Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

This really is a full service blog.

…and a burning sense of injustice to juice the soul.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

No one could have predicted…

How can republicans represent us when they don’t trust women?

The current Supreme Court is a rogue court. Very dangerous.

Everything is totally normal and fine!!!

Let’s finish the job.

If you’re looking for someone who’s young and athletic, go watch a fucking movie.

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

When we show up, we win.

Conservatism: there are people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

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

Republicans would impeach Biden if he bit into a whole Kit Kat rather than breaking the sections apart.

The gop is a fucking disgrace.

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

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Fani Willis claps back at Trump chihuahua, Jim Jordan.

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

I’m sure you banged some questionable people yourself. We’re allowed to grow past that.

So many bastards, so little time.

Republicans: “Abortion is murder but you can take a bus to get one.” Easy peasy.

You are here: Home / Politics / Domestic Politics / Friday Morning Open Thread: We’ve Earned A Little Indulgence

Friday Morning Open Thread: We’ve Earned A Little Indulgence

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Gotta admit, one of the best things I know about President Obama is that he had the smarts to fall in love with this woman, and the skills to keep her interested after all these years. From The Hill:

… “All we have is hope,” the former first lady says in a preview clip from Thursday’s “Ellen” show. Obama’s sit-down with host Ellen DeGeneres marks her first TV interview since leaving the White House last year…

“The thing I learned in the eight years that I was in the White House is that what we do every day in our lives, the good things that we do every day — and we know we do it: we show empathy, we care for each other, you know, we do have a lot in common,” says Obama. “That’s what it means to lead with hope and not fear.”

“I would just encourage your viewers, the country, to do the things we do every day: to love each other, to take care of each other, to show empathy — and you can’t do that only when people make you feel good or safe,” the 54-year-old Obama said, without mentioning President Trump. “We’ve got to do it all across the board.”

“We have to be an open-hearted nation and that’s who we are,” she added.

“So, let’s just keep living our lives like that every single day and forget what they’re saying in Washington. That’s not necessarily who we are. We know who we are.”…

***********
It’s also Candlemas — a/k/a Groundhog Day — and here in Massachusetts, it’s raining:

If Candlemas is bright and clear, there’ll be two winters in the year;
If Candlemas has snow and rain, old winter shall not come again… “

The rain is supposed to turn to snow as the temperature drops sharply, so any groundhogs getting used for media clips are unlikely to see their shadows unless the camera crew messes up. Since I was one of the Massholes caught in the rush-hour commute home during the April Fools Day blizzard, I never put away the snow shovels before Mother’s Day. But even though it hasn’t been a bad winter so far, I can’t help hoping for an early spring…

Apart from memories, good & bad, what’s on the agenda as we wait for the Friday news drop?

Reader Interactions

158Comments

  2. 2.

    ?BillinGlendaleCA

    I can’t help hoping for an early spring…

    It’s called climate change, and it’s a bad thing. It’s been over 80 here for the past week or so, and we’ve had one really good rain storm. Forecast for the next week…around 80.

  3. 3.

    WereBear

    It will be in the teens today, and cloudy, and this has been such a sucky winter I hope the groundhog is right.

    Normally we don’t get layers of ice until St Patrick’s day and it lasts a couple of weeks. We’ve had two assaults already this year.

  5. 5.

    Kay

    ‏

    @benpershing
    13h13 hours ago
    More Ben Pershing Retweeted Jonathan Swan
    Entirely possible that a) the memo is a “dud” in that it doesn’t change anyone’s mind about anything; but b) the #ReleaseTheMemo buildup has already succeeded in convincing Trump’s base that there’s a massive FBI conspiracy against him, regardless of actual content.Ben Pershing added,

    You could write this for anything though. “X has already convinced Trump’s base of Y, regardless of actual content”

    They also think he won the war in Afghanistan and that all crime is committed by immigrants. Massive FBI conspiracy against Trump is just this week’s bullshit. It’s not even in the top five things Trump says and they believe that are not true.

  6. 6.

    Chet

    I got caught in that blizzard too. Although my commute at the time was from MIT back to Somerville by T and on foot. I remember they said it snowed an inch per hour for 24 hours.

