Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

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

“More of this”, i said to the dog.

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

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

It’s time for the GOP to dust off that post-2012 autopsy, completely ignore it, and light the party on fire again.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

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

It’s the corruption, stupid.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

The revolution will be supervised.

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

This blog will pay for itself.

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

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

You are here: Home / Gun Issues / gun safety / Friday Morning Open Thread: Ready for the Deluge?

Friday Morning Open Thread: Ready for the Deluge?

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But on the positive side, Rep. Doug Jones gave a speech…

Yeah, low bar, but at least he’s speaking out. Let’s not discourage the baby-steppers.

Reader Interactions

146Comments

  3. 3.

    NotMax

    Shall opt for the Kevlar golf umbrella as protection against all the shoes dropping, thank you very much.

  6. 6.

    NotMax

    For the ‘I got a bad feeling about this” file (emphasis added).

    Riding on the interest in Venezuela’s fledgling state-backed cryptocurrency, President Nicolas Maduro has highlighted the new investment interests lured through the Petro while simultaneously announcing a major reform to the country’s circulating currency.
    [snip]
    Maduro said the country had received 200,927 offers of Petro purchases from individuals and companies from 133 countries, including Colombia, Spain, the United States, Mexico, Argentina, Peru, Turkey, Germany, Brazil and Russia.

    With over US$5 billion sold during the presale, the president also thanked Russian firm Nem, which provided logistics and ensured “the highest standards of security and quality” for Petro operations, adding that the cryptocurrency “is the best investment and the most secure you can make in Venezuela.”

    Maduro also announced that new bills will be put into circulation, slashing the denominations: “I have decided to remove three zeros from the currency,” he said, highlighting a new 50 bolivar bill to replace the 50,000 bolivar notes put into circulation last year. Source

    Strictly FYI, for the new paper currency the largest denomination is the equivalent of 1¢ U.S.

    Venezuela’s new set of monetary denomination will consist of two coins, one of 0.50 cents of a bolivar ($0.00001) and the other of one bolivar ($0.00002).

    In addition there will be bills of two bolivars ($0.00004), five bolivars ($0.0001), 10 bolivars ($0.0002), 20 bolivars ($0.0004), 50 bolivars ($0.001), 100 bolivars ($0.002), 200 bolivars ($0.004) and 500 bolivars ($0.01). Source

  9. 9.

    lowtechcyclist

    But on the positive side, Rep. Doug Jones gave a speech…

    Nitpick: Sen. Doug Jones is not a member of the House of Representatives, so ‘Rep.’ Doug Jones is incorrect. (You could get away with ‘Congressman’ Doug Jones, since both Representatives and Senators are Congresspersons.)

  10. 10.

    lowtechcyclist

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    Shit, here I am with just a rainsuit and knee high woobies.

    And here I’m standing naked, laughing madly at the sun
    Though I wanted to sleep late today, the battle’s just begun.
    -Blood Sweat and Tears, “The Battle”

  13. 13.

    Cermet

    Lets see what the money’d class has to say in the stock market; increased interests rates and a trade war should make for fun. If ‘profit’ makers can turn this mess around, then there are a lot of suckers out there buying.

    Looking at the fundamentals of the economy – the so-called middle class is shrinking, wages are still lagging behind inflation, school as well as credit card debt is only increasing, medical expenses are increasing both for healthcare and medicare at an alarming rate, two wars are still being fought and mostly unpaid for, a trade war is rearing its head, and our military expenditures are increasing the national debt; one could hardly think there is anything positive about this economy that would convince investors that this is anything but a really dangerously unstable economic system driven by lunatics running the congress and an extremely stupid and small handed orange fart cloud pretending to be president. How’s all that for a start of this Friday?

  17. 17.

    Baud

    A Reddit commenter. Speaks for itself.

    I hate to admit this so, so much and actually struggle with the reality of it, but I do believe I was manipulated. As a matter of fact, before the election, I left the Democratic party because of the anger that had built up, due to how they treated Sanders. I still stand by being “No Party Preference” because the Democratic Party as a whole has shifted a bit too far to the right for my liking, but I hate that I left due to a lot of influence from whatever Trump/Russian/any other trolls. I don’t think I’m particularly intelligent, but I have a Bachelors in History and Masters in Counseling and feel like critical thinking is something I practiced not only in my formal education but as a part of my professional career. With that said, it’s nuts to think how easy it is to influence and manipulate.

