Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

Let’s finish the job.

When do the post office & the dmv weigh in on the wuhan virus?

“And when the Committee says to “report your income,” that could mean anything!

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

Bark louder, little dog.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

People are complicated. Love is not.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

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

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

Their freedom requires your slavery.

I didn’t have alien invasion on my 2023 BINGO card.

Ah, the different things are different argument.

A last alliance of elves and men. also pet photos.

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

“Squeaker” McCarthy

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.

You are here: Home / Past Elections / Election 2018 / Monday Morning Open Thread: Working Together

Monday Morning Open Thread: Working Together

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… She and her husband, Joe Daley, closed on Lisbon’s 480-acre Packard-Littlefield farm on June 29, within days of learning that the White House would not continue to pursue her nomination. Thornton announced her resignation from the State Department on June 30. The youngest of her three children had just graduated from high school, severing the last obligation they had to stay in Washington. They’ve now moved into their new home, and are “just sorting out internet and lawnmowers,” she said.

The Thornton-Daley family is also sorting out their relationship with the former owners’ tenant, Cultivating Community, a nonprofit that has turned 30 acres on the Packard-Littlefield farm into a powerful incubator for immigrant and refugee farmers, many of them Somali-Bantu. According to Cultivating Community’s website, the farm is hosting 18 farmers growing for markets and over 30 community gardeners at the site. Fresh Start Farms, a packing and distribution service for the new-American farmers, is also based at the farm. Cultivating Community’s lease is due to run out soon.

“We’re planning on continuing the relationship,” Thornton said. “We have had discussions about renewing the lease. They are trying to figure out their plans for the next five years, and we’re talking about how we can both work side by side there.”…

“It helps us to feel like we’ve got a partner there that already knows how to do this,” she said of Cultivating Community. “Because we are obviously kind of neophytes.”…

She said she and Daley had always wanted to own a farm here but had added incentive once their son, Ben, a recent graduate of Wesleyan University, decided he wanted to be a farmer. (More incentive: Their daughter Kate is a freshman at Bowdoin.) He’s worked on vegetable farms in North Carolina and in Maine, has experience with livestock and has worked on horsepower farms. “I think he is thinking of horsepower,” Thornton said. “He likes the slow pace.”

The Packard-Littlefield farm went on the market in the spring of 2017 with an asking price of $2.7 million. (It sold for $760,000, according to the listing agent’s office). The longtime owners, Ella Mae Littlefield Packard and Robert Packard, had farmed the land but were in their 70s and ready to retire.

The Packards, part of only the second family to own the 18th-century farm, had taken steps to preserve the land for agricultural use. It has been designated a “Forever Farm,” meaning most of it is covered by an agricultural conservation easement. In 2004, Androscoggin Land Trust and the Packard family, working with the Maine Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, used funding from the Land for Maine’s Future and Farmland Ranch Protection Program to put 195 acres into protected status. Then the Packard family donated conservation easements on two additional parcels in 2007 and 2010, bringing the total conserved acreage to about 400 acres…

The Beltway’s loss, hopefully Maine’s gain.

Reader Interactions

97Comments

  4. 4.

    OzarkHillbilly

    The black and white photo that reshaped schools in the south adorns her wall. In the frame, it is 1957. She’s 15 and walking toward a previously all-white high school, her chin up and shoulders back, flanked by hunched-over white kids following her menacingly, their spittle soaked into the fabric of her checkered dress.

    The next morning, she was on the front page of the New York Times under the headline Soldiers and Jeering Whites Greet Negro Students. James Baldwin saw the image and said it compelled him to return to the United States from France to write about civil rights in the south.

    “There was unutterable pride, tension and anguish in that girl’s face as she approached the halls of learning, with history jeering at her back,” he later said. “It made me furious. It filled me with both hatred and pity. And it made me ashamed. Some one of us should have been there with her.”
    …………………..

