Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

Oh FFS you might as well trust a 6-year-old with a flamethrower.

There is no compromise when it comes to body autonomy. You either have it or you do not.

The snowflake in chief appeared visibly frustrated when questioned by a reporter about egg prices.

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

“Perhaps I should have considered other options.” (head-desk)

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. keep building.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

You cannot shame the shameless.

People are complicated. Love is not.

Shut up, hissy kitty!

All hail the time of the bunny!

Consistently wrong since 2002

Come on, man.

“woke” is the new caravan.

If you thought you’d already seen people saying the stupidest things possible on the internet, prepare yourselves.

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

In after Baud. Damn.

“But what about the lurkers?”

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

Not loving this new fraud based economy.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

You are here: Home / Economics / C.R.E.A.M. / I’m looking for pound notes, loose change, bad checks, anything

I’m looking for pound notes, loose change, bad checks, anything

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Another day, another Republican House retirement. Let’s kick in some money into the fund that’s split equally among all Democratic eventual nominees in all House districts currently held by Republicans.

Goal Thermometer

Thought you might might like this picture of my dog with Santa. When we hit 25K on this, I’ll put up some baby pictures.

Reader Interactions

72Comments

  1. 1.

    ? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?

    Awesome. They know they’re going to get creamed in November.

  3. 3.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    When we hit 25K on this, I’ll put up some baby pictures.

    Shameless! I’m torn between a groan and a chuckle.

    I’m a little confused:

    NOTE: Your contribution will be divided evenly between TX-24 2018 Democratic Nominee Fund, WY-AL 2018 Democratic Nominee Fund, and 238 other groups. Click here to allocate amounts differently or view all recipients

    So the plan is to divide it up and give to every Dem challenging a sitting R?

  4. 4.

    ? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?

    @debbie:
    You and me both. He’s one of my senators and he’s such a phony fake moderate.

  6. 6.

    debbie

    I’m not sure what the tag means; this may be O/T, but tough.

    Has Wolff’s publisher’s response to Trump’s Cease and Desist demand been shared at BJ yet? it’s really quite cheering:

    “The president is free to call news ‘fake’ and to blast the media. That goes against convention, but it is not unconstitutional,” Sargent wrote. “But a demand to cease and desist publication—a clear effort by the President of the United States to intimidate a publisher into halting publication of an important book on the workings of the government—is an attempt to achieve what is called prior restraint. That is something that no American court would order as it is flagrantly unconstitutional.”

    “There is no ambiguity here. This is an underlying principle of our democracy. We cannot stand silent,” Sargent added in his memo. “We will not allow any president to achieve by intimidation what our Constitution precludes him or her from achieving in court. We need to respond strongly for Michael Wolff and his book, but also for all authors and all their books, now and in the future. And as citizens we must demand that President Trump understand and abide by the First Amendment of our Constitution.”

    John Sargent takes shit from no one. This came out before the publisher’s attorneys offered their response (at the same link, but drier).

  10. 10.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    Son of a ….

    He brought up the farm bill, which is passed every five years and, among many other things, provides financial assistance to the agricultural sector through subsidies and other programs.

    “And I support a bill that includes crop insurance, unless you don’t want me to,” he half joked, again to applause.

    “I guess you like it right? Good. Because if I heard no applause I’d say ‘Forget it, give it up.’ Now I can’t do that.”

    The guy is a thug.

  12. 12.

    ? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?

    @ruemara:
    They can try. I’m young so I don’t have a memory of Iran-Contra, but this seems to much bigger than previous scandals. I read that Mueller is planning on interviewing Trump.

  14. 14.

    MomSense

    @debbie:

    I’m thinking of taking a week/10 days to visit my mom in Akron and do voter registration. I have to figure out when the campaigns will be doing that phase of work.

    There’s also some family things I want to do like see the old haunts and visit the grandparents at the cemetery. That sounds so morbid but they’ve been on my mind a lot lately.

  15. 15.