  7. 7.

    OzarkHillbilly

    And can somebody explain to me how it is the calendar update that got posted at 6;10 PM last night is at the top of the BJ page?

  9. 9.

    bystander

    @HumboldtBlue: Check for pupil dilation and ocular inflammation. If these conditions e sit, I may be able to explain her temporary disappearance in Humboldt County.

  10. 10.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Kay:

    “X has already convinced Trump’s base of Y, regardless of actual content”

    You misspelled FOX, Kay.

  12. 12.

    Anne Laurie

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    And can somebody explain to me how it is the calendar update that got posted at 6;10 PM last night is at the top of the BJ page?

    There is a FYWP trick to make a post ‘sticky’ — where it will sit at the top of the page until the trick is undone. Cole’s using it, in this case, to be sure that everyone who has or wants to order a calendar sees his post, since there’s no telling how many of us will put up how many posts at any given time…

    P.S. How’s your son doing? As well as can be expected, or even better, I hope?

  15. 15.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Anne Laurie: He’s doing well. Saw the surgeon on the 31st and all is as it should be. Also thank Obama and JB Edwards he got signed up for Medicaid so he will not have to declare bankruptcy, the hospital and surgeon won’t get stiffed, and he won’t have to find a physical therapist who will teach his leg to walk again for couch change. *Now all they have to do* is figure out how they’re going to feed himself.

    **Another good thing, the company he works for has a fund to help employees who find themselves in sudden shitty situations. The fund is probably going to pay a couple months worth of their rent.

  18. 18.

    Kay

    And, that’s not really the issue is it? That Trump’s base will be convinced of something? The issue here is that Trump will fire anyone in law enforcement who isn’t loyal to him. That’s why they’re doing this. They’re planning on getting rid of the only people who are providing any oversight of the Trump Administration and they need this bullshit as cover to do that.

    When Trump said he could shoot a person on the street and his base would still support him the concern shouldn’t be his base and what they think- it should be the person he shot – because whatever his base believe that person is still dead.

  19. 19.

    Kay

    Beautiful. This has always been indefensible:

    U.S. District Judge Mark Walker said the Florida “scheme” unfairly relies on the personal support of the governor for citizens to regain the right to vote. In a strongly-worded ruling, he called the state’s defense of voter disenfranchisement “nonsensical,” a withering criticism of Gov. Rick Scott, the lead defendant in the case.
    “Florida strips the right to vote from every man and woman who commits a felony,” Walker wrote. “To vote again, disenfranchised citizens must kowtow before a panel of high-level government officials over which Florida’s governor has absolute veto authority. No standards guide the panel. Its members alone must be satisfied that these citizens deserve restoration … The question now is whether such a system passes constitutional muster. It does not.”
    Walker wrote: “If any one of these citizens wishes to earn back their fundamental right to vote, they must plod through a gauntlet of constitutionally infirm hurdles. No more. When the risk of state-sanctioned viewpoint discrimination skulks near the franchise, it is the province and duty of this Court to excise such potential bias from infecting the clemency process.”

  20. 20.

    Mustang Bobby

    It’s 65 here, going to 79 and partly cloudy.

    I fully expect the memo to say that the FBI covered up Hillary attacking the consulate in Benghazi! with the gun she used to kill Vince Foster.

  21. 21.

    Mustang Bobby

    @Kay: Good, because it’s also going on the ballot in November and I had my doubts as to whether or not it would pass. I am sure it will be appealed, but I’d be interesting to see how Gov. Dickwithears defends his star chamber.

  22. 22.

    Kay

    @Mustang Bobby:

    This is exactly what Nixon did. It’s on the tapes. He said he wanted the CIA to get the FBI to back off. Of course, he didn’t do it publicly because it’s obviously out of bounds, but that was back when there were standards and you had to hide it.

    Now a major cable network and the majority in Congress are leading the effort to obstruct, so it’s worse of course. Ya know, much, much worse. Really bad.

  23. 23.

