Today is @HillaryClinton's 70th Birthday! pic.twitter.com/WCw2lZ1MhA
— Famous Birthdays (@FamousBirthdays) October 26, 2017
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I refuse to believe the mess the current Oval Office squatters are making is unrepairable, because Goddess knows we’ve survived worse — from Warren G. Harding to Andrew Johnson.
But if not for a relative handful of traitors in the Republican party, imagine what we could be doing right now…
Corner Stone
Sigh…
Omnes Omnibus
Happy birthday to her. I agree with you on things not being irreparable.
gene108
Heh…my mom’s four months older…she recently retired and is enjoying not going to work everyday…
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Omnes Omnibus: Lives lost are the only thing that’s irreparable, everything else is just a heavy lift.
gene108
@Omnes Omnibus:
I am surprised how well institutions are holding up. I thought by now every government contract would be paying a kickback to Trump.
Corner Stone
While unrepairable includes a long time, IMO it seems pretty obvious we’re not going to get back a lot of what is being damaged for a few, if not several generations.
cokane
that’s the true tragedy anne. few societies have possessed such enormous wealth and relative security
Corner Stone
@gene108: Which ones are those?
Cheryl Rofer
We would be mobilizing a major effort to rebuild Puerto Rico. It would include some Elon Musk-type innovation and basic water and electrical utilities. It would boost their economy and the mainland’s.
Ohio Mom
I also think that eventually we will bounce back. I’m undecided about how long that will take, and I hope it doesn’t involve too much upheaval, as in armed conflict.
Corner Stone
@Cheryl Rofer: Puerto Rico would always be a disaster, no matter what. But we had have a pre-staging effort and an honest, fair effort to get the situation handled in the best manner possible.
satby
@Corner Stone: it would be the difference between having a disaster and becoming one. The hurricane didn’t kill many people outright, but when the death toll from the criminal neglect is tallied it will be appalling, because it would have been preventable.
Mike in NC
@gene108: I figured by now a family of tourists visiting Washington DC would be forced to pay Disneyworld-style admittance fees just to see the Smithsonian museums, National Archives, and Lincoln Memorial, with the proceeds going to the Trump Organization. I guess that’s still in the works.
Mike J
@Corner Stone:
We don’t know what the plan was, because FEMA has denied the FOIA for their plan.
Viva BrisVegas
That’s an awfully low bar.
There is a direct line from Andrew Johnson to Jim Crow, which itself only lasted 100+ years.
There is a direct line from Harding through Coolidge and Hoover to the Great Depression.
If Trump is not as bad as those, it only means he has failed to become a blight on generations of Americans.
No Drought No More
A handful of republican traitors? What are the millions of American women who voted for Trump called?
Mike in NC
@Viva BrisVegas: Best description of Trump to date was “an embarrassing stain in our national underwear”.
Corner Stone
@Corner Stone:
But we *would* have had
rikyrah
@Cheryl Rofer:
Yes. President Clinton would be leading the effort to rescue Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands
rikyrah
@Corner Stone:
President Clinton would not be trying to kill these American citizens ?.
gene108
@Corner Stone:
Judicial branch still holding up.
Basic government services like Social Security still holding up.
Anti-bribery laws still keeping Trump, Zinke, etc from openly demanding bribes for government work (yeah, low bar, but that’s where we are). Price forced to resign for abusing public services for private business.
Flynn resigning after 24 days on the job.
I am not saying institutions aren’t being battered on a daily basis, but so far we have not been broken and heading the way of a Turkey or Russia, where democracy got subverted to turn an elected official into a de facto dictator.
The norms of what we have come to expect from the President, Congress, etc have all been shot to hell, but that hopefully can be fixed by electing better people next time.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Interesting. If Lisa Murkowski decides she wants to flex her muscles, Zinke could see a once-promising career cut short. Also, expect the head of FEMA to be filming some North Korean style videos on the greatness Leader Trump has shown for the morning shows
bemused senior
About to have my 69th. Just unretired and took a full-time job. My kids and their twins can’t make enough to live in the Bay area. I dread reaching the point when I can’t help them any more.