    Bruuuuce

    If we’re sharing our retirement hopes, I am going to give a callback to Schoolhouse Rock, and hope for No More Kings. (But if only one goes, let it be that momzer Steve King.)

  18. 18.

    tobie

    @Enhanced Voting Techniques: The people in the audience are also thugs. They lap up farm subsidies a.k.a. entitlement, govt spending or welfare and then complain about layabouts in the cities who expect government help. I’ve often wondered whether we should pay for crop insurance in years when it’s not used. I understand covering it in years when crops fail but shouldn’t we expect farmers to pay for it in bumper years?

  20. 20.

    B.B.A.

    @debbie: I remember neither, but from this millennial’s perspective, Iran-Contra was bigger than Watergate. Yet Nixon resigned in disgrace while Reagan is going on Mount Rushmore. How do you like them apples?

  28. 28.

    MomSense

    @Sab:

    Oh cool. Definitely. My mom is heading back on Thursday. She’s driving which makes me nervous but I can’t tell her anything!

  31. 31.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Bruuuuce: I now have an earworm in fragments from (good god I’m old) forty odd years ago

    (Gonna e-lect a president!)

  35. 35.

    Gelfling 545

    @debbie: It was seriously downplayed, though. I remember at the time thinking “How are they getting away with this?”

  37. 37.

    Crashman06

    @debbie: I used to work for a Macmillan company. Sargent was a good guy and a good leader. I was always impressed when he’d come to the office at the end of the year to talk with us and take questions.

  38. 38.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Gelfling 545: “A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and evidence tell me it is not.”
    – Ronald Reagan, admitting the Iran-Contra Affair, March 1987

    My recollection is, the public pretty much went along with this. And Poppy Bush perjured himself. And liberal columnist Richard Cohen said that was fine, cause he and Cap Weinberer used to nod hello to each other in the Piggly-Wiggly

  39. 39.

    Quinerly

    @MomSense: He’s an interesting looking guy. Kinda odd duck. Just clicked on MSNBC…caught a bit of a psychiatrist essentially saying the mentally ill are offended by being compared to Trump….the times we are living in…..

  40. 40.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    I’m watching Tweety for the first time in a long while, out of sheer bone laziness. Jonathon Swann (I think?) of Jim Vandehei’s Axios is personally offended by the Wolff book

  45. 45.

    Kathleen

    @Sab: I get emails telling me all the great stuff he’s doing for Ohio. When he isn’t trying to kill us.

  46. 46.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    it’s like they’re trolling BJ

    @ mattyglesias
    My god
    NYT OpinionVerified account @ nytopinion
    Did you vote for Donald Trump for president? We’d like to hear from you. #NYTLetters

  48. 48.

    debbie

    @Crashman06:

    I worked at Macmillan also, but before S&S took over. I remember Sargent having a good reputation in the industry, unlike so many others.

  49. 49.

    raven

    @debbie: A bit, a bunch of friends just called and the bars are full so we’re having an impromptu game party. I got pretty sad an hour ago, this will probably help.

  51. 51.

    p.a.

    My scandal is the biggest. No one has had bigger scandals than me! Pfft… other scandals?? SAD SCANDALS. Me me me big big big. goo gooo gaa gaa gaaa…

  55. 55.

    raven

    @debbie: It’s coming here, the bars are packed. I went to the Doc, didn’t go to the game, if my friends need shelter from the storm I’m here.

  57. 57.

    Fair Economist

    OMG, it’s like Christmas hasn’t ended yet! Royce (my Representative for many years) is one guy I really wanted out and was expecting to have to work really hard against. And now he’s gone, before I had to do anything!

  62. 62.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Fewer than 700 estates rich enough to pay the tax in 2016 had any farm assets at all, CNN reported in October, but that didn’t stop the wave of applause that greeted Trump when he claimed to have “spared” his audience the “punishment of the deeply unfair estate tax, known as the death tax.”
    “Get up!” he urged his audience, who obliged.
    “Oh, are you happy you voted for me,” Trump purred later. “You are so lucky that I gave you that privilege.”

    he was talking to farmers, basically– as somebody said on twitter the other day, I’d bet even money he’ll announce during the SOTU that Ivanka’s birthday is a national holiday

  64. 64.