    OzarkHillbilly

    An short but interesting read: That’s patriarchy: how female sexual liberation led to male sexual entitlement

    For feminists who survived those generations, it must seem extraordinary to have battled at such risk for liberation to hear younger women discuss sexual contracts, a desire for boundaries, a wish not to be sexualised by men in their lives. Given the emergence of their generation from socially-enforced cocoons of sexual repression, where actual laws existed to culturally erase women’s sexuality, it must look like regress to older women.

    But what has happened in the intervening decades is that sexual freedom has become another realm of women’s experience for patriarchy to conquer. As soon as older feminists had won sexual liberation, patriarchy reframed it as sexual availability for men. Writer David Quinn was actually having a pop at #MeToo feminism in The Times when he stumbled onto an eloquent truth: “The only sexual rule today is ‘consent’, and men have been taught that women are potentially always sexually available because that is what ‘liberation’ means.”

    Where once the patriarchal structures of cultural production were censorious of women’s sexuality in film, art, literature, now the depiction of it is hypersexualised and explicit – but the structures of production remain just as patriarchal.

    The flipside to the destigmatisation of sex for women has been a sense of patriarchal entitlement to sex with women, which is why the painful conversation about consent in our new era of “freedom” must be confronted. One in 10 women, as opposed to one in 70 men, report they’ve been coerced into sex, the vast majority by an intimate partner.

  24. 24.

    Kay

    @Mustang Bobby:

    I’m thrilled it’s on the ballot. Whether it passes or not it’s the only way in, and it’s outrageous that the governor decides who gets to vote.

    The felon disenfranchisement was always mean-spirited and nonsensical. It takes voting from a right to a privilege. Also- just as a side note- how big an asshole do you have to be to want to punish these people forever? They served the sentence.

  28. 28.

    Immanentize

    @?BillinGlendaleCA: That’s fabulous. It looks so filmic (I know — who knows what that means today). By that I mean in a very high quality produced movie. I am not generally a fan of the fish eye (I know you are) but this works so well.

  29. 29.

    But her emails!!!

    @Kay:

    And, that’s not really the issue is it? That Trump’s base will be convinced of something?

    I know this isn’t quite what you meant, but my opinion is that this is indeed the key issue. Trump’s base, the Republican base will believe anything and assume any position given a couple weeks worth of propaganda dumped into the puke funnel. That is why Trump is President. It’s why we’re at this point.

  30. 30.

    ?BillinGlendaleCA

    @Baud: I did it a different way this time(though it’s not the recommended way) and it worked. Only problem is that about midway through my battery died and I had to replace it, so there’s a little jump.

    @Immanentize: The fisheye’s really good for sunsets, since it captures such a wide angle. I might try it with the lens I use for Milky Way shots(it’s a 12mm and the fisheye is 10mm).

  35. 35.

    debbie

    @Kay:

    That the memo is stupid-sounding and inept has to be what’s going on, or Trump would have released it as soon as possible. This is possibly the most cheering thing I’ve read in quite a while.

  38. 38.

    Kay

    @But her emails!!!:

    It’s gotten so much worse since the tax bill passed, because now he’s captured the institutional GOP and all the affiliates.

    If it gets bad- like, constitutional crisis bad- we’ll look back at the tax bill as the point where he solidified control.

    He bought them. It was so easy.

  39. 39.

    bystander

    Moanin’ Joe is just shocked that Paul Ryan is a treasonous little sh*t. What the rest of America knew years ago, Joe just figured that out and he gets paid millions of dollars a year to suffer his cognitive dissonance publicly on a daily basis.

  42. 42.

    Kay

    @But her emails!!!:

    Trump’s world view is really deeply cynical- everyone can he fooled, everyone can be bought, no one really believes anything and it’s just a matter of “making a deal”- and it’s depressing to watch because his cynicism is proving true.

    It IS that bad. WE are that bad.

  43. 43.

    OzarkHillbilly

    Until I read this headline at the Guardian, Amazon fulfillment centers don’t boost employment, analysis finds I had never heard of “fulfillment centers” and being curious clicked thru to find out just what the hell one is. Oh. It’s a fucking warehouse.

  46. 46.