    A bill before the state legislature, HB 514, would allow these towns, each more than 77% white, to develop their own charter schools. If it becomes law, town residents would have priority admission, and kids from the rest of the county would be able to enroll only if seats remain.

    It’s part of a deconstruction of school systems that’s already occurred in other cities – Detroit and New Orleans, for instance – and a trend that the US secretary of education Betsy DeVos would like to see continue nationally. Congress rejected many of her spending proposals this year, but DeVos’s goals were clear when she suggested adding $1bn for school choice programs and vouchers while cutting the US Department of Education by 5%.

    Supporters of the North Carolina bill argue that charters provide students and parents with more options than traditional public schools systems, while expressing little concern for kids who may be left behind in a shrinking district.

    For Counts-Scoggins, it feels like another thread being pulled out of her life’s work. She’s spent 61 years trying to walk out of that photo. She prefers to be called Dot Counts-Scoggins now, but it’s a regular occurrence for something to remind her of a time when her name went around the world as Dorothy Counts. She’s a part of a generation of civil rights activists who endured the abuses of the 1950s and 1960s, only to see a surge of repeat offenses late in life. She’s a living lesson, unlearned.

    To her, this isn’t the standard debate over whether charters are as effective as traditional schools. It’s about wealthy towns crouching behind charters to pass a law that builds walls around white zip codes.

  7. 7.

    Steeplejack (tablet)

    I have adjusted to Las Vegas time, but now I find myself in late-night mode. Not very tired, not very sleepy.

    Weird to see Morning Joe coming on live at 3:00 a.m.

  9. 9.

    Steeplejack (tablet)

    @raven:

    I don’t gamble anymore. I used to a little bit when I came out here for trade shows in the ’80s. The money is much better spent on restaurants; lot of good ones here. I might play the nickel slots when I go out to lunch with my mother. Whoop-de-doo.

  10. 10.

    JPL

    Local news is covering the Kavanaugh news. IMO the right thing to do is have him withdraw his nomination, but if they push his nomination through, the republicans will continue to lose the female vote. Of course, my opinion doesn’t count.

  11. 11.

    TS (the original)

    @JPL: Pushing him through won’t win them any votes they don’t already have – but that is not of concern to trump. Probably worrying a few republicans

  15. 15.

    satby

    Every day I resolve to get up and take a walk after I take the dogs out and have a cup of coffee. But I wuss out because it’s still so dark.

  21. 21.

    Immanentize

    I guess the good news is that at least four Republican Senators are suggesting a vote delay on Kavanaugh:
    Corker, Flake, Collins and Murkowski. Baby steps, people, baby steps.

  24. 24.

    Steeplejack (tablet)

    @rikyrah:

    Thanks. I like Vegas too. Good restaurants, interesting stuff to do and several different climates in easy driving distance to do outdoorsy stuff. I’m catching the end of the hot season, but it’s not too bad. There really is something to that “dry heat” thing.

  32. 32.

    Patricia Kayden

    @Baud: Join the Republican Party. You can boast about grabbing women by the p*ssy and still be elected President!! You’ll even get the majority of voting White women to vote for you!

  36. 36.

    Patricia Kayden

    @Immanentize: I assume that if somehow the Kavanaugh nomination goes down in flames, Trump won’t have time to push another nominee before the midterm election. Works for me.

  37. 37.

    JR

    22% of your asking price is taking it in the shorts.

    I hope for their sake the Packards didn’t have a lot of debt tied into their farm

  38. 38.

    satby

    @JR: asking price and market value are two often entirely different things. I see a lot of listings for lake houses purchased only a couple of years ago for a few hundred thousand on the market for quadruple that. Real estate hasn’t appreciated that much, and they seldom put that much into the property in improvement either. People get greedy.

  41. 41.

    Ken

    @Patricia Kayden: This is why I’m hoping the Dems get the Senate. They can cite the “McConnell Rule” that the Senate doesn’t even have to give the courtesy of holding hearings for any nominees. (I know he phrased it differently, but that’s what it really was.)