  19. 19.

    PsiFighter37

    Seeing that Stormy Daniels’ attorney is teasing that there are some visual receipts that are going to be shown Sunday night. Give me my popcorn please! This is gonna be good…

  23. 23.

    David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch

    Thursday night an all-female panel sitting down with CNN host Don Lemon was visibly repulsed after watching a clip of an ex-Playboy Playmate claiming that President Donald Trump told her she reminded him of his daughter Ivanka during one of their alleged sexual trysts.

  24. 24.

    Baud

    @satby: I know. But we need cracks to break the dam. The big question is whether they can resist Manipulation 2.0.

  25. 25.

    But her emails!!

    @Baud:
    How do these people manage to avoid decapitating themselves with spoons while eating breakfast? The Democrats have never been this far left socially and their economic program hasn’t been this far left since at least the 70s.

  26. 26.

    Cermet

    @NotMax: Sorry, we only have three day old cyanide – so, maybe come back Monday. I mean really, it has to be a better week. I keep telling myself that every week – at some point, maybe it will be.

  28. 28.

    satby

    @Baud: well, that’s not usually somewhere I read, and the follow-up comments remind me of trying to discuss politics with my millennial nieces and nephews (my kids generally agree with me). The complete lack of historical context, the baseline erroneous assumptions about Democratic party platforms, the pseudoscientific “analysis” of how people might have been manipulated…. Gah.
    At least idiots I end up fighting with on FB are less pretentious.

  32. 32.

    Comrade Nimrod Humperdink

    Good evening from the ass-end of the world everyone. Have we started bombing somebody yet?

    On a more positive note, I hope Doug Jones uses his time well and suspect he will. I don’t expect him to get re-elected but getting sane Congressional representation from Alabama is a nice step up. Who is going to go up against McDaniel in Mississippi? He’s not quite Roy Moore, but he’s still an odious motherfucker who could go down against the right Dem.

  33. 33.

    gene108

    @Baud:

    There are a lot of people more liberal than the Democratic center, who cannot accept that everyone does not share their vision for the country and that many would rather suffer than let Those People live a better life.

    Their agenda can only be failed, the democratic-sociali$t-Scandinavian utopia cannot fail.

  34. 34.

    debbie

    @satby:

    At least this person has realized the consequences of his/her actions. I’m not quite sure how much self-flagellation should be required here, or if it’s even the answer.

  37. 37.

    Baud

    @gene108:

    I will say this about the younger folks. They were manipulated by people they trusted. Think Truman Show. I hope, like Jim Carrey, that they can escape their false reality.

  38. 38.

    Comrade Nimrod Humperdink

    How do these people manage to avoid decapitating themselves with spoons while eating breakfast? The Democrats have never been this far left socially and their economic program hasn’t been this far left since at least the 70s.

    This. Hillary ran the most unapologetically liberal presidential campaign in history. I would’ve loved a little more economic populism because that’s how I roll, but that’s a quibble. The party has decidedly NOT moved right in recent years. Over a couple decades it got a bit more capital-friendly, but so did the rest of the US political climate. Republicans used to sometimes be responsible regulators. When they thought regulations could be reasonable or at the very least popular (Nixon: EPA) they brought something to the table. That all died in the 1980s, along with the prominence of unions in many households.

  39. 39.

    Matt McIrvin

    So on LGM they found a person on Twitter saying about Bolton what one of our drive-by trolls just said about Pompeo replacing Tillerson: that this is the Deep State’s “Clinton/Bush neocon machine” taking over the peaceful Trump administration in a soft coup. I think we’ve found the RT trollniverse’s new line.

  40. 40.

    debbie

    @Baud:

    Younger than you’re referring to, but Cameron Kasky gave an exceptional interview of NPR this morning.

  41. 41.

    Baud

    @satby:

    It’s practicality. We need voters. As long as we don’t have to subjugate ourselves to the haters or compromise our integrity, I’ll let them be.

  43. 43.

    satby

    @debbie: I’m not asking for self flagellation, I’m asking for someone with enough humility to check if his/her assertions are true before posting them as fact. Until they do, we’ll go through this over and over.
    Shit, I googled “hoi-polloi” to make sure I remembered the spelling. It’s not that high of a bar.

