Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

The GOP is a fucking disgrace.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

Republicans in disarray!

He really is that stupid.

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

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

Meanwhile over at truth Social, the former president is busy confessing to crimes.

T R E 4 5 O N

Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.

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Afternoon Interlude

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Because tea is a moment’s distraction and it’s still too early (where I sit) for stronger stuff, here’s a bit of pure visual pleasure to provide some relief from the bathetic wreck that is our politics right now.

 

I show this to my students every year in the first meeting of my advanced documentary class.  I try to lead them to two points: first, given that my students are almost all writers, and this is their first exposure to film making, to think about the specifically visual techniques used to tell the story here.  The second is what sound does in film — which is to convey so much of the emotion and meaning that the silent pictures alone would not convey, or not nearly so well.  I think there’s one spoken word in the above — and yet, at least for me, it tells a fabulous tale.

Oh — and for those of you keeping score at home, it won the documentary short Oscar in 1959.

Anyway, beats thinking on the nazgul orbiting the stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue that runs from Mr. Lincoln’s dome to the House the Brits Burnt.

Reader Interactions

68Comments

  1. 1.

    Mnemosyne

    Sitting in Panera after finishing some chili and salad. I have one more errand and then I have to go home and do laundry. I hate laundry.

  9. 9.

    Mnemosyne

    @raven:

    There are classic car shows out here all the time since we have a good climate for preserving cars. There’s a huge one in Glendale every July.

    That restaurant is a couple of blocks from where G and I had our wedding reception and a lot of our pictures are in the various stores and alleys around there.

    (In Old Town Pasadena, an alley is primarily a pedestrian walkway, so it’s not as weird as it might sound in other cities.)

  10. 10.

    raven

    @Mnemosyne: Yea, with 4 trips up there we got to know Old Pasadena pretty well. My brother’s Pink Floyd band is playing the Rose tonight.

  11. 11.

    Mnemosyne

    @raven:

    If you got up towards the civic center and city hall (Pasadena’s city hall was used for the exterior shots on “Parks & Recreation”), that main library is the one where G works.

  12. 12.

    Another Scott

    Neat film. The editor certainly was busy. As was the (whatever the title of the person who prepares the closing credits).

    Thanks.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  20. 20.

    Mnemosyne

    @raven:

    The civic center is about a block off Colorado, but I think they had already started closing nearby streets off to cars. The library is on Walnut, if that sounds familiar.

  22. 22.

    Mnemosyne

    I probably shouldn’t have gotten frozen yogurt at Menchie’s in addition to lunch at Panera but, what the hell, I decided to treat myself. Their Banana Pudding yogurt is excellent — real bananas for real banana flavor.

  23. 23.

    Doug R

    AHEM: The house the CANADIANS (with British help) burnt.
    Edit: But the flag was still there.

  24. 24.

    Mnemosyne

    @Doug R:

    Actually, it was the British troops fresh off the Peninsular War who burned it. There’s a darn good book about it written from the British POV.

    ETA: The flag was in Baltimore, which was the next stop on their East Coast tour. But the Baltimoreans had time to prepare since it took the Brits extra time to make it down the river to them.

  26. 26.

    MoxieM

    Lordy I swear I saw that in Jr. High. The opening tones … (Lexington MA was ever so advanced in its pedagogy etc.. And its Jill Steins, alas.)

  27. 27.

    The Dangerman

    @raven:

    My brother’s Pink Floyd band is playing the Rose tonight.

    Oh, more info please; I recently saw a PF band out of the Bay Area (House of Floyd, IIRC) and it was a fun show (I never saw the original, sadly).

  28. 28.

    FlyingToaster

    @David Anderson: If you’re ever up in Vermont, they still blow glass while you watch at Simon Pearce in Quechee VT (right off Rt 4). His son Andrew has a bowl-carving shop down the highway in Taftsville.