    Also I’d love to have them note that the Garland nomination was never voted on, and start holding hearings.

  42. 42.

    frostys

    @Steeplejack (tablet): I’ve got a co-worker heading there for a batchelor party who doesn’t want to spend all the time in the casinos. Any recommendations for things to do? The only one I could come up with was Boulder Dam.

  43. 43.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    @Immanentize: I enjoyed teaching. I came out of a classroom more energized than I was when I went it.

    On a topic that somehow feels semi-related to the Kavanaugh accusation, a friend’s HS sophomore daughter was given a coupon at an assembly that said she was a “distraction” because she was wearing a tank top. Yup. Girls are responsible for what the boys do and must be admonished. Boys will be boys. Whatcha gonna do?

  44. 44.

    Bruce K

    Jimmy Carter: probably not the best President of the post-war era, but with little doubt he’s the best human being to occupy the Oval Office since Lincoln.

  45. 45.

    Kay

    @JR:

    I wondered too. I think it’s really a 30 acre farm as far as ground they can use, w/the easement and the trust in place. 400 acres of farm ground here would be at least 2 million.

  47. 47.

    LaNonna

    Spent a lot of time in Vegas not gambling, go to red rock canyon for sunrise hike/breakfast, Moapa Springs for hot springs and massage, and scour the pawn shops in “downtown” for great buys, particularly if you know your gold, silver, and jewelry designers.

  48. 48.

    Steeplejack (phone)

    @frostys:

    Let me do some checking and get back to you in tomorrow morning’s thread. Just had to change from my tablet to my phone because of battery issues, and I need to do a little research. Plus I just got here Thursday, got my brother off on his motorcycle trip, and today was the first day I felt “normal.” But I’ll be here for three weeks. When is your coworker coming?

    The Neon Museum, which I mentioned above, is supposed to be very cool, and I just heard something a couple of days ago about a mob museum that sounds interesting. I need to check that out.

    if your friend likes Thai food, Lotus of Siam is nationally known and is really good. I also like Penn’s Thai, which is down in Henderson (where my brother’s house is).

  49. 49.

    MomSense

    @GregB:

    I’m shocked shocked that he is not the champion of freedom and transparency he pretended to be.

    In other crazy news, this Tom Arnold Mark Burnett altercation is crazytown.

  50. 50.

    OzarkHillbilly

    Our great country is divided. But the Red Sox and Mets fans at Fenway Park just joined together to chant “Yankees suck.” Truly heartwarming.

    Pete Abraham

  52. 52.

    MomSense

    @JR:

    The forever farm program is wonderful. It is designed to make sure farms are successful. I support the program and the Maine Organic Farmers and Growers Association.
    The story behind Portland Mainebeing named the best foodie city in the country is that our programs to start and sustain farming in the state means the most amazing ingredients for breweries, distilleries, and restaurants.
    I hope I see the Thornton Daleys at the Common Ground Fair this weekend.

  53. 53.

    Tony Jay

    @Ken:

    Also I’d love to have them note that the Garland nomination was never voted on, and start holding hearings.

    IANAL, and it almost 100% certainly isn’t a ‘thing’, but it would be utterly hilarious if Rapey K’s nomination went down in flames, the Pustule couldn’t get anyone else pushed through, and a Democratic Senate majority announced that, since there was already a Presidentially nominated candidate for the USSC on the books, it would be well within the Senate’s purview to consider that nomination and put Garland forward for a vote.

    Sadly, I think that under the terms of the Treaty of Nagganappen that’s a non-starter, but since all norms and expectations of behaviour are now out of the window….

  55. 55.

    Kay

    @JR:

    Sometimes they put ground they aren’t working in a wetlands land trust here (this is a migratory bird flyover – that was the point) to save on property taxes and then they’re mad because it changes hands to someone who actually wants to plant it and it’s worth less.