    Jeff

    This year in Philadelphia it’s been a “normal” winter. Last year the crocus were starting to bloom at this time. This year they are only just up. They should flower in March. I do like spring. Not looking forward to summer at all.

  47. 47.

    David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch

    @bystander: A WaPo reporter MSNBC last was shocked to discover Kelly is a wingnut and not a moderate.

    He was so dismayed. As if someone told him Santa Clause wasn’t white.

    Fucking Village. Bunch of boobs and saps.

  52. 52.

    Kay

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    I found a painter. My client’s husband. He came in to pick up papers in work clothes and I thought “YOU’RE a painter! Duh!”

    He agrees that the pinky-white hue is flattering, or so he said. We have to be on the same page.

  62. 62.

    David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch

    The FBI has a real ugly history. From the Palmer Raids to the Internment Camps to the Red Scare to McCarthyism to COINTELPRO to the X-Files.

    Perhaps their greatest disgrace is their subversion of an entire national election simply because they wanted to destroy Clinton. And now Drumpf is trying to destroy the FBI.

    There’s something fitting about that.

  66. 66.

    JPL

    @debbie: They all plead loyalty to the leader before they were hired. Ryan is the one that concerns me, because he already talked about cleansing the FBI. Believe me, they will start checking to see what primary you vote in before they hire you.

  69. 69.

    Kay

    @David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch:

    They will never be able to explain why it was necessary to hold press conferences on the investigation into Clinton while at the same time hiding and even outright denying the investigation into Trump.

    Comey’s explanation for his behavior makes no sense. None of this makes sense. We’re given an explanation and then the justification for the actions falls apart when we’re (finally) given accurate information. Imagine how different the last month of that election would have been if we had been talking about BOTH candidates being under investigation. But we weren’t. In fact, the NYTimes told us the opposite- that Trump was NOT under investigation.

  71. 71.

    Baud

    @Kay:

    One other point that shouldn’t be forgotten. The investigation into Hillary was frivolous and political from the outset. The one into Trump is a serious matter.

  72. 72.

    Kay

    @JPL:

    Believe me, they will start checking to see what primary you vote in before they hire you.

    Well, that’s already the rule, now. Trump and Fox News announced no law enforcement investigation is valid unless the investigator is a Trump supporter. Since there won’t be any investigations by Trump supporters this works out perfectly for them.

  73. 73.

    Kay

    @Baud:

    Right. I’m convinced the NYTimes flogged the email story because they broke it. All the rest of the dopes followed them.

    It had to be important because The Times is important. I’m so fucking sick of these people.

  77. 77.

    Cheryl Rofer

    Fifty degrees at nine last night driving home from Los Alamos. Thirty-five now. Full sun with continuing no rain. Fire season will be awful this year.

    One of the opportunity costs of Trump is that we’re not addressing global warming.

  78. 78.

    James E Powell

    @Kay:

    I’m convinced the NYT flogged the email story – and every other bullshit Clinton scandal story – because somebody there despises Clinton. They have a culture there in which negative Clinton stories are rewarded & the writers who do them get promoted. It’s been that way for years.

  79. 79.

    OzarkHillbilly

    Novel lost for 400 years sheds light on Spain’s imperial heights

    Historia del Huérfano, or The Orphan’s Story, charts the progress of a 14-year-old Spaniard who leaves Granada and heads to the Americas to seek his fortune. Its hero ricochets around the Spanish empire, from the high-society fiestas of Lima to the mephitic mines of Potosí, and goes on to witness Sir Francis Drake’s attack on Puerto Rico and the sacking of Cádiz. After romantic escapades and the odd shipwreck and run-in with pirates, the soldier-cum-missionary finally manages to embrace the calm of monastic life in the capital of viceregal Peru.

    “There’s an awful lot of travelling, but you do get a sense of what the viceroyalty of Peru was like from the inside and of the exchange of people and goods between Europe and America,” said Belinda Palacios, a Peruvian academic who spent two years editing the book back to life. The story was written between 1608 and 1615 by Martín de León y Cárdenas, a Spanish Augustinian friar born near Malaga in 1584 and who, like his eponymous hero, had travelled to Lima. It was set to appear in 1621 under the nom de plume of Andrés de León, but it never made it to the printing presses – perhaps because its author feared it might cause him problems as he embarked on an ecclesiastical career that would see him become an archbishop, and the president and captain-general of the viceroyalty of Sicily.

