Americans.

    Now if we could just get this to pass into law.

    The FREE Act would create a federal requirement for credit reporting agencies to freeze or unfreeze access to credit files at a consumers’ request at no cost. It would also prevent credit reporting agencies from profiting off of consumers’ information during a freeze and refund any fees charged for credit freezes in the wake of the Equifax data breach.

  117. 117.

    ThresheK

    The grammar schooler who played a flute solo at our wedding 19 years ago is going to be a bride tomorrow.

    The invitation for me to bring my vintage Guild and amplifier must have got lost in the mail.

  118. 118.

    Kay

    Meanwhile, here’s a bill to the government for rooms at Mar-a-Lago.

    I’m old enough to remember Travelgate. Blanket coverage for months.

    The Trumps are direct beneficiaries of White House business every single day and no one says a word.

    The standards are lower. He is held to a much lower standard than any prior President in my lifetime. To deny that at this point is to compound the offense by lying to cover for him.

  124. 124.

    TenguPhule

    @Kay:

    The standards are lower. He is held to a much lower standard than any prior President in my lifetime. To deny that at this point is to compound the offense by lying to cover for him.

    There are no standards at this point.

    Every conflict of interest Trump has is being systematically ignored by the Republicans and the media.

    We are not a country of laws anymore.

    We are a fucking banana republic.

  126. 126.

    TenguPhule

    @Kay:

    God, is that in Warren’s wheelhouse or what? IDEAL for her.

    I could live with a second president from Hawaii. Or a woman president.

  128. 128.

    worn

    @Baud: Seriously, this. I wonder if anyone has suggested the idea to John.

    Anybody with a couple of brain cells to rub together knows that Taboola links are always bullshit. And that their presence can slow the loading of web pages to a crawl. I gave up visiting TPM several years ago when the site became a hall of mirrors & links to stories that were literally nothing more than a repetition of the headline of the link, each and every one encrusted with gobs of that out traffic crap. When loading a page basically I would immediately hit the ‘x’ button when the page content appeared to keep it from endlessly reloading some mystery element; otherwise my browser would lock up.

    But shit, I guess folks are making money off the bullshit.

    I read BJ every day and have never run it through an ad blocker, figuring the revenue John receives makes the site possible. But to me, Taboola ads cross some nebulous bullshit line up with which I will not put. Time to reconsider my position on this, I suppose.

    ETA: Maybe I can ixnay the divs with yarip…

  129. 129.

    Mnemosyne

    @Kay:

    Travelgate happened because the Clintons tried to fire someone who was embezzling money from the US government but Sam Donaldson liked the way the guy did his travel arrangements.

    Seriously.

  130. 130.

    ThresherK

    The tween who played a flute solo at our wedding 19 years ago is going to be a bride tomorrow.

    The invitation for me to bring my vintage Guild and amplifier must have got lost in the mail.

  131. 131.

    Kay

    Well, all of Ohio Dems were waiting for Richard Cordray to announce his candidacy and he has not done so. I wish he would make a statement one way or the other. I think he’d be a great governor but it’s not really fair to the other people running that he’s holding them up.

  132. 132.

    gene108

    @?BillinGlendaleCA:

    Clintons released 38 years of tax returns.

    Clearly hiding something. Why not 40 or 45 or 50?

    I hate the Cljntons corrupt stuff. They have never abused power in office. They have been investigated for years and no evidence of abusing their offices had ever been found.

    Either they are super villains, who just have not been caught – like the Joker in the 1989 Batman movie, before the ending – or they are reasonably honest politicians.

  135. 135.

    Kay

    @Mnemosyne:

    I periodically go back and look at the Clinton Scandals because the double standard is so glaringly obvious that it grounds me.

    Anyone denying this at this point is a hack or an idiot. They took Hillary Clintons fingerprints off file folders. Donald Trump and his family appeared with EMPTY file folders and everyone played along. I could go on forever like this. There’s just no comparison.

    Much lower standard. Undeniable.

  136. 136.

    Shana

    @Teddys Person: On the other side however, I had my annual well woman exam yesterday during which my doctor asked if anything has changed in the last year. I said “you mean aside from waking up every morning wondering what stupid thing the President* did/said overnight?” He laughed ruefully and said he knows what I mean. We had a nice chat about how worried we are about our government, etc. And then talked about my physical condition, which is doing fine. Cheered me up a bit.