Steve in the ATL
@Omnes Omnibus: related question: I know you were a redleg, but what was your MOS?
cthulhu
Historians will not be kind to this era – which is good! That many of those most involved in the terribleness won’t live to see the reckoning disappoints me.
James E. Powell
I just can’t find the optimism that many of you do. Looking at the macro situation, the forces that produced Trump are still there and none of them have lost force. A few seem to be stronger, or at least more apparent and more accepted in the mainstream press/media.
The midterms are a year away and other than “Trump is unfit” I don’t see or hear any campaign themes. Does anyone really believe that Democrats will flip the senate or the house in 2018?
Mike in NC
@bemused senior: Awful. We visited my wife’s uncle in the Oakland area in 2002 and that was in a trailer park. Can’t imagine the cost of a real house.
Omnes Omnibus
@Steve in the ATL: 13A05P.
Mike J
@Viva BrisVegas: Australia, WTF? 5 MPs ruled ineligible due to dual citizenship right wing lose majority?
Is that the gist?
Corner Stone
@James E. Powell:
If R’s pass a tax cut that eliminates State and Local Taxes deductions and we don’t wipe the floor with them, then we don’t deserve to hold leadership positions.
If they don’t pass that tax cut bill we still should have enough ammo to pin them to the floor and make significant gains.
Corner Stone
@Omnes Omnibus: “13A05P, why aren’t you at your post? 13A05P, do you copy?”
Mike in NC
@James E. Powell: Everything from here on is dependent on Trump driving the economy into a very deep ditch with his massive tax cuts for the rich, tax increases for everybody else, ruinous trade wars, and budget cuts that hurt millions of us peons.
Steve in the ATL
@Omnes Omnibus: ah so not a dagby as we all suspected
Omnes Omnibus
@Steve in the ATL:? Dagby?
Mike J
@Steve in the ATL: Gunbunnies? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1G0oJJXmmQ
Steve in the ATL
@Omnes Omnibus: dumb ass gun bunny
ETA: 13B
Omnes Omnibus
@Mike J: Unexpected.
Amir Khalid
Are there any musicians/guitar modders here? I need to know what AWG size wire to buy to ground the copper shielding I plan to put in The Girl. I will greatly appreciate any help I get.
Omnes Omnibus
@Steve in the ATL: You have an extra letter. For the rest, you are well off base.
Mike J
@Omnes Omnibus: They used to play the Pyramid Club and the South End all the time back in the day. They were from Little Rock, so Memphis was a once a month gig.
Amir Khalid
@Amir Khalid:
Also, what colour should I get for ground wire in a guitar?
gene108
@James E. Powell:
It won’t be easy to flip the House, but it might be possible. Democrats have won some state and local races for the first time in many years that usually go Republican.
Right now there are no non-self inflicted problems for Trump and the Republicans. At some point there corruption and incompetence will have real effects for people, even their voters, and that will turn things in the short term.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
We’re nine months and one Meuller and several who-knows away from having any idea what the mid-term landscape will look like
Mike J
@Amir Khalid: Black 22. Green is also sometimes ground.
Corner Stone
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: We can’t allow ourselves to wait that long, hoping on a non-elected bureaucratic functionary to save us.
Steeplejack
This just in: Looks like Jeb Stuart High School in my ’hood (NoVA) will be renamed Justice High, supposedly by 2019.
This was discussed here back in the summer when all of the Confederate monument stuff came up. It has been a contentious issue for the last several years.
oldgold
I disagree. Trump is much worse than these two chumps.
Trump, unlike our other poor Presidents, the worst probably being James Buchanan, is not merely incompetent, he suffers from an acute personality disorder – malignant narcissism .
Viva BrisVegas
@Mike J: Australia allows dual citizenship of citizens. However the Constitution specifically disallows citizens of another country being elected to parliament, even if they are also citizens of Australia. If any are found to be elected, their election becomes null and void and they either go to by-election for the House of Reps or just get kicked out and replaced if in the Senate.