    A Spanish academic rediscovered the manuscript in the archives of the Hispanic Society of America in 1965. Previous attempts to publish The Orphan’s Story had come to nothing, giving rise to rumours that something malevolent lurked among its 328 pages. “When I started working on it, a lot of people told me that the book was cursed and that people who start working on it die,” Palacios said. “I laughed it off but I was a bit apprehensive at the same time. It’s taken a while because the people who have worked on it have died – one from a strange disease, one in a car accident and another of something else.”

    Palacios hopes the curse has been lifted after it was recently published by the José Antonio de Castro Foundation, which works to safeguard Spain’s literary heritage.

    Heh.

  82. 82.

    Baud

    @James E Powell:

    They have a culture there in which negative Clinton stories are rewarded & the writers who do them get promoted that is garbage. It’s been that way for years.

    Abbreviated.

  83. 83.

    Argiope

    @Baud: Nunes may have self-deluded to the point of actually believing the Russia investigation is politically motivated on that basis. He may assume this is all just a bigger ratfvck than politicizing Benghazi—-which he helped orchestrate. Could explain why he’s such a zealot. Some people probably really do see clothes on the naked emperor. He may be one of them.

  86. 86.

    Dorothy A. Winsor (formerly Iowa Old Lady)

    After a three day break, Trump is back to tweeting

    “You had Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party try to hide the fact that they gave money to GPS Fusion to create a Dossier which was used by their allies in the Obama Administration to convince a Court misleadingly, by all accounts, to spy on the Trump Team.” Tom Fitton, JW— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 2, 2018

  87. 87.

    rikyrah

    @Kay:
    Kay,
    I don’t know if you know this, but a husband and wife team went out, got the signatures, and felon re-enfranchisement will be on the November 2018 ballot in Florida. Taking it out of the Governor’s hands completely. It’s the most important referendum in the country for 2018, IMO.
    If it passes, Florida will forever change.

  88. 88.

    OzarkHillbilly

    Estimates are out for how much publisher Portfolio might have lost on Ivanka Trump’s book, and they won’t be happy reading for the US’s “first daughter”, or her publisher. Women Who Work was conceived, its author has said, after she appeared on The Apprentice years ago and received “a flood of letters from young women asking for guidance”. This made her realise “the need for more female leaders to speak out publicly in order to change the way society thinks and talks about ‘women who work’”.
    Sign up for the Bookmarks email
    Read more

    Unfortunately, it seems that not that many people wanted to listen. According to Forbes, the book sold 31,900 copies between publication in May 2017 and the end of the year. Crunching the numbers, Forbes says this means the book has earned around $1.1m (£772,000), of which the publisher will have received $566,000. But it paid an estimated $787,500 advance, with a second advance instalment to follow. Forbes estimates that this means Portfolio – which has yet to comment – has lost “at least” $220,000 on the book.

    Publisher Melville House puts the sum higher, speculating that Portfolio might be down as much as $500,000, and adding that “the upshot of all of this is the observation that Ivanka has mastered her father Donald’s greatest skill: convincing people to take on absurd amounts of risk, while paying for the privilege”.

    Whoocoodanode?

  95. 95.

    David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch

    @Baud: if they did nothing wrong then they have nothing to complain about.

    Their panic screams guilt.

  98. 98.

    Amir Khalid

    @Baud:
    What is Ivanka to those big pockets, that they would want to buy up her book? Is she the big political macher in her family? Is she a high-profile pundit, or a pundit of any profile at all? If you curry favour with her, will President Daddy feel like he owes you one? No, no, and no. She’s just one of his hangers-on.

  99. 99.

    David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch

    CIA Director Mike Pompeo met with two high-level Russian spy chiefs in Washington last week

    I had no idea the KGB and CIA were so interested in adoptions. Rather touching.

  100. 100.

