Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

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

… pundit janitors mopping up after the GOP

Battle won, war still ongoing.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

After roe, women are no longer free.

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

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

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

Usually wrong but never in doubt

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

Come on, man.

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

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

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

A Senator Walker would also be an insult to reason, rationality, and decency.

“Squeaker” McCarthy

You are here: Home / Politics / Politicans / David Brooks Giving A Seminar At The Aspen Institute / Looks like we made it

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100Comments

  3. 3.

    Corner Stone

    I thought we had somehow survived something. Like maybe an entire parking garage collapsed on GOP leadership or something useful like that.

  4. 4.

    Steeplejack

    Goddamn, Doug. This is like the Nobel Prize of trolling. Where do you go from here?

    Let me be the first to say that we should do a whip-round to buy you a huge, garish Super Bowl of trolling ring. One that Putin would be itching to steal.

  6. 6.

    Another Scott

    Heh indeedy.

    :-)

    Of course, we all know that they just have some unpaid intern running their Twitter comments, so … :-/

    But still, congratulations! :-D

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  12. 12.

    Aleta

    Why do we keep renting golf carts for the SService? ($145,000 for rentals since Jan 20. $7500 for cart rental over Thanksgiving.) Why don’t we buy and garage them?

  15. 15.

    Mnemosyne

    @Aleta:

    Why do we keep renting golf carts for the SService?

    Because renting them puts money in Trump’s pocket. Who did you think we were paying to rent golf carts at Trump’s golf courses?

    (Yes, I’m a little cranky tonight. Turns out I jacked up my knee even worse than I thought I did, and I will need surgery on it next year. Fuck.)

  19. 19.

    Amir Khalid

    @Aleta:

    Why do we keep renting golf carts for the SService?

    So POTUS can make money renting the things to them. Besides, imagine the Director putting such a line item in his budget proposal, and the reaction from the Secretary of Homeland Security: “You want two hundred thousand dollars to buy WHAT?”

  23. 23.

    frosty

    @Mnemosyne: Bad news about the knee. It seemed like it might be bad based on how long you needed the crutches. But if you’re like me, you assume the best.

  24. 24.

    jl

    So NBC said that they acted right away really really fast on the first complaint they received about Lauer. And Chuck Todd was being very journalistic when he started fluffing his corporate network bosses for being good on this stuff not like those crummy politicians. But now I hear that word got out about several stories on Lauer were going to be published this week. Man, that is quite a coincidence. And what do they say?

    Matt Lauer Accused of Sexual Harassment by Multiple Women (EXCLUSIVE)

    Several women told Variety they complained to executives at the network about Lauer’s behavior, which fell on deaf ears given the lucrative advertising surrounding “Today.” NBC declined to comment. For most of Lauer’s tenure at “Today,” the morning news show was No. 1 in the ratings, and executives were eager to keep him happy.


    http://variety.com/2017/biz/news/matt-lauer-accused-sexual-harassment-multiple-women-1202625959/

    The corporate bosses are as dopey as people who think it is easy to make things disappear from the internet that everyone has noticed. You just delete it.

    Edit: Maybe Todd was auditioning to replace Lauer on Today?

    Edit2: and the corporate bigwigs are also vile. The stuff sounds awful. Very bad behavior. Some of it might be criminal.

  30. 30.

    Davebo

    @Mnemosyne:

    Someone I care about is facing knee surgery as well. Hopefully yours is simple arthroscopic. She’s biting the bit waiting for it. We already had to cancel one marathon trip but hopefully within 3 months she’ll be on the road again.

  32. 32.

    Aleta

    @Mnemosyne: Really sucks about your knee. Bad mood understandable; My sympathy.
    What I mean is, why can’t we stop him taking advantage like this by refusing to rent from him.

  34. 34.

    Mnemosyne

    @frosty:

    I was pretty sure it was bad even though I was trying to keep a stiff upper lip around other people, but I had to wait for the authorization to see the orthopedist. Still, you never want to orthopedist to manipulate your leg and immediately say, “Yep, the ACL’s gone.”

    Weirdly, the ACL almost seems to be the least of the damage — the MCL and meniscus are hurting a lot worse.

  37. 37.

    piratedan

    as much as I loathe 45, regardless of his mental shortcomings, the people I want hurt, politically, socially, economically are the GOP. Those folks enabled him. They conspired with him and despite everything that is currently on fire both in our country and around the world can be laid on their doorstep for the purpose of making their already wealthy benefactors even more so.