Most of those caught by this were conservatives. They inherited foreign citizenship from one or more parent. The most notable case being Barnaby Joyce, the Deputy PM, who was found to be a Kiwi because his father was born in NZ. He is of course as thick as two bricks and half as useful, but even he would have been able to work that out in about 30 seconds on Google had he bothered to look.
The interesting thing is that the conservative Liberals currently have a one seat majority in the Lower House. With Barnaby gone, they technically lose their majority and could be brought down by a no confidence motion. This won’t happen because several independents have indicated they will support the government while they are in minority. In the meantime the government is rushing through a by-election to get Barnaby back in parliament.
If Barnaby Joyce’s name is at all familiar, it’s because he was the one who threatened to have Johnny Depp’s dogs, Pistol and Boo, executed for illegally entering the country.
Amir Khalid
@Amir Khalid:
Greatly appreciated. Many thanks.
frosty
@Amir Khalid: you can use bare copper which signals to anyone that it’s ground. Other than that, US standard is green for ground (house wiring).
Matt McIrvin
@James E. Powell: The Senate is harder, just because the wrong seats are up for reelection this time around.
The House is a tough call. The analyses I’ve seen of the headwind from gerrymandering suggest that we need about a 7 point lead in the nationwide popular vote to flip the House. In the generic House ballot polls, how far we are ahead depends wildly on which poll you look at. There are some that show that Democrats about 5 or 6 points ahead, and another batch that show a much wider lead, 10 or even 15 points. The more optimistic polls seem to have taken a jump up very recently, but this split seems to be a persistent, systematic difference between polls. So I don’t know what they’re saying.
Mike J
@Viva BrisVegas: He wasn’t going to just ship the dogs to Nauru?
Amazing how little we’ve heard about the Joyce case in the US. Of course when your house is on fire you don’t notice when your neighbor’s rain gutters are filled with leaves.
frosty
@Amir Khalid: You don’t need much, there’s not a lot of amps in there. 22 stranded?
Matt McIrvin
@Viva BrisVegas: It seems like a ridiculous rule that was a trainwreck waiting to happen. But it’s kind of delicious that it’s hitting the more xenophobic party so hard.
ThresherK
Hilz is a fellow Scorpio? Cool.
Villago Delenda Est
@Steve in the ATL: 13B is an enlisted MOS. So, yah, DAGBY.
Amir Khalid
@Viva BrisVegas:
I’m puzzled. If Barnaby Joyce is ineligible for Parliament, how does his party plan to get him back in? Does it involve him renouncing his New Zealand citizenship?
Villago Delenda Est
@ThresherK: Here’s a shocker. I share my birthday with Sarah Palin. She’s an Aquarius.
So much for astrology.
Mike J
A song for Australia
Matt McIrvin
@gene108:
The “Hillary the Russian stooge” bullshit, the way it’s got traction and become the dominant narrative–that feels like breaking, to me. I think we might be breaking now.
If the media just stop criticizing Trump from here on in, if Mueller’s report is just all condemnation of Hillary Clinton and she goes to jail after all, you’ll know that’s it. I thought it was going to happen on Inauguration Day, but maybe there was just a little delay.
Major Major Major Major
Aliens holds up.
Adam L Silverman
Adam L Silverman
@Matt McIrvin: Mueller is not investigating Secretary Clinton.
Villago Delenda Est
@Matt McIrvin: Hillary’s done nothing to be investigated for.
Donald, on the other hand, is going to die in prison.
Major Major Major Major
@Villago Delenda Est: Sure, if you believe Felix Sater.
opiejeanne
@Cheryl Rofer: I think Elon Musk has been down there recently, setting up some solar power equipment.
opiejeanne
@Mike in NC: The Smithsonian? Isn’t that financed through donations?
Viva BrisVegas
@Amir Khalid:
He already has. The High Court case is the end result of a 4 month process.
The previous election which Joyce won has been declared void. In effect Joyce has not been a legitimate parliamentarian since he was elected. The government can simply call a by-election to replace him, and Joyce can run in that by-election. Which he will probably win easily, since that electorate mainly consists of rural mouthbreathers.