    TS

    @Dorothy A. Winsor (formerly Iowa Old Lady): It seems like it will never stop. …. “If any other President did this ….” every time he tweets – or speaks.
    He is openly attacking a judicial inquiry – day after day after day.Surely not just obstruction but subversion. It is to be hoped he falls because twitter refused to ban his racist sexist self

  103. 103.

    oldgold

    This farcical memo is much more powerful unpublished. Ask any feather dancer.

    As such, Trump, should say that although publishing the memo would greatly help him by definitively showing the Deep State is biased against him, he will put the security of the nation first and request that the memo remain unpublished.

    It would be a huge tactical win for him. “Today he became President” would echo across the fruited plain from sea to shining sea. Hell, Melania might even agree to ride in the same limo or hop in bed with him and eat a cheese burger.

    But, the Stable Genius is too damn stupid to figure this out.

  105. 105.

    Dave

    @Kay: The most likely explanation is pretty obvious. He wanted to punish her and cripple her presidency. He figured she’d still win but have no power. And probably because he genuinely thinks the Clinton’s get away with everything. Whatever else he is rational when it comes HRC is not one of them. Oh there were probably other things various pressures and so on but I think that in this case it is the simpler explanation.

  106. 106.

    Dave

    @Argiope: It’s a possibility especially given that it’s very common for ratfuckers and liars to really believe that everyone else is as well. That an investigation can exist on it’s own merits may never occur to him or that even if you removed the partisan lens people could still care about it may be unimaginable to him. Or he could just be guilty as sin or all of the above and more.

  109. 109.

    Lapassionara

    @Dave: This. It is always projection with these people.

    I think someone should start reminding the American people why we have in the past considered the independence of the Justice Department to be one of the important foundations of our democracy.

  110. 110.

    O. Felix Culpa

    @Kay:

    It IS that bad. WE are that bad.

    “Yes” to point 1, “not entirely” to point 2. There are a lot of us who are telling the truth and fighting for our democracy. I also believe our numbers are growing as T and his allies grow more audacious and rapacious. For example, putting our public lands up for grabs has brought previously apolitical people into the resistance fold. The Trumpites are (mostly) lost, but they are a minority. We can win our country back.

  111. 111.

    japa21

    Serious question. Other than the Russian bots, the biggest pusher for the memo’s release has beern Hannity. It is know that he and Trump have spoken about it and that Hannity has pushed Trump to release it.
    I really believe that Hannity has actually seen the memo, probably provided to him by Nunes. Obviously, Hannity does not have security clearance. Technically, a journalist seeing classified info is not a crime, but whoever gave him the memo to read definitely is subject to penalty.

    Now the question. Just how much do you think the FBI is using this time to look at who has seen the memo, who provided the initial information to Nunes and looking for criminal activity in that regard?

  112. 112.

    WaterGirl

    @OzarkHillbilly: Wonderful news about your son! Between that and reading about the company’s fund brought tears to my eyes. I imagine it will be a long time before your son can work – any estimates of a timeframe?

  113. 113.

    japa21

    Unbelievable. Joe Walsh, yes that Joe Walsh tweeted:

    If this memo is released, it’s Devin Nunes & the other Republicans putting “protecting Trump” above “protecting America.”

    That’s wrong.

  114. 114.

    bemused

    @Kay:

    Rightwingers talk so much about redemption but only for their own tribe. Punishment forever for everyone else. No redemption for people who have paid their dues, served their sentences and who are less likely to vote GOP.

  115. 115.

    But her emails!!!

    @japa21:

    Serious question. Other than the Russian bots, the biggest pusher for the memo’s release has been Hannity.

    I’m fairly certain that Hannity is a Russian bot.

  116. 116.

    schrodingers_cat

    @Kay: I don’t know it is/was pretty scary to me seeing the benefit of the doubt being extended to Kelly even when his actions made it crystal clear that he didn’t deserve any.

  118. 118.

    WaterGirl

    @MomSense: @OzarkHillbilly:

    That is such good news. Please let us know if we can help out.

    I was having the same thought. You are a beloved commenter and friend here at BJ, so I bet lots of us jackals would be grateful to be able do something to help your son.