    If we get to have more elections and if they’re halfway legitimate ones, and the Dems regain power, I want these people eviscerated. I want their benefactors taxed to a fare thee well, I want their “churches” taxed like the political organizations that they are. I want their pensions garnished and given to the lesser among us and their possessions confiscated and sold as criminal assets that have been forfeited. These people are the supposed political ancestors of Lincoln, that believed that people are simply people and have a right to a vote, a voice and an opportunity… now, they’ve made that legacy essentially a shit sandwich all in the name of political expediency. I fucking hate those people.

    I want these people politically defeated like Sherman’s March to the Sea.

  38. 38.

    Fair Economist

    @Mnemosyne: Sorry your injury turned out to be so nasty.

    A completely torn ligament typically hurts less than a badly injured one so it is no surprise other parts bother you more than your ACL.

    Oh, and this is absolutely better than headfirst down concrete stairs. Heads are way more important than knees.

  39. 39.

    Mnemosyne

    @?BillinGlendaleCA:

    I was saying in one of the threads below that, between this injury and the choking thing from March, I’m now convinced that 2017 is trying to kill me. Good thing I always wear my seatbelt.

    @Fair Economist:

    I knew it was going to be bad even as I did it because my foot stayed planted (stuck on the carpet) while my knee twisted. That’s how football players get themselves career-ending injuries.

  44. 44.

    Ruckus

    @Mnemosyne:
    I’ve also been in situations where there are no good options. Of course I was going a lot faster and on a race track but still, not having reasonable options does sort of suck.
    Sorry about the knee. May they make it as good as new and as pain free as you like.

  46. 46.

    fuckwit

    Feeling especially shitty about the future tonight.

    Rethugs try to pass a tax cut specifically so they can gut SS and Medicare next. Simple formula: throw the USG so deep into debt that there’s no money left for anything anymore. Drown us all in a bathtub. Especially everyone in the blue states (can’t deduct state taxes anymore from Federal taxes).

    Then “rocket man” launches a nuke on DC. Takes over 30 minutes to arrive, so in the meantime Twitler and Dense are either rushed into an underground bunker or Marine One’d safely out of the blast radius. Horrific loss of innocent life. Mulller and investigatiors either all killed or simply can’t proceed further with their work to put Dotard behind bars. Tax cuts pass anyway, and WWIII is started by a retaliatory strike on DPRK, for which China retaliates by who knows what. US can’t occupy DPRK, so either nothing happens or they launch more nukes or there’s massive loss of life in ROK as they get stuck in a ground war.

    Either the corporate media succeeds in whipping the USA into post-9/11-like right-wing jingoistic war frenzy, or there is total chaos and anarchy and riots in the streets.

    Bitcoin goes up over $20k though, as rest of global financial system starts collapsing.

  48. 48.

    Mnemosyne

    @Ruckus:

    My friend at work was trying to comfort me by saying that they’ve probably improved knee repairs since the last time I had it done (12 years ago). But I really really hated the whole process of surgery. Hated. It.

    @fuckwit:

    FWIW, North Korea doesn’t have a rocket capable of hitting DC. If they did manage to get one to hit the contiguous US, Seattle is probably as far east as they could get.

  49. 49.

    fuckwit

    @Mnemosyne: Latest ICBM they tested can apparently hit east coast of USA. Yes, they’re incompetent fools. No, missile and guidance technology isn’t that hard by modern standards (we had them in the 1960s… they got us to the moon).

  54. 54.

    SRW1

    @Aleta:

    Why do we keep renting golf carts for the SService?

    To put some change in presidential pockets. There is a saying in German: Kleinvieh macht auch Mist. Which loosely translated means: Chickenshit also qualifies as fertilizer.

  55. 55.

    Mnemosyne

    I know that Cole is almost always wrong in his predictions, but his Twitter rantings are at least giving me hope that I’ll be able to watch Trump’s trial from my couch as I recover from knee surgery next year.

    (Nope, no clue at all when it might happen. I still need an MRI to see exactly what I did and what needs to be repaired.)

  56. 56.

    Mnemosyne

    @fuckwit:

    FWIW —

    We do not know how heavy a payload this missile carried, but given the increase in range it seems likely that it carried a very light mock warhead. If true, that means it would be incapable of carrying a nuclear warhead to this long distance, since such a warhead would be much heavier.

  57. 57.

    jl

    @?BillinGlendaleCA: “You’ve been reading too many of Trump’s tweets. ”

    I meant to type ” Hope the pain gets better long before you have surgery. ”
    Sounds like it must be a painful injury.

    My comment was not a Trump parody. Maybe I am losing it too. OTOH I am preoccupied with some unpleasant family squabbles that have me really down, and have been very distracted. Having trouble focusing, but starting to come out of it.