  29. 29.

    rikyrah

    The FBI is Cracking Under Pressure, and Time is Running Out
    by David Atkins January 6, 2018

    In the year since Donald Trump moved into the White House, one of the key questions was how long the institutions of American democracy would hold up if he tried to create an authoritarian state centered around himself. For a long time things seemed to be largely OK: the institutions of state were mostly able to resist Trump’s incursions into their necessary roles and perform their duties more or less as intended. Sure, Trump’s appointees were hyperpartisan in their deregulatory and corporate-friendly fervor, which often put them at odds with the purposes of the agencies they were in charge of. Yes, talented employees are leaving in droves and some key functions are going unfilled, and yes, agencies with authoritarian powers like ICE have been behaving cruelly and abominably with horrible consequences for those affected. But overall, American democracy itself has not been on the verge of unraveling. The president has found himself at least partially constrained by the courts in his racist immigration decrees; the Justice Department and FBI have been doing their duty in pursuing investigations into the President’s malfeasance; the states effectively scuttled Kris Kobach’s voter suppression commission; and the other agencies aren’t fully dysfunctional even if they are perverted in serving the interests of the rich and powerful rather than regular Americans.

    But all of that started to change this week. The seams are beginning to come apart, and the danger of autocracy is far nearer than it was just a few days ago. This, even as the publication of Michael Wolff’s new book shows just how dangerously unfit this president is even under normal circumstances.

    Republican Senators who began last year by pretending to want investigations into Russia’s interference in the election are now actively scuttling those investigations. Two Republican Senators, Charles Grassley of Iowa and Lindsey Graham, have now made a criminal referral to the FBI against Michael Steele, the longtime intelligence officer who provided information designed to expose Russia’s crimes and accomplices. This is nothing less than a coverup designed to muddy the waters, protect those truly guilty of collusion with Russia to undermine our democracy, and intimidate anyone else who might come forward in the future under similar circumstances. It’s particularly galling coming from Lindsey Graham who at one time was one of the president’s harshest critics, but is now serving as his political hit man even as Trump’s unfitness for office has never been clearer.

    Meanwhile, reports surfaced the FBI wilted some months ago after ongoing public pressure from Donald Trump to prosecute his political opponents for nonexistent crimes by reopening investigations into the Clinton Foundation and the Uranium One nothingburger. The investigations were halted due to lack of evidence of wrongdoing, but the mere fact that the FBI could be pressured into harassing the charity for purely political reasons is troubling.

    On the real collusion front, the integrity of the FBI’s investigation in Trump and his associates is being hampered by Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes’ blatant attempts to acquire sensitive documents held close by the FBI, and to subpoena FBI officials whose public testimony would harm the investigation itself. Nunes is already widely suspected of having passed sensitive information to the White House and having lied about it, but he is being backed up in this coverup by Paul Ryan himself.

    If (like our illustrious president) video is more your thing than text, Rachel Maddow provided a good rundown of these and other disturbing developments on her show last night. It makes for disturbing viewing.

    It’s clear that the country has reached a dangerous inflection point. Republicans have decided en masse that their best chance at political survival is to hew closely to President Trump. But the president is so clearly unfit for office and in such obvious legal and ethical peril that they cannot protect him without violating basic principles of accountability and democracy.

  30. 30.

    rikyrah

    Quick Takes: Grassley and Graham Are On Board With a Cover-Up
    A roundup of news that caught my eye today.

    by Nancy LeTourneau
    January 5, 2018

    * In case you were wondering whether Senate Republicans would do anything to hold this president accountable, you got an answer today.

    Two Republican senators have called for the investigation of Christopher Steele, the former British intelligence officer who compiled a dossier on alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.

    In a letter to the US justice department, Charles Grassley and Lindsey Graham claimed there was reason to believe that Steele had misled US authorities over his contacts with journalists and called for him to be investigated.

    The letter, the first criminal referral from Congress since it started investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 elections, comes at a time when Republicans are seeking to divert those investigations from scrutinising Donald Trump’s links to Russia to focus instead on whistleblowers, the FBI, and the special counsel investigating the issue, Robert Mueller.

  33. 33.

    Yarrow

    @Mnemosyne: Menchies! Yum! I love their plain yogurt because it’s actually a little tart instead of just sweet. I also like their dulce de leche.

  35. 35.

    karensky

    Loved “Glass”. Thanks. There’s. Place in NJ about an hour from Philly that has a small glassblowing operation. Great place to visit on a cold day.

  37. 37.

    WaterGirl

    I just woke up from my nap, and it’s a balmy 8 degrees. Can’t wait for tomorrow. I turned on the faucet in my dreams, and nothing came out – the pipes were frozen – then a small trickle started and I ran to all the other faucets in the house to see if they were all frozen. No idea whether they were or not.