    Someone here mentioned that there is a better choice than GoFundMe that keeps less of the money for overhead, so if you can be convinced to put up something like that, you might want to look into that option. Sadly, all I can recall is that it (maybe) and the word “care” in it, but I am sure I could pick it out on a multiple choice test.

  119. 119.

    WaterGirl

    @Cheryl Rofer: Plus, I bet they are hoping that doing this will inoculate the against their own pedophile scandal being brought back into the limelight.

  121. 121.

    schrodingers_cat

    ICE has arrested a U.S. army veteran who served two tours of duty in Afghanistan and has two U.S. citizen children. His name is Miguel Perez Jr. and he has lived in the U.S. since he was 8 years old
    Thread

  124. 124.

    Patricia Kayden

    @Kay: Trump can’t fire the State Attorney Generals who can continue to investigate Trump and his Russian ties even if Mueller is fires.

    A Saturday Night Massacre will not stop the investigation into Russian collusion/interference into the last presidential election.

  126. 126.

    Patricia Kayden

    @schrodingers_cat: On Nunes? On all Cobgressional Republicans? We know that Russians hacked the RNC at the same time they hacked the DNC so there is no doubt that Republicans are being blackmailed.

  131. 131.

    bemused

    @David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch:

    I rolled my eyes at media praise of Kelly right from the beginning and thought it’s only a matter of time before Kelly shows who really he is and they can’t ignore it. It’s knee jerk with media that they have to put the new political faces on the scene under rose colored lights although it seems to be Republicans that get the benefit of the doubt imo, Democrats not so much.

  132. 132.

    Amir Khalid

    @OzarkHillbilly:
    Maybe they won a bidding war for the right to publish the book, and then it turned out to be crap. Or maybe they were just starstruck — it can happen to publshing executives too, same as anyone else.

  133. 133.

    NotMax

    FYI.

    Fidel Angel Castro Diaz-Balart, 68, the son of Fidel Castro, committed suicide on February 1, unable to overcome severe depression, reports the official Granma newspaper.
    [snip]
    “Fidelito” as he was known, played a prominent role in efforts to develop nuclear energy on the island. He served as the executive secretary of Cuba’s Atomic Energy Commission from 1980 to 1992 and was in charge of a project to build a nuclear power plant in the south central Cuban province of Cienfuegos.

    The project was scrapped in 1992 after its funding source, the Soviet Union, ceased to exist. Source

  134. 134.

    schrodingers_cat

    @bemused: It was not just the MSM that gave him the benefit of the doubt. It was pretty universal till the Rep Wilson incident happened, with the exception of those who had followed his time as the DHS secretary closely.

  135. 135.

    clay

    @japa21: Well SOMEONE leaked the contents of the memo, since we all know what it says. And I doubt it was a Democrat on the committee since they seem to take national security seriously.

    I’m sure any minute now Trump will decry the leakers of classified information, like he did about James Comey.

  137. 137.

    WaterGirl

    @clay: I was surprised to learn that it was NOT just two people who saw the original classified material – Trey Gowdy and Adam Schiff – it was those two people “and their staff”. Very interesting, I thought.

  138. 138.

    schrodingers_cat

    @bemused: Dig deep? They could have just reported what he was doing as DHS head, how he treated Congressional oversight and tracked how many had died in immigration detention under his watch. Not to speak of the behavior of CBP during the first Muslim ban.

    ETA: Just not seeing a military man through rose tinted glasses would have helped.

  140. 140.

    Calouste

    @JPL: Paul Ryan is behaving like someone who has a lot to fear from the FBI.

    I wouldn’t be surprised if we hear that someone connected to Ryan has already talked to Mueller’s Grand Jury.

  144. 144.

    Another Scott

    In other Shock, Shocking morning news… TheHill:

    House lawmakers will likely consider legislation early next week to keep the government open through about March 23, according to two sources familiar with the situation, though the plan has not been finalized.

    The thinking is that a six-week funding patch would give lawmakers enough time to reach a deal on immigration, which would then unlock the budget caps deal that is needed to write a massive omnibus spending bill for the rest of the fiscal year.

    Congress may end up voting on the spending measure as early as Tuesday because of a House Democratic retreat planned for next Wednesday.