  60. 60.

    K-to-the-Jane

    @Mike J: Applebee’s–yikes!! Number one worst restaurant ever. Filth and squalor combined with all food served at the same temperature (Should one’s dinner salad be as warm as one’s fries are cold?). Ho-ho-rendous.

  61. 61.

    Redshift

    @fuckwit: The discussion with experts on BBC this morning was a bit more nuanced. The distance it covered was equivalent to the East Coast on a different trajectory, but apparently getting a missile intact through the stress of reentry is not trivial. I think they estimated 2-3 more years for that.

    Which makes me feel like we’re in a time travel story where our hero is trying to make sure the administration that would set off WWIII is out of office before NK gets that capability…

  64. 64.

    jl

    @Mnemosyne: I also heard a news report that NK has announced that its ‘testing phase’ is over and it’s now a nuclear power. And wants to formulate a deterrence strategy. I’d like to hear more what that is about.

    I also watched some interesting youtubes of interviews with North Korean refugees. One interesting bit was their analysis of aspects of Un that seem bizarre to us. His haircut, weight gain, some behavior and antics in public appearances that seem bizarre. They said it was a very calculated and obvious homage to Kim Il-Sung. They also said in their opinion, that Un is not at all crazy, but very calculating and rational. They said that the regime is just as afraid of losing control of their people as it is of foreign-backed invasion or regime change. Population has to be kept away from brink of feeling that they have nothing to lose, so if they are going to die soon anyway, why not take out their frustration on the goons in charge. Said that most NK population, particularly the young are not brainwashed. Easy enough to get, and there are relatively light penalties for having, bootleg CDs and tapes from other parts of the world. Just don’t get caught with any South Korean material, porno or anything explicitly critical of NK regime.

  66. 66.

    kilo50

    @piratedan: They deserve everything that your imagination can conjure up. The only problem is that many will insist that we play by the rules that we endeavor to uphold. In other words civility. And then we must develop a steely resolve to pay back in criminal convictions that put many away for a long time.

  67. 67.

    jl

    @?BillinGlendaleCA: They must vary in quality. The one near my ancestral stomping grounds has been very good (for what it is, compared to competitors) the few times I’ve been there, mainly when a family elder sees a special. I was a little annoyed at first, but then realized it was unfair to hold them responsible for David Brooks and one of his most famous boo-boos in journamalism.

  68. 68.

    kilo50

    @?BillinGlendaleCA: I made a decidedly poor decision to order a steak while out of town with the hotel I was staying at was across the parking lot from an Applebees. The center was still frozen. Reheating it did not enhance the culinary experience.

  75. 75.

    kilo50

    Related to a thread last night it appears the Project Veritas campaign to “expose” the biases of the Washington Post were far more sustained and undertaken much longer than Wednesday’s reporting.

    Her true identity and intentions were revealed only when The Post published a story on Monday, along with photos and video, about how she falsely told Post reporters that Moore had impregnated her when she was a teenager. The Post reported that Phillips appeared to work for Project Veritas, an organization that uses false cover stories and covert video recordings in an attempt to embarrass its targets.

    Phillips’s sustained attempt to insinuate herself into the social circles of reporters makes clear that her deception — and the efforts to discredit The Post’s reporting — went much further than the attempt to plant one fabricated article.

    It will be interesting to see just how much of effort the Post is going to take in fully exposing the O’Keefe racket will be. They get millions from the Mercers and Bannon is apparently somewhat affiliated with these liarsso there is dirt to dig. Now that Trump is into retweeting snuff films from ISIS it will also be interesting to see if Trump turns pro.

  76. 76.

    Mnemosyne

    @Steve in the ATL:

    If you’re in downtown Glendale near the Americana, we really like Granville, which is on Brand but not in the Americana itself. There’s also a really famous dim sum place, Din Tai Fung, but they’re crazy busy and you’ll probably have to wait at least an hour. Porto’s, the famous Cuban bakery, is about three blocks north of rhe Americana, still on Brand.

    And, of course, if you don’t hit In N Out right there on Brand, the gods of the Angeles will strike you down.

  77. 77.

    Origuy

    @?BillinGlendaleCA: Mt Pinos is beautiful. The LA orienteering club usually has a meet there in June every year. I missed this year, but I’ve been a half dozen times or so. Any snow at the summit yet?

  78. 78.

    ?BillinGlendaleCA

    If your time is constrained there are actually some pretty good places at the galaria’s food court(Bibigo, Bento Box, and Massis Kabob) everything else is meh.