  44. 44.

    Baud

    @debbie: I’m getting the impression that the second internet generation is more sophisticated than the first. But we’ll see. They’ll be the object of propaganda too.

  45. 45.

    Comrade Nimrod Humperdink

    @Matt McIrvin: Pompeo and Bolton are both happy to drop as many bombs as we can make I suspect, but the Deep State, as far as such a thing exists, has fuck all to do with that. As if career professionals in defense and intel and law enforcement wanted these two fucking guys humoring Cheetolini’s global shit-talking. Their lives are on the line every time this pack of goons steps up to a microphone.

  46. 46.

    Baud

    @Baud:

    And not to be forgotten, we still won millennials, even though most of the young voices we hear and see on the internet seem to be against us.

  47. 47.

    Matt McIrvin

    @gene108: There was a time when it stung me to be lectured by European lefties about how we sheeple Americans only had two parties and they were both exactly the same.

    Eventually I figured out that the constitutional structure of our government had something to do with it–US political parties are not European parliamentary parties; they’re more like governing coalitions, and it doesn’t actually make sense to abandon them for being not extreme enough if your position can’t swing a majority.

    But that’s probably more sophistication about the workings of government than even the average person with a college degree can be expected to come up with on their own.

  48. 48.

    satby

    @Baud: millenials are the second generation, and I don’t have any confidence that they’re better at all. They mostly think ancient history is the 1980s.

  49. 49.

    Baud

    @satby:

    I count differently. Gen Xers remember a time before the internet. Millennials do not. That’s why I count them as first.

  50. 50.

    Comrade Nimrod Humperdink

    @Baud: The Youngs voted Dem in like fortyish states in 2016. Contrasting Obama with W and Trump will certainly be making an impression. The issue is getting them out to vote more than anything else.

  52. 52.

    Baud

    @Matt McIrvin: European parties are also structured differently IIRC. Actually, less democratic and more top down. I’m not sure how many people here would prefer that.

  53. 53.

    Matt McIrvin

    @satby: White male millennials are in many ways almost as bad as older white guys. But fewer millennials are white, and their gender gap is also colossal.

  54. 54.

    debbie

    @satby:

    I’m not sure I was so different at that age. But you learn, and then you do better. Is the bar you’re holding one you could have passed at their age? If so, congratulations, but you were the exception to the “rule.”

  55. 55.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Baud: Yeah, the whole concept of primary elections is pretty alien to most of them. In a US party that’s an incentive to stay in the tent.

  56. 56.

    Comrade Nimrod Humperdink

    @Baud: Hell when I watched Argo and saw the centrally-located kitchen telephone with the mile-long cord and the tube tvs with rabbit ears and dials you had to get off your ass and turn, smoking on airplanes, etc, I realized I was watching a period film about my childhood, and I felt old.

  57. 57.

    satby

    @Matt McIrvin:

    Eventually I figured out that the constitutional structure of our government had something to do with it–US political parties are not European parliamentary parties;

    See, shit like this annoys me because you didn’t used to have to figure it out for yourself, it was taught in basic civics classes how our constitutional republic works. The absolute lack of understanding by most of this country’s citizens of how their government works and how policies that affect their lives are supposed to get enacted just floors me sometimes. But it lets the demagogues run free, so there’s that.

  58. 58.

    satby

    @Baud: but a ton of us using the internet are Boomers. I would say we’re the first generation.
    And I always forget there was a Gen X.

  59. 59.

    satby

    @debbie: well, I have always been a square peg, but checking your sources dates back to grammar school for me.
    Those nuns were brutal ?

    Edited to be clear, it was a standard we all were held to.

  60. 60.

    Matt McIrvin

    @satby: I don’t think so, actually. I had a civics class in the 8th grade, I took AP Government in high school, and while they taught me a lot about our system, they didn’t teach me much if anything about other systems. There was no “Comparative Government”. So if someone came along and told me that voters in some North European country are more virtuous because they have four viable parties and one is super lefty, I wouldn’t immediately look for structural reasons.

  61. 61.