    Jeffro

    Hey (since I guess this counts as an open thread?) see if this sounds familiar: Kansas Lawmaker says African-Americans are More Susceptible to Drug Abuse Because Reasons

    It’s heartening to see the Post push right back, right there in the article:

    Attempting to explain at a weekend legislative coffee session with constituents why “all drugs” were outlawed in the United States in the 1930s, Rep. Stephen Alford offered the following, according to The Garden City Telegram: “One of the reasons why, I hate to say it, it’s that the African Americans, they were basically users and they basically responded the worst off to those drugs just because their character makeup, their genetics and that.”

    At the risk of stating the obvious, this is not true.

    According to federal data, there is virtually no difference between black and white Americans when it comes to either rates of illicit drug use or rates of substance-abuse disorder. In 2016, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 54 percent of whites age 12 and older had ever used an illicit drug in their lifetime, higher than the 46 percent rate among blacks.

    Similarly, whites (7.8 percent) were slightly more likely than African Americans (7.6 percent) to meet diagnostic criteria for a substance-use disorder in 2016.

    And see if this sounds familiar (BJ was there first! This week, anyway!!)

    Rep. Alford is correct, however, that there was a distinct racial component of early efforts to outlaw certain types of drugs. It was not, however, out of concern for minorities, but instead part of an active effort to target them.

    Harry Anslinger, the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (a predecessor of the Drug Enforcement Administration), zealously pursued marijuana prohibition in the 1930s in part due to a belief, echoed 70 years later in Rep. Alford’s remarks, that it was primarily used by blacks and Hispanics.

    Racism was “commonplace in Anslinger’s discussion of marijuana,” as John Hudak, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, describes in his book Marijuana: A Short History. Among other things, Anslinger testified before the House Ways and Means Committee in 1937 that “colored students at the University of Minnesota [were] partying with [white] female students, smoking and getting sympathy with their stories of racial persecution. Result — pregnancy.”

    Getting ‘sympathy’?? Is that what they called it back in the 30’s?? Ah well…

    I’m starting to think that NCLB was created so that American students would spend less time learning history…maybe the solution is to go all-in on history and science (screw math!)

  71. 71.

    J R in WV

    @chopper:

    Iran-Contra WAS bigger than Watergate.

    Watergate was criminal conspiracy to steal an election by bugging the DNC HQ and learning what they were doing… never mind that Nixon had that election nailed in a box from the get-go.

    Iran-Contra was conspiring with a foreign enemy power (Iran) first to gain election by encouraging Iran to hold US diplomatic staff hostage until after the inauguration. Secondly to sell arms illegally to Iran, then using those funds to provide illegal support to right-wing death squads in Central America.

    Those Salvadorans being threatened with deportation back to El Salvador, they are victims of Reagan’s (and Oliver North, and, and … ) treasonous plots, which are still paying off for death squads in Central America. Reagan should have been tried, convicted and punished for his treason.

    But Republicans working all levers of power were able to cut things off way short of the President, even though he pleaded guilty in that speech he made. And then the prosecution (probably deliberately) made errors in Oliver North’s trial, in which he was convicted of multiple felonies, so that he squirmed out of all the crimes he committed, and has spent the rest of his life on the RWNJ gravy train.

    Gelfling is right, the public had no taste for political hoopla at the time. I think times have changed. I hope! Trump is far worse than Reagan, and his conspiracy went far further than Reagan’s. Conspiracy with the most dangerous rogue state in the world, with more special (nuclear) weapons than we have.

  72. 72.

    Citizen Alan

    @Jeffro:

    Jesus fucking Christ. From the last paragraph:

    “I’m about as far from being a racist as I can get.” said Alford.

    “I’m not a racist. I just think blacks are genetically predisposed to be inferior.”

    Chris Rock called it years ago. The only way a white conservative can possibly be a racist is if he personally assassinated Medger Evers.

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