    […]

    Priorities, donchaknow. :-/

    Seriously, it seems clear that there are just going to be short CRs until January 2019 (when the new Democratic House is sworn in) at the earliest. And, it seems to me, that there isn’t going to be any DACA deal before then either because the GOP leadership clearly doesn’t want one no matter their protestations to the contrary. It’s too wonderful a hostage and punching bag for them.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  146. 146.

    schrodingers_cat

    @Another Scott: Besides the cuts in legal immigration the so called path to citizenship is full of pitfalls, where the Dreamers will be treated like criminals on parole, one wrong step, including losing their job makes them subject to deportation, during their wait of 10 to 12 years before they can apply for citizenship.

  147. 147.

    trollhattan

    Oh dear lord, nooooo! re. the 13 California home-school/prison kids, you can see the fire from the frying pan.

    Public outreach for the children has been heartwarming, with reality star Amy Duggar saying that she hopes to adopt all 13 of the victims.

    Is there anybody who’s first thought wasn’t “more Duggars” on hearing about these kids?

  149. 149.

    rikyrah

    @schrodingers_cat:

    @bemused: Dig deep? They could have just reported what he was doing as DHS head, how he treated Congressional oversight and tracked how many had died in immigration detention under his watch. Not to speak of the behavior of CBP during the first Muslim ban

    The two warning bells for me?
    1. Threatening to walk out on Arab citizen groups in Michigan that had requested a meeting
    2. He saw nothing wrong with SEPARATING PARENTS AND CHILDREN WHO WERE IN DETENTION.

  150. 150.

    schrodingers_cat

    @rikyrah: He insulted members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, he pretty much wore his racism on his sleeve and all we kept hearing about was his burnished resume.

    Isn’t #2 the official policy now under his hand picked successor, Nielsen who thinks nothing of lying under oath.

  151. 151.

    Karen Potter

    Groundhog day? seriously; another cross quarter day that was “Christianized” to help convert more pagans. Of course there are six weeks more of winter, it is six weeks until Spring Equinox. Some of the pagans celebrate Imbolic; since they seem to have decided to use the Celtic names and it was a fertility celebration, some honor the godling Pan

  152. 152.

    MisterForkbeard

    @Dorothy A. Winsor (formerly Iowa Old Lady):

    “You had Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party try to hide the fact that they gave money to GPS Fusion to create a Dossier which was used by their allies in the Obama Administration to convince a Court misleadingly, by all accounts, to spy on the Trump Team.” Tom Fitton, JW— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 2, 2018

    The really impressive part is that almost none of this is true. Hillary and the Democratic Party didn’t hide anything, but it was a Democratic-affiliated lawyer who apparently didn’t even tell the Hillary campaign. The Dossier wasn’t “created” with just Democratic money. It was not used by “allies” in the administration, but rather by people who publicly shivved Hillary’s campaign at least twice and broke longstanding FBI policy to do it… we have only disgraced congressmen Nunes’ word that it was used misleadingly, and the FBI spied not on “The Trump Team” but re-engaged years worth of surveillance on Carter Fucking Page, whom Trump had been warned about and for whom we have literal notes from Russians saying they want to recruit him.

    What a douchebag.

  157. 157.

    Matt McIrvin

    @OzarkHillbilly: The way I’ve always seen it is that it’s sort of like a parallel-processing “race condition” in computer science. Second-wave feminism and the Sexual Revolution were happening at the same time on parallel threads, and ended up with a lot of gnarly cross-thread interactions: the loosening of sexual mores initially happened in a profoundly sexist environment, even compared to today.

    It might have maybe gone better if we’d had the feminism first. But that’s not how anything happens.

  158. 158.

    J R in WV

    @?BillinGlendaleCA:

    Wonderful job! I especially love the jet plane shooting past near the end of the show. I see the blip where you changed the battery out. I wish my cameras had better power left indicators. They do seem to go quite a long time on a single charge, tho. I’ll be interested to see the 12mm version, I suspect it will come out better… I’ve never been crazy about fish-eye, although very wide angle is great for some things.

    Keep up the good work, I love seeing it.

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