  57. 57.

    JPL

    I think that Kavanaugh withdraws by the end of the day tomorrow in order to protect his family.
    BTW I never gamble, because I can’t afford to lose that much money.

  58. 58.

    Walker

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    North Carolina is already filled with horrible quality private schools that exist for no reason than to protect racists from those people. Now they just want the tax payers to pay for them.

  59. 59.

    Steeplejack (phone)

    @rikyrah:

    I’ve been thinking that if Kavanagh’s accuser testifies at a congressional hearing, as now seems likely, it will not be her that gets roasted but the (Republican) senators. A lot of people remember what happened to Anita Hill, and they’re going to come out of the woodworks with guns blazing.

  62. 62.

    Immanentize

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: You know what I hate about those distraction rules (besides everything) is that it is generally adult males deciding who is a distraction. Remembering from my long ago youth, clothes had very little to do with attraction distraction in high school. Sweaters and down coats created as much distraction as shorts and tank tops. Except to adults.

  66. 66.

    Nicole

    I’m still trying to wrap my head around McArgleBargle’s ridonkulous tweeting last night. I really cannot fathom that level of stupid ending up on the WaPo (FTFNYT, sure, as they already have the double dumbass of BoBo and Chunky BoBo- they should have hired her instead so they could have a Holy Trinity of Stupid: Father, Son and Holy Sh*t Did She Just Really Say That?).

  68. 68.

    Lee

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    Impeachment of a SC justice would be very difficult. You know what would be easier?

    To shrink the court by 2 justices & just remove the last 2 seated (assuming Kav gets approved).

  69. 69.

    MomSense

    @Dorothy A. Winsor:

    I had a math teacher (also the assistant principal) who was very interested in policing what I wore. It felt more like stalking. He used to say incredibly inappropriate things to me. Of course my classmates, mostly males in the advanced math class, decided to tease me viciously about it. My parents were upset with me because my math grades were slipping. Because if the teasing, I think I assumed all of the shame and embarrassment for the adult teacher and I didn’t tell my parents what was happening to me.

  70. 70.

    Immanentize

    @Lee: That is not constitutional. You could shrink by attrition, but not by firing justices.

    What really needs to happen is that the Court expands.

  71. 71.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Immanentize: @Dorothy A. Winsor: I have several teacher friends, both male and female. If a male teacher has an inappropriately dressed female student, he does not DARE say a word to that student, because to do so is to admit “he was looking”. He has to get a female teacher to deal with the situation. So in the STL area public schools, it is both male and female teachers who decide what is inappropriate dress.

  73. 73.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Lee: I’m not sure how the removal of 2 SC justices could possibly be easier that the removal of one but it doesn’t really matter. I’m just wishing on a rainbow farting sparkle pony anyway.

  74. 74.

    Immanentize

    @MomSense: This happened to my wife in high school a lot. She was a straight A student, star basketball player and a serious punk with a bleached mohawk. The vice principal was on her like a fly on shit. She was constantly getting detentions for her distracting clothes and hair.

    Meanwhile, boys could take licks as punishment, girls had to sit in detention for hours. Asses

  75. 75.

    Immanentize

    @satby: I did read it and I agree all one needs to do to change the number of justices is pass a law, but I think 27 is crazy talk. I wonder what the supreme Court building could manage….

  76. 76.

    MomSense

    @Immanentize:

    Yup. I didn’t have a Mohawk but I did rock some pretty wild pony tails. He just wanted to call me to his office so he could creep on me. He also had assigned seating and it just happened that I had to sit in the front row directly across from him and his stupid overhead projector.

  77. 77.

    Tony Jay

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    That would be great, but what basis would the impeachment have?