    Comrade Nimrod Humperdink

    @satby: That was actually the thing that I found the most offensive about watching Trump in debates especially but frequently Republicans in general and Sanders as well: it’s as if none of them have any idea how any of this shit works (“You’ve been fighting ISIS your whole adult life!”) or pretend not to for the sake of a punchline for the rubes. Maybe I was spoiled by the Obama/Clinton debates in ’08. Those were gold. Sure they agreed on a lot so they spent a bunch of time splitting hairs on healthcare and foreign policy, but they gave thoughtful answers to their positions and gave viewers a sense of context. Even Romney, a guy who should be smart enough to know better but threw bombs anyway because that’s what Republicans do now, just dumbs shit down horribly.

  63. 63.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @OzarkHillbilly: And speaking of where I live, Wednesday I saw a “TUCK FRUMP” sticker prominently displayed in the rear window of a car w/ a “Black Lives Matter” on the bumper below. Didn’t get a chance to honk at my fellow traveler (female) but had the welcome thought of “I am not alone after all.”

  64. 64.

    Comrade Nimrod Humperdink

    @Matt McIrvin: Comparitive politics is something I didn’t get exposed to until I was an undergrad. A basic cliff-notes version is kind of required to understand 20th century history though, which might explain why some folks have a hard time putting those older pieces together with where we are now.

  68. 68.

    Kay

    Senator Rand Paul
    @RandPaul
    Page 580:
    Post Office gets $58 million but only if it promises not to close down small, underutilized, money-losing post offices.

    They’re all retweeting this like it’s clever, but this is how the post office works. Was designed to work. There are lots and lots of “small underutilized money losing routes”. The bigger routes carry them, along with federal subsidies. Because it’s national and not a for-profit business. Which was the whole point. Couriers always existed. People knew there was a private sector model, except the goal wasn’t making money- it was affordable access and universality. Every address, not “profitable addresses”. That’s the point.

    They remind me of how kids get when they’re about 12. They know SOME things, they know “58 million for the post office”, but not nearly enough to be clever and sneering.

  69. 69.

    gene108

    @David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch:

    ex-Playboy Playmate claiming that President Donald Trump told her she reminded him of his daughter Ivanka during one of their alleged sexual trysts.

    Is anyone surprised? He was openly groping Ivanka, after she introduced him for his acceptance speech at the RNC.

    Lord knows what he would have tried in private.

  70. 70.

    satby

    @Matt McIrvin: We had lessons on comparative styles of government, comparative religion too, even though I mostly was educated at Catholic grammar school and public high school.
    But maybe the difference is that I started attending school only 15 years after the end of WWII, and only 8 years after the end of the occupation of Japan. The urgency to never forget history was still fresh.

  73. 73.

    Baud

    @satby: Well, it’s not like the Olds haven’t absorbed the propaganda. They just do it through a diversity of media.

  74. 74.

    gene108

    @Comrade Nimrod Humperdink:

    Republicans used to sometimes be responsible regulators. When they thought regulations could be reasonable or at the very least popular (Nixon: EPA) they brought something to the table.

    Bush, Sr with the 1990 Clean Air Act, and banning CFC’s, due to the destruction of the ozone layer, as well as the ADA.

    It wasn’t until the rise of Gingrich that Republicans jettisoned the ability to govern.

  75. 75.

    Comrade Nimrod Humperdink

    @Kay: Fuck Rand Paul right in the ass with a rusty chainsaw. I despise that “if it doesn’t make a profit it doesn’t deserve to exist” bullshit. Drop that shithead in the back woods of his home state with no money and local emergency services that need you to pay them x amount per year or no cops/firefighters for you and let him sort it out. I’d watch that reality show.

  76. 76.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Kay: People like Rand Paul don’t want their constituents in East Podunk, Kentucky to have access to a mail system, I guess.

  78. 78.

    Kay

    @Matt McIrvin:

    So on LGM they found a person on Twitter saying about Bolton what one of our drive-by trolls just said about Pompeo replacing Tillerson: that this is the Deep State’s “Clinton/Bush neocon machine” taking over the peaceful Trump administration in a soft coup.

    Because they can’t admit they got played. They’re the smartest people in the world. There’s always another layer that proves they were right.

  80. 80.

    JR

    @Kay: Paul is also doing kind of a shitty job representing his constituency, which is by and large more rural than most.

  83. 83.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Kay: I assumed this was just more playing or being-played, myself–it sounds so much like something they’d get directly off RT.

  86. 86.