There is no real penalty for invalidly contesting an election, except that you may be required to pay back your salary. However that is at the discretion of the government, who will unsurprisingly be very sympathetic.
What is interesting and hasn’t had much discussion yet, is that legislation passed by the government by one vote, i.e. Joyce’s, may be subject to challenge in court as being itself invalid.
Smiling Mortician
@Adam L Silverman: I love John Lewis, exactly as much as I love Madame President.
@Villago Delenda Est: I share my birthday with Edward Albee and the Girl Scouts. I’ll take it.
@Ohio Mom: I too hope the country recovers, but I doubt that I will live to see it. This is the saddest thing ever for me — sadder even than the reason that I doubt I will live to see it.
burnspbesq
@Mike J:
No way that survives litigation. It is to scoff. What exemption are they speciously claiming, and what dogshit arguments are they making?
Mike J
@burnspbesq: Security, what else?
eta: https://www.propublica.org/article/fema-had-a-plan-for-responding-to-a-hurricane-in-puerto-rico
Adam L Silverman
opiejeanne
@Mike in NC: We moved to the Bay Area in 1992 and every place we looked was more expensive that the previous one. We thought we would end up living in a garage. We did find a house but there were other things that were much more expensive, like groceries.
burnspbesq
@Mike J:
Ha. Crock of shit. Any lawyer who signs a pleading espousing that position should get hit for Rule 11 sanctions.
burnspbesq
@opiejeanne:
The entire state is in an affordable housing crisis, to which there is no obvious solution.
Major Major Major Major
@burnspbesq: Other than silly ideas like “maybe you idiots should have spent the last several decades constructing enough housing, maybe you could start now.”
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
If any of the IT people are still around, maybe you could help me. I’m at work and one of my computers froze; it wouldn’t respond to anything, including Ctrl-Alt-Del. I waited almost ten minutes for it to do something, and then forced it to shut down with the power button. Now it won’t turn back on. The power button is flashing amber quickly. I’ve tried unplugging it and plugging it back in, but it won’t start.
I called the IT service desk, but no one’s there right now and since I can perform almost all of my job functions on the other computers I’ve got, I didn’t initiate the emergency procedures and wake someone up. That work around is really annoying, though, so it would be great to get the computer restarted. Anyone have any thoughts on what else I could try?
Mike J
@Major Major Major Major: You want to build apartments next to me? And let people live in them? Are you nuts?
Major Major Major Major
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym: Have you used the tech support cheat sheet?
Seriously though, that sucks.
@Mike J: It gets worse, I want to make sure they have adequate access to public transit too.
Mike J
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym: When you plug it back in and hit the power button, does anything happen? Can you hear the fan on the power supply spinning or does it sit there inert?
I had a computer that needed to have the power switch on the power supply (a small rocker switch on the back of the computer) turned off and on or the button wouldn’t work, but I always just wrote it off to homebrew weirdness.
eemom
It is also the birthday of our late General Stuck, who I think would have been 65.
Can imagine what he would have had to say about the nightmare that surrounds us.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@Mike J: No fan. Nothing when I plug it back in. There’s no switch on the back, nor that I could find when I opened the case. (And now I’ve got the cover jammed in a way that will neither come back off nor close completely.)
Steeplejack
@eemom:
RIP, Stuck.
eemom
@Steeplejack:
?
Hope he’s in a better place. Hope there IS a better place.
opiejeanne
@burnspbesq: I had moved from a very nice house in Riverside which was the bargain for housing in SoCal, and we ended up in Castro Valley; it was a tough move both emotionally and financially, but that’s where the job was. I live near Seattle now so I know about some current affordable housing problems, and we still own a very small property in California in the mountains and I’ve watched its value skyrocket over the past year.
Steeplejack
@eemom:
Amen to both.
opiejeanne
@Major Major Major Major: It was terrible in the Bay Area in the 90s. Tracy was the nearest “affordable” housing and it wasn’t very affordable.