    More upscale is the Americana @ Brand, they have sit-down Mexican and Japanese places(I’ve not been but they seem to do good bidness).

    I’ve been to a Peruvian place down near the BMW dealer, it was so so(I may just not care much for Peruvian food, my first time), there’s also one near the Alex(it has a large spire in front) theater(on Brand). Most of the restaurants in town are on Brand, unless you go up to Montrose(North Glendale), then it’s Honolulu(my info up there is a bit dated).

  80. 80.

    TenguPhule

    @MomSense:

    I’ve given up on meteors and now I pray for sinkholes.

    Spanish Flu.

    Becoming increasingly more likely thanks to Global Warming.

  82. 82.

    ?BillinGlendaleCA

    @Origuy: I went up there about 50 years ago, and it was the coldest place in my memory(and I’ve been to Anchorage in the winter), from what I can gather, there’s not been any snowfall up there this year. It looks like it’ll be sunny, 43 degrees with a 5mph wind.

  83. 83.

    TenguPhule

    @Mnemosyne:

    and I will need surgery on it next year.

    Look on the bright side, we may not have any working hospitals left in the desolate wasteland where our nation once stood next year.

  85. 85.

    Mnemosyne

    @?BillinGlendaleCA:

    He should make a red meat exception for an In N Out burger. And if he absolutely can’t, they can make him a grilled cheese upon request from the secret menu.

    @TenguPhule:

    Speak for yourself, bub — I live in California. We’re going out last.

  88. 88.

    TenguPhule

    So we need to peel off three GOP defectors in the Senate to stop the tax destruction of America.

    And the female Republicans have already sold themselves cheaply. So they’re out.

    We might have McCain. But honestly at this point he’d do the most good at this point by suddenly dropping dead and giving us an excuse to run out the clock till the government shuts down.

    I have no idea who else we can target as the weak link in the Elephant chain. All the “moderates” have fallen into line.

  90. 90.

    Sister Golden Bear

    @Mnemosyne: So sorry to hear that. About a decade ago, I had to have a blown quad tendon sewed back together. Not fun.

    FWIW, if you know any good Pilates instructors, I found them to be far more helpful than the PTs during my rehab. Unfortunately I also had to pay them out of pocket.

  95. 95.

    bystander

    For Giving Tuesday, twitler gave the dignity of the Presidency to slur an entire religion and, more importantly, to smear Joe Scarborough over the Lori Klaustis thing. Today, Joe and Mika are calling for twitler to be removed from office because he’s insane. Last night on Ari M., the guy who ghostwrote Art of the Deal said that twitler is “decompensating” and losing touch with reality.

    Joe and Mika, whose righteous hasn’t been so aroused since Hillary Clinton’s husband had a foundation that saved lives, are a real success story of how sexual harassment can work out well for everyone.

  96. 96.

    Starfish

    @Major Major Major Major: It’s almost impossible to know that half of Doug’s tweets are trolling. I follow him and still get mad about half the time he tweets anything.

    Why is it ok for women to wear short skirts to work but not ok for men to drop their pants at work?— DougJKidney (@DougJBalloon) November 29, 2017

  97. 97.

    Steve in the ATL

    @Mnemosyne: thank you! And I have had both fries and shakes at In N Out and they were awesome.

    @?BillinGlendaleCA: thank you! Can’t recall if I’ve had Peruvian food, though I have eaten at some weirdly specific Latin American restaurants in Atlanta.

    @Sister Golden Bear: thank you! Love garlic anything. Well, not garlic pancakes so much.

  98. 98.

    artem1s

    @piratedan:

    I want these people politically defeated like Sherman’s March to the Sea.

    Uncle Billy was too nice. I want Uncle Billy with Sherman tanks.

  100. 100.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Mnemosyne: “Fat Man” weighed in at a bit over 5 tons. Granted there’s been a lot of progress in miniaturizing electronics & probably somewhat less progress in increasing the power of HE (thus reducing the weight required for imploding the fissile core). But it also takes a fair amount of structure & shielding to deliver a functioning fission device after re-entry at ~14,000 mph. Hard to believe a deliverable warhead would mass it at less than a tonne (~2200 lb).

    My not-terribly-informed guess is that the high arc of this test (1000 km downrange vs 4000 km vertical) was primarily a test of warhead survivability after re-entry at ICBM speed, & probably involved a payload that was mostly sensors & wasn’t nearly that heavy. I also conjecture that once the launch was noticed, radars from Japan, ROK & the US Navy tracked the flight path & from the velocity profile after re-entry should have a very solid handle on the payload weight & performance during re-entry.

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