Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The most dangerous place for a black man in America is in a white man’s imagination.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

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

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

The willow is too close to the house.

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

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

Pelosi: “He either is stupid, or he thinks the rest of us are.” Why not both?

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

Prediction: the gop will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

If West Virginia and San Francisco had a love child.

It’s not hopeless, and we’re not helpless.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

White supremacy is terrorism.

Fundamental belief of white supremacy: white people are presumed innocent, minorities are presumed guilty.

“In the future, this lab will be a museum. don’t touch it.”

Tick tock motherfuckers!

Compromise? There is no middle ground between a firefighter and an arsonist.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

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Archives for February 2018

Open Thread: Professor Krugman vs. Buck-Fiddy Ryan

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“Speaker Ryan”‘s press secretary, y’all. Note the timestamp: HE’S NOT GIVING UP HIS BIG LIE!

Though, despite “presidential” precedent, looks like the Grey Lady *still* won’t let Krugman use the word bullshit on its website…

… Should we keep giving Ryan grief over that tweet? Yes, we should – and not just because it shows how out of touch he is. By highlighting the tiny tax cut some workers will get as if that were the point and main result of a bill that blows up the deficit by more than $1 trillion, he helps illustrate the bait-and-switch at the core of the whole G.O.P. agenda.

For tax cuts aren’t free. Sooner or later, the federal government has to pay its way. Even if you don’t think the budget deficit is currently a big problem, except under very special circumstances anything that reduces revenue will eventually have to be offset by later tax increases or spending cuts…

So Ryan is patting himself on the back for giving a schoolteacher some French fries. What’s he planning to take away?

Well, we know the answer: Republicans constantly use the alleged dangers of budget deficits to argue for sharp cuts in social programs. You might have thought they’d lay off that rhetoric for a while after passing an unfunded $1.5 trillion tax cut, but in fact they barely paused; even at the height of the tax “reform” debate, people like Orrin Hatch declared that we can’t “spend billions and billions and trillions of trillions of dollars to help people who won’t help themselves.” Right now they’re dragging their feet on funding for community health centers, complaining about the cost…

It’s such an obvious scam that you might think either that its perpetrators would get embarrassed or that the public would get wise. But the first won’t happen. The second – well, we’ll see in November.

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Trump Trough (Open Thread)

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So, this is happening right now:

Stipulated: the Dow isn’t the economy, and a 1,500-point drop doesn’t mean the same in 2018 as it would have meant 20 years ago in terms of percentage. But damn! The contrast between that orange gasbag droning on about how Democrats didn’t applaud his stellar economic management with sufficient enthusiasm at his stupid speech last week and that chyron about the stock market tanking…

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So What’s Our Story?

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Over the weekend, Paul Ryan’s now deleted tweet about the woman in Lancaster, PA whose extra $1.50 per week will cover her Costco membership got a fair amount of attention (here and here, for example). I know this went pretty far and wide, since my daughter showed me that it was showing up on her social media feeds, which (unlike mine) aren’t all (or even mostly) politics. So “the millenials” know that Ryan is a clueless twit and that his party’s “tax cut” isn’t enough to pay for one night of drinks at a cheap bar.

The logical follow up to this is a few simple, straightforward words about what Democrats will do differently. How does this sound: “Once we have Congress and the White House, we will roll back the Trump tax cuts on the 1% and give that money to the middle class.” I think it sounds pretty good, but I’ll be god damned if a mainstream Democrat can say it without a bunch of mealy-mouthed qualifications.

So, in 2018 and 2020, are we going to run on something people care about – cutting their taxes, giving them more services (including Medicare for all) and making the rich pay for it? Or is it going to be another year of 100 page position papers with 50 different little proposals that nobody can understand?

That’s an honest question, not a rhetorical one. And, if you’ve seen some good Democratic messaging from one of the many good candidates who’ve stepped up for 2018, please tell us about it in the comments.

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“Executive Time” Open Thread

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Here are Twitler’s bunker babblings so far today:

Taking the tweets in chronological order from the bottom up, the ill-informed gibe about the UK’s NHS was apparently inspired by yellow-fanged fascist-coddler Nigel Farange’s appearance on Fox & Friends, which further inspired Twitler to slobber over the three vapid sofa squatters on that program. Is this unprecedented in U.S. history, a president* acting as social media director for a partisan cable news morning program? As far as I know, yes!

Congrats to Congressman Schiff for getting under the creature’s skin in a big way to earn a “Little” nickname. Is it unprecedented in U.S. history for a president* to relentlessly drag members of congress on social media and issue vague, blustery imperatives like “Must be stopped!” about an elected official to an army of heavily armed, brain-dead cultists? I believe so, gentle reader, and let’s hope Congressman Schiff has robust security!

If Trump were a rational actor, one might be tempted to read hope into the tweet about DACA since it doesn’t explicitly mention the nonstarter demands to drastically curtail LEGAL immigration. But since we’re dealing with a clown who has already rejected a bipartisan bill that meets the named conditions, the probable explanation is that Stephen Miller simply isn’t in the golf cart this morning. Is this unprecedented in U.S. history, a president* who’s such a spongy amalgam of malice, ego and cluelessness that elected officials of both parties and people whose lives depend on policy outcomes just have no idea what to expect? Eh, maybe not.