Major Major Major Major
@opiejeanne: It’s pretty damn bad right now. One of the reasons we want to move to New York. It’s absolutely not worth paying more than we’d pay there, to live here.
Steeplejack
Holy shnikeys!
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym: If the button is flashing, then it may be doing so in a pattern. You didn’t mention the manufacturer, but Dell has a diagnostic sheet that would tell you which component is being flagged. In any event, one or more of the components has failed.
Steeplejack
@eemom:
Two Stuck-isms:
On the Republicans:
The meaning of life:
Amir Khalid
@Amir Khalid:
This should have been addressd to Mike J.
burnspbesq
@Steeplejack:
Holy spoliation inference, Batman! The state could be well and truly fucked here.
And I don’t for one fucking second believe it was inadvertent.
opiejeanne
@Steeplejack: I need to go find it, but someone with a blue check beside his name says that the FBI has a copy of what was on those servers in Georgia.
Steeplejack
@burnspbesq:
Inadvertent?! It is to laugh.
ETA: If the Kennesaw State techno-weenies are truly inept, I hope that some (competent) forensic techno-weenies can recover the data from the “wiped” drive.
opiejeanne
@Steeplejack: It’s in here. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/apnewsbreak-georgia-election-server-wiped-after-suit-filed/2017/10/26/8fa8c578-ba36-11e7-9b93-b97043e57a22_story.html?utm_term=.b9326b2e562f
Steeplejack
@opiejeanne:
That would be great.
opiejeanne
@Steeplejack: What did Stuck die of so young? I was an infrequent visitor and just remember that he was gone one day.
Steeplejack
@opiejeanne:
That appears to be a reprint of the AP story, which says this toward the bottom (farther than I read before I did a spit-take and briefly blacked out):
Viva BrisVegas
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym: It sounds most like a power supply problem. Anything physical been added to the PC lately?
Remove absolutely everything attached to the computer, except keyboard and monitor, and try to power on.
For completeness sake try a different power point.
Also, if you can’t get the lid back on properly it may not power up anyway. There is often a chassis switch which needs to be down.
If no go, it’s stuffed and needs to go to the PC hospital.
Steeplejack
@opiejeanne:
A “brief lung illness” at age 60.
ETA: Valued commenter SIA tracked down his obituary.https://balloon-juice.com/2013/07/10/tire-rims-and-anthrax/#comment-4528091
Steeplejack
@Steeplejack:
Well, I screwed up that comment several ways. My bad.
Villago Delenda Est
@burnspbesq: Prop 13 unintended consequences, perhaps?
opiejeanne
@Steeplejack: Thanks. I actually do remember that post from only 4 years ago now that I read it. I was a regular reader by then for several years, but I don’t remember much about Stuck.
Van Buren
@Mike in NC: Don’t forget the financial scandal from lack of oversight.
TenguPhule
@No Drought No More:
Negotiable virtues?
TenguPhule
@gene108:
Have you looked at the Supreme Court lately?
Or who those assholes are trying to get into Appeals?
Only because they’re mostly automated and insulated from general interference. Whatever these fuckers can touch, they break.
Meanwhile, Trump and family are still serving as living proof that bribes are now part of the official US platform.
Yet. But two out of three institutions are FUBAR. And we haven’t had a really bad national crisis yet.
The American public tends to behave irrationally when shit hits the fan.
The Truffle
“I refuse to believe the mess the current Oval Office squatters are making is unrepairable, because Goddess knows we’ve survived worse — from Warren G. Harding to Andrew Johnson.”
You’re more optimistic than I am–I think this is possibly a fatal blow to the country. And the people are simply too far divided for a reconciliation to be feasible. Certainly, many, if not most people on the right just are not interested in co-existence. That’s why I laugh whenever anyone suggests that liberals reach out to Trump voters. Nobody suggested right wingers reach out to Obama voters. If it’s one-sided, I’m not interested. Right now, I think healing is just not in the cards for the country. We’re too far apart. I could see America headed for divorce court. And my honest opinion? It could be for the best. I think everyone would be happier in the long run if we walked away from each other.