    So that’s my exciting Saturday. When I closed the computer for my nap, I wondered if I would wake up to Sessions fired and the attempted coup in our country moving rapidly forward. So far, no news on that front, so that’s good!

  42. 42.

    frosty

    @Mnemosyne:

    it took the Brits extra time to make it down the river to them.

    Up the river, technically. Or maybe up the Bay is better since the Patapsco is tidewater by Ft McHenry.

    /Bawlmer pedant

  46. 46.

    Spanky

    @frosty: No, down the river is right, although said river is the Patuxent. The troops disembarked at Benedict and marched west, overnighting at The Brickyard before engaging militia and Barney’s bargemen at Bladensburg. The militia defense quickly crumbled and they fled, allowing the Brits to cross the Anacostia and burn various buildings in DC, including the Navy Yard and, obviously, “House the Brits Burnt”. Or alternatively, “The Preznit’s Reznitz.”

    /Patuxent dweller

  47. 47.

    geg6

    Too fucking cold to even hit the grocery store. I can’t take another day of this shit. We’re getting pizza tonight and drinking a bottle of wine and hitting the sheets early. Hope I don’t wake up to single digits tomorrow. I really want to try this Debi Mazar recipe for spaghetti with shrimp and lemon that I got out of the newspaper but I have to hit the store to make it.

  48. 48.

    Spanky

    @Spanky: ETA: “down the river” to the mouth of the Patuxent, obviously, before turning up the Bay towards Balmer. Of course, they weren’t in a terrible hurry since they burned DC on August 24, and the Battle of North Point wasn’t until September 12.

  51. 51.

    Mnemosyne

    @Spanky:

    If I remember the book correctly, torrential rains and poor conditions on the river delayed the Brits, plus an American sniper took out Richard Ross, the British commanding general, and some delays followed from that.

  53. 53.

    Mnemosyne

    @frosty:

    I freely admit that i have a poor grasp of the geography between DC and Baltimore, particularly in the good ol’ days when almost everyone traveled by water because the roads were so bad. One of these days I’ll get out to Charm City and see Edgar Allan Poe’s grave.

  54. 54.

    Immanentize

    Re: Glass — At Corning Glassworks, kids (and you too!) Can blow their own large glass ornaments, choosing their own colors, etc. It’s really neat. The whole public side of that facility is great. And hiking the gorges and the Finger Lakes and Watkins Glen…. Great summer trip destination.

  56. 56.

    Shana

    @Mnemosyne: I find laundry weirdly satisfying. Something about emptying the hamper, folding and ironing things at the end and having everything done.

  57. 57.

    Mnemosyne

    @delk:

    Did you get the Samsung ones that play you a little tune when they’re done? I still remember Stephanie Pearl-McPhee’s story about that. She was replacing a washing machine that was over 20 years old, so she was amused by the change in technology.

  58. 58.

    Shana

    @Mnemosyne: Don’t miss the American Visionary Art Museum either. And there’s a great deli not far from Little Italy called Attman’s.

  63. 63.

    Steeplejack

    @geg6:

    Amen, sister. I was going to go out to get something to quell the urges I’ve been having for food that I didn’t have in the house. Probably didn’t help that I was watching cooking shows to avoid the political mess. Never got the momentum, so I said screw it and ordered pizza.

    I am so sick of hearing the HVAC blowing nonstop. It’s 16° now in my corner of NoVA, going down to 4° overnight. But that should be the worst of it. Up to 24° tomorrow, then 37° on Monday and into the 40s the rest of the week. Normal winter weather.

  66. 66.

    mainmata

    I love films celebrating skilled crafts people and glass blowing is exacting and unforgiving, it is so exciting to watch. With the light jazz music with the tinkly, glassy notes, it is just right. But boy is the look so 1950s.

  67. 67.

    WaterGirl

    @Mnemosyne: I left you a comment about the blankie on some thread last week. I thought the blankie was nice, but I would give it a 4 out of 5. It kept me warm at my niece’s, and I loved the color – it was kind of a dark teal color. It was a nice price point, too. But I wouldn’t rave about it. How about you?

  68. 68.

    Mnemosyne

    @WaterGirl:

    I like it a lot, but I wouldn’t marry it like some people on Amazon seem to want to do. I was mostly curious if it really was warm enough for colder climates since sometimes things that are warm enough for Southern California winters are not warm enough for other locales. I may get one for my mom or mother in law (or both!)

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