And finally, the valorization of the stooge Devin Nunes. The only ray of sunshine in that black hole of stupid is that Twitler seems to be aware, if dimly, of the controversy surrounding the slam-dunk “vindication” memo. I guess even Fox & Friends can’t hide that.

Open thread!

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On the Road and In Your Backyard

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Good Morning All,

This weekday feature is for Juicers who are are on the road, traveling, or just want to share a little bit of their world via stories and pictures. So many of us rise each morning, eager for something beautiful, inspiring, amazing, subtle, of note, and our community delivers – a view into their world, whether they’re far away or close to home – pictures with a story, with context, with meaning, sometimes just beauty. By concentrating travel updates and tips here, it’s easier for all of us to keep up or find them later.

So please, speak up and share some of your adventures and travel news here, and submit your pictures using our speedy, secure form. You can submit up to 7 pictures at a time, with an overall description and one for each picture.

You can, of course, send an email with pictures if the form gives you trouble, or if you are trying to submit something special, like a zipped archive or a movie. If your pictures are already hosted online, then please email the links with your descriptions.

For each picture, it’s best to provide your commenter screenname, description, where it was taken, and date. It’s tough to keep everyone’s email address and screenname straight, so don’t assume that I remember it “from last time”. More and more, the first photo before the fold will be from a commenter, so making it easy to locate the screenname when I’ve found a compelling photo is crucial.

Have a wonderful day, and enjoy the pictures!

Thanks to an enhancement from Major Major Major Major, the back-end form mechanics are improved, so we start this week with more from Le Comte…’s trip to Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, etc.

But first – mot sure who else is as jammed about Tuesday’s launch of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket as I am, but folks, this is really a big step in history. Launch window begins at 1:30 pm EST and I’ll be glued to a screen or two with at least one eye, no matter what else is going on!

I hope this is a week we look back on in awe, and that this launch starts something inspirational: a more concrete vision of neartime space exploration and habitation possibilities. It’s really exciting!

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Monday Morning Open Thread: Branding — That’ll Leave A Scar

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Is “I only watch it for the ads” still a thing?

Apart from post-game recovery, what’s on the agenda for the start of another week?

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Leftovers Open Thread — Superb Owl Edition

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David Roth, in the Baffler — “Downward Spiral”:

… The NFL is financially healthy and also pretty luridly out of its mind, increasingly given to grandiose delusion and stubborn denial and spasms of executive sadism. And lately, it’s declining—in ways that are obvious for even casual viewers and evident during an average Sunday’s slate of games and in ways that the league might not fully feel for generations.

It’s America’s game all right, and if the NFL is sick, if it is even perhaps dying, it is for the most American of reasons—because it is increasingly ragged and rotten with corruption, and because it can’t quite come up with any other way that it would rather be…

Rich television deals ensure that profitability is locked in for the foreseeable future, and ratings are only slightly off their old Olympian standard. But the NFL currently feels very much like a league in decline—the league seems in a real way to have lost interest in football, or in trying to stop the league’s broader skid. There are and will always be bad teams, but the NFL in 2017 is remarkable for the number of teams that appear not even to be trying to compete. This includes not just teams embarking on variously forward-thinking tank schemes to gain advantageous position in upcoming drafts, or the roughly equal number of teams that are plainly institutionally incompetent. The ones that stand out most dramatically are those that are plainly not trying to do anything but bump along the bottoms of their divisions and collect their share of the $39.6 billion in television revenues that the league’s thirty-two teams will divide between 2014 and 2022.

Fans will put up with a lot, but such overt and unapologetic indifference is an insult that’s hard to ignore. The NFL has always prioritized the profits of the men who own the league’s teams above any other end and has only rarely bothered to conceal that fact. In its simultaneously sincere and delirious self-performance, the NFL rhymes perfectly both with our Trump-y moment and the man himself, from its valorizing of not just money but greed, its blank devotion to bigness, its endless capacity to take offense at every outrage against itself, by “anti-football” doctors revealing the damage the game does to the people who play it, to the kneeling Kaepernick. It makes sense that Trump once owned a football team of his own, the New Jersey Generals of the short-lived USFL; it’s a nice Trumpian touch that the USFL only realized a modest financial return when Trump and his fellow team owners negotiated a buyout at the expense of their far richer NFL counterparts. That the same NFL owners who donated more than any other sports executives to Trump’s inauguration celebration, according to FEC filings, recoil righteously from Kaepernick vulgarly “politicizing” their American Sunday tradition is, mostly, unsurprising. That Trump, in a characteristically beefy ad-lib at a late-September rally for Alabama Senator Luther Strange, said he would “love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now, out, he’s fired,’” was, in retrospect, probably inevitable. That he kept mashing away at that (popular) sentiment whenever his poll numbers turned down in the months afterward spoke not just to Trump’s well-documented animal shamelessness but also to the risks of the NFL’s long, strange campaign against its players.

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