    Kay

    @Comrade Nimrod Humperdink:

    Too, it’s not even true anymore. Both FedEx and UPS use rural post offices for “last mile” delivery. Because it’s not profitable for them to guarantee universal in rural areas, so they shift that to the nonprofit. But don’t complicate his stupid, easy conclusion.

  87. 87.

    Chet Murthy

    @Matt McIrvin: 1970s Texas “Government” class was good in that you got a good sense of how the Govt was constituted, but bad in that all the decisions were portrayed as Grrreat! The Best! Brilliant! Ditto the way the process of negotiating the Constitution was portrayed in Am Hist. No attempt at placing in context of other countries’ systems, except to extol the manifold virtues of our system. Which. Is. The. Best.

    Interestingly, in college American History (same town, Weatherford TX) the teacher went so far as to note that both parties were conservative (defined as “primarily interested in the rights of property”) but not much farther. One presumes he was interested in keeping his job, and being a barn-burning Marxist might have gotten in the way. And anything to the left of “rah-rah” is Communist, after all.

    I learned what I know about Poli Sci from LG&M.

  90. 90.

    gene108

    @Kay:

    The Post Office is mandated in the Constitution, along with setting up Post Roads.

    This isn’t even pretending to be clever. This is pretending to do the minimum required by the Constitution is a bold step in responsible governing.

  91. 91.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Chet Murthy: Exactly. You got a fair bit of information about the existing system, but in a context of arguing how it was incredibly wise and good, and the only alternative to tyranny.

  92. 92.

    Kay

    @?BillinGlendaleCA:

    Well, if you made a lot of pronouncements about Donald Trump versus Hillary Clinton you’d be defensive too, but you didn’t, because no one knew anything about Donald Trump. They don’t just pretend to know. They continue to pretend to know even after it’s clear they didn’t know anything more than anyone else.

    On what basis did they decide Clinton was more of a hawk than Trump? What he says? Guffaw.

  93. 93.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Kay: So it’s kind of like arguing that we don’t need the National Weather Service because we have Accu-Weather, which relays information from the National Weather Service.

  95. 95.

    satby

    @Matt McIrvin: and sadly, Texas became the template for school textbooks nationwide because it had outsized buying power. So it dictated more conservative slants.I

    Edited: now, not content to change spelling, Kindle is inserting phrases for me. So helpful.

  96. 96.

    Kay

    @gene108:

    I could see modernizing the post office. They have modernized it over and over for decades. But “underutilized and money-losing” isn’t the deciding metric so Rand Paul can’t do it because he doesn’t understand the basic concept.

    I haven’t worked there for a long time but when I was there people were predicting the demise of 1st class letter mail, which was true. But first class letter mail will be replaced by parcel delivery if it hasn’t been already because of online sales.

    The people who predicted the closure didn’t predict internet shopping when I was there, because there was no internet.

    It’s funny because rural people + the post office were the original distance shoppers. They order EVERYTHING by mail- tires, adult swans, giant saw blades. You wouldn’t believe what we were delivering to these people. I had older rural customers who ordered 100% of their clothes from catalogues.

  97. 97.

    satby

    @Kay: I remember going into my local rural post office that first spring, and I could hear lots of little peeps coming from the back room. Farmers were getting their baby chicks delivered. Totally blew me away.

  105. 105.

    jonas

    @Comrade Nimrod Humperdink: Reelection will definitely be an uphill battle, as I don’t expect the Alabama GOP will be nominating an alleged child molester who rides a horse like a dork. On the other hand, let’s see what happens when Alabamans see what it’s like having a senator who’s not just about being a crazy culture warrior. If he knows how to do constituent services like a boss, and word gets around, he may have a shot.

  106. 106.

    Kay

    @satby:

    Baby chicks are easy- you just have to keep them warm. They also send adult fowl to one another- they sell the adults for breeding. A really mad swan sticks out in my memory. The VA sends prescription drugs by mail. They send them more than an ordinary prescription- 3 months or 6 months. They would all come the same day. We used to have poor old people mill around in the lobby on Social Security check day. Waiting, but they’re polite so they’re pretending they’re reading posters out there or whatever :)

    The envelopes are a different color with a bar across the top in the tray so you could pull them out, so we used to do that rather than making them wait 3 hours until it’s all sorted. I sort of get the anxiety. If I was out of money I would be anxious too.

  108. 108.