    He also said his office got a ton of calls right after the election from women asking about IUDs.

  139. 139.

    Teddys Person

    I hate the Cljntons corrupt stuff. They have never abused power in office. They have been investigated for years and no evidence of abusing their offices had ever been found.

    Boy howdy, the press covered the investigations with glee. The results of the investigations, not so much.

    ETA: In response to gene108 @ #131

  140. 140.

    efgoldman

    @TenguPhule:

    Expecting a federal court challenge to this.

    :

    Laws governing U.S. elections date back to Article 1 of the Constitution (PDF, Download Adobe Reader), which gave states the responsibility of overseeing federal elections.

  141. 141.

    TenguPhule

    Hahahaha! FUCK YOU SESSIONS!!!

    More good news.

    A federal judge on Friday blocked the Justice Department from withholding grant funds from places that do not provide immigration authorities access to local jails or give advance notice when suspected illegal immigrants are to be released — dealing a major blow to the Trump administration’s vowed crackdown on sanctuary cities.

    U.S. District Judge Harry D. Leinenweber in Illinois wrote in a 41-page opinion that Attorney General Jeff Sessions had probably exceeded his lawful authority when he imposed new conditions on particular law enforcement grants, requiring recipients to give immigration authorities access to jails and notice when suspected illegal immigrants are to be released.

    The judge blocked Sessions from implementing the conditions not just on the city of Chicago — which had sued over the matter — but also across the nation, writing that there was “no reason to think that the legal issues present in this case are restricted to Chicago or that the statutory authority given to the Attorney General would differ in another jurisdiction.”

  146. 146.

    Kay

    @Mnemosyne:

    This is my favorite example for the Obama’s:

    A grating reminder comes from our colleague, Andrew Zajac, over at the Swamp that Chicago’s Northern Trust Co., which is under heavy criticism for executive party-timing after taking federal bailout money, is the very same institution that loaned Barack and Michelle Obama $1.32 million in 2005 at very favorable rates.
    The Obamas used the money to buy their $1.65-million house in Hyde Park on Chicago’s South Side, now the Windy City White House.
    They got a 5.67% interest rate at a time when Chicago jumbo mortgage rates were 5.93 to 6%.

    Remember those days? When they all searched the Obama home mortgage records? A .26 lower rate! The Washington Post did a thorough expose.

    They literally don’t even know what Trump owns, let alone what or who he owes.

  148. 148.

    Mary G

    @Major Major Major Major: Listening to “A Closed and Common Orbit” by Becky Chambers right now and highly recommend it. The first one in the series was “The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet.” I was kind of meh about it, but this one is really good and I don’t think you need to have read the first one to enjoy it.

  151. 151.

    Mnemosyne

    @Kay:

    Meanwhile, Trump is selling Florida properties at inflated prices to Russian “investors” who just happen to have ties to Putin, and the story dies after the initial reporting. Just not something worthy of follow-up, because it’s not fucking e-mails.

  152. 152.

    TenguPhule

    @Mnemosyne:

    Meanwhile, Trump is selling Florida properties at inflated prices to Russian “investors” who just happen to have ties to Putin, and the story dies after the initial reporting.

    Even worse, its still happening and they’re taking money in overseas and not ONE FUCKING REPORTER can be bothered to chase after the story.

    Instead we get sop pieces about fucking pivoting by Trump.

  153. 153.

    Ohio Mom

    @Kay: Sigh…I’d lost track of that. I had hopes pinned on Cordray because I’m not convinced that any of the other candidates are going to capture enough people’s imagination to win the governorship.

  154. 154.

    Mnemosyne

    @TenguPhule:

    Oh, I’m pretty sure that there’s one reporter chasing the story. But that’s the point — these stories get written and the MSM doesn’t care. They couldn’t STFU about Hillary’s emails for 18 months, but can’t be bothered to do a follow-up on stories about actual corruption.

  156. 156.

    BruceFromOhio

    What’s on the agenda as we (thank goddess) look forward to the immanent weekend?

    Drinking, smoking, and generally fucking off as much as possible between getting other shit done before the weekend is over.

    ETA: and aging rapidly from watching baseball, oy

  159. 159.

    Lurking Canadian

    @Major Major Major Major: Recommendation #1: Don’t finish Seveneves. If you are through the first two parts, you’ve read all the good stuff already.

    Recommendation #2: I liked Stephenson’s new one (until the end, natch) and I second the recommendation for Stross.

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