    GregB

    It appears the American business class traded tax cuts for nuclear war.

    I hope the returns were worth it.

  109. 109.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Kay: An old Usenet friend of mine went so off his rocker in 2016 about how Hillary was going to start World War III, and about how anyone talking about Trump and Russia was “sucking the CIA’s cock”, that he got defriended by the last friends of mine who were following him on Facebook, so I don’t know how he’s reacting to all this.

    In hindsight, his 2012 obsession with Ron Paul should have been the trigger.

  110. 110.

    SFAW

    In a follow-on from last night’s “John Fucking Bolton?? Fu-u-u-u-u-u-ck!” Open Thread:

    The hasn’t-been-liberal-since-John-Henry-bought-it Boston Globe had a headline this AM regarding Lying Littledick’s appointment of “former ambassador” John Bolton as NSA. Not “Fox News commentator/guest moron.” I guess I should be glad they didn’t say “and member of the Democrat Party.”

    Yet another reason to wish cellar-dwelling on the Red Sox. [For what it’s worth, I’ve been a Mets fan for something like 80 years, but I had no special animus toward the BoSox. Until John Henry started his bullshit with the Glob, that is.]

  113. 113.

    SFAW

    @Matt McIrvin:

    Mrs. SFAW’s boss — someone who my wife says is actually pretty smart, and highly proficient in her job — still talks about “Crooked Hillary.” I asked my wife if I could ask the boss what exactly Hillary did that was illegal or c”crooked,” and that bullshit Trump claims/lies don’t count. My wife — knowing how little I tolerate idiots of the political variety — thought it might be sub-optimal for me to confront her boss in that manner.

  114. 114.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @Matt McIrvin:
    We got a lot of ‘Hillary is going to start a war with Iran just to prove how tough she is’ here during the 2016 election. And it took freaking forever for the commentariat to realize how liberal she is. ‘Pushed to the left’ by Sanders, my ass.

    EDIT – @SFAW:
    I have learned one thing from talking to my very liberal mother: Anyone who has issues about infidelity in marriage frames Hillary Clinton for them. Once you go there, hey, she must be dishonest, right?

  116. 116.

    Peale

    @Kay: by not listening to what he says. Seriously. And ignoring everyone he appoints. The entire supposedly “pro peace” foreign policy left has demonstrated why they deserve to be permanently locked out with this one. They have no judgement. They run around making heroes of anyone anti-US. That’s all they bring to the table. It’s nothing. They ignore everything else. A room full of leftist foreign policy wonks at the State Department or the CIA would produce no analysis worth reading any more than Josh Bolton can.

  117. 117.

    Dorothy A. Winsor (formerly Iowa Old Lady)

    Open thread so yesterday, I managed to get my twitter feed onto my blog, the way John has his here. Basically they wanted me to set it up to feed to my mobile devices and suggested it signal me (ding!) each time a tweet landed on my feed. I was appalled. How does anyone get any work done?

  118. 118.

    Cheryl Rofer

    This was announced last night, but it got lost in the Bolton terror. Coming up in 80 minutes or so.

  119. 119.

    Joe Falco

    @Baud: I’m a millennial and I can remember that time before internet came into my life just fine. I still played on the computer like any kid back then would; it was a whole lotta solitare and minesweeper but we liked it that way! And our Gameboys then came with just two colors: green and dark green!

    And another thing… [rambles in the distance]

  120. 120.

    SFAW

    @Immanentize:

    Your wife is wise.

    One of the reasons I married her.

    Of course, that she married ME mitigates that wisdom somewhat. Maybe she thought “Wiseass” meant “wise person”?

  122. 122.

    SFAW

    @Joe Falco:

    And our Gameboys then came with just two colors: green and dark green!

    Which just happens to be the color of your lawn! Which those damn kids are always on!

  123. 123.

    danielx

    I’m still at the point where I’m all “John Fucking Bolton, this can’t be real”.

    I’d like to think that because Bolton has a strong ego and likes to be in the news, he won’t last long since lord shortfingers doesn’t want anybody working in the White House to be in the news other than himself. However…there may be a confluence of views in this instance. Bolton gets to try out every insane idea he’s ever had, while Trump desperately needs some Wag-the-Dog action.

  128. 128.

    Betty Cracker

    @Frankensteinbeck: I would gladly contribute to a GoFundMe to send Sanders into the fucking sun, but he did nudge the party leftward in 2016. Fat lot of good it did, given how things turned out, partly thanks to Sanders and his cult followers. But yeah, he pulled the party to the left on economic issues, including minimum wage and TPP.

  129. 129.

    Steeplejack

    Bro’ Man just sent me a picture of the March for Our Lives stage going up and reported 2,000 portable toilets are being positioned around the Mall and environs. (His office is near Union Station, and he walks on the Mall before work and at lunchtime.)

  130. 130.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @Betty Cracker:
    TPP turned out to be one Hell of a lot better than it sounded, and he nudged the details of policy (how much to raise the minimum wage how fast, for example) Democrats already supported – while being behind Hillary in everything else.

  132. 132.

    SFAW

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    My wife won’t let me have any fun either. You don’t have to be ashamed of it.

    It was the idea of dissing my wife that I took umbrage about. Or would have, were I serious.

    But I’m sure your wife is a lovely person, since she seems to put up with you good-naturedly.

  133. 133.

    Comrade Nimrod Humperdink

    @Betty Cracker: There were elements of TPP I didn’t care for (I’m skeptical of free trade agreements generally but not against the entire notion) but what nobody ever seemed to point out was that TPP was an instrument of Chinese containment. It was a foreign policy instrument more than it was an economic one.

  134. 134.

    SFAW

    @Steeplejack:

    reported 2,000 portable toilets are being positioned around the Mall and environs

    That’s something like 2 for every person who was at Shitgibbon’s inauguration.

  138. 138.

    David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch

    @Betty Cracker: Tariffs are taxes. Regressive taxes. They hit the poor and the working class the hardest.

    Even the liberal Robert Reich, Chris Hayes, and Rachel Maddow oppose tariffs.

    The 1932 Democratic campaign platform pledged to lower tariffs. After winning the election, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the now-Democratic Congress passed Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934. This act allowed the President to negotiate tariff reductions on a bilateral basis, and also treated such a tariff agreement as regular legislation, requiring a majority, rather than as a treaty requiring a two-thirds vote. This was one of the core components of the trade negotiating framework that developed after World War II. The tit-for-tat responses of other countries were understood to have contributed to a sharp reduction of trade in the 1930s.

    As to the minimum wage, Obummer started pushing it to the left years earlier, beginning with the 2014 SOTU.

    Feb 12, 2014 – President Barack Obama on Wednesday formally signed an executive order raising the pay for employees of federal contract workers, but his attention was on a push for Congress to do the same for all Americans.

  139. 139.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @SFAW: Saints Mrs SFAW and Mrs OHB, the patron Saints of put upon wives everywhere. They will not deliver a wife from her torment but will endow her with endless patience and twisted senses of humor.

  140. 140.

    Steeplejack

    @Baud:

    “Yes, because the Democratic Party was drifting a little too far right, my awesome critical thinking skills told me to quit in disgust, thereby leaving the field open to the ultra-right fascist Republicans.”

    Genius!

  141. 141.

    Elizabelle

    Good morning, all.

    Tomorrow we march. And we will be heard.

    No doubt Trump and Co. will do something idiotic to grab the news cycle, but this one belongs to the students and others marching and speaking out for gun safety, especially in our schools.

  142. 142.

    Betty Cracker

    @Frankensteinbeck & @Comrade Nimrod Humperdink & @David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch: I think tariffs are a dumb idea, and I can’t think of anything more pointless than arguing the merits of TPP in 2018 — when it was still a relevant issue, I thought it was too weighted in favor of corporate rights but hardly a deal-breaker, blah blah blah.

    Anyhoo, I wasn’t trying to reopen that can of moldy, expired, deceased worms — just pointing out that Sanders’ participation in the 2016 primaries moved the party platform leftward. That doesn’t make him a good person. It doesn’t mean his participation was a net gain — I’d argue the opposite, actually. But it happened, just like John Edward’s phony, insincere campaign brought valid issues to the fore in 2008.

  145. 145.

    Miss Bianca

    @Matt McIrvin: too fucking right. My ex, who first ran off with another woman and then shacked up with my best friend, told me that he only voted for Hillary because “Bernie told him to.”

    Honestly, if the guy didn’t make me laugh harder than any human on the planet, he’d be *so dead* to me right now…

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