    It does occur to me, though, that a Democratic Senate – should – do something big and in your face with the Garland nomination. I’m sure I’ll be corrected if I’m wrong (which I almost certainly am) but I don’t actually recall Garland asking for the nomination be dropped or Obama withdrawing it. Rather, McConnell just refused to even let the Senate discuss it for eighteen months until the 2016 Election, after which it was forgotten about.

    But, just speaking hypothetically, is there a law or a rule that actually states that nominations to the Supreme Court by an elected President – have – to be ‘advised and consented to’ by the Senate of the day, rather than by ‘The Senate’ as a branch of Government? I recall clearly every commentator outside of the Wingnutosphere saying how McConnell was violating every precedent on the books when it came to denying Garland a vote, so why would it be crazy for the Democrats to make a point by, 1) Restating their opposition to McConnell’s partisan and illegitimate behaviour in 2015/6, 2) Noting that precedent, tradition and the clear text of the Constitution all maintain that an elected President’s nominations to the Supreme Court – always – receive a hearing in the Senate, short of the President withdrawing the nomination, and c) Announcing that they are restoring the traditions of the Senate by finally giving President Obama’s nominee the hearing he was Constitutionally entitled to but did not receive.

    Sure, the Republicans and their mouthpieces would go totally loco, but so what? It’s not like they don’t go loco about every single thing Democrats do anyway, why not shove it up them sideways by using McConnell’s bastardy against him? If they just let the ‘McConnell Rule’ stand, then that’s it for any future Democratic nominees under a GOP Senate, they’ll do it every time and get away with it. Giving Judge Garland the hearing he was denied should the Democrats retake the Senate makes it a precedent that any future GOP efforts to ignore Democratic nominees to the USSC just leaves loaded bullets in the chamber for Democrats to fire should they have the Senate and an empty UNSC seat with a GOP President in office.

    No, it won’t happen, but theoretically, couldn’t and shouldn’t that case be made?

  79. 79.

    Nicole

    It’s not just girls’ clothing that get named a “distraction.” It’s also hairstyles that don’t fit a white view of the world.

    Last year I inquired of my 2nd grader who the strongest readers in his class were. He said he didn’t know. I said, “Really?” He replied that the teachers told the kids to focus on their own work, not other people’s. I think the same sort of response would be the ideal one for clothing and hairstyles, too. Focus on your own.

    I don’t know if any girls were ever sent home from my high school for inappropriate dress (this was the late 1980s, Central PA public school). I do recall one boy was, when he came into school dressed as a woman (as a dare). He argued it, though. :)

  80. 80.

    Lee

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    Removal via Impeachment takes 67 votes in the Senate. The number of seats on SCOTUS is determined by Congress and just needs a majority to pass.

    So if we take the Presidency in 2020 and keep the House & Senate. It would be easier to get the votes to reduce the number of justices than it would be to impeach.

  81. 81.

    Aleta

    Daniel Lippman @dlippman
    AndrewRestuccia and I called many of Kavanaugh’s 65 female HS acquittances who signed a letter supporting him. After his accuser came out on Sunday, only TWO said they still stood by him. More than two dozen didn’t respond, and two declined to comment.

    via S Kendzior

  84. 84.

    Elizabelle

    Dog bless the Tony Alsups of the world. WaPost: Noah’s Ark except it’s a school bus: Truck driver rescues 64 dogs and cats from floods of Hurricane Florence Truck driver out of Greenback, Tennessee (SW of Knoxville and Maryville).

    … Inside the bus, the seats have been ripped out to make room for its passengers. On the bus’s side are the words “EMERGENCY ANIMAL RESCUE SHELTER.” But it could have said “Noah’s Ark.”

    In the last week, Alsup and his bus have rescued 53 dogs and 11 cats from South Carolina shelters that were in Florence’s treacherous path, as first reported by the Greenville News. (Greenville News link.)

    And come morning, Alsup expects to search for more.

    “I’m like, look, these are lives too,” Alsup told The Washington Post during his Waffle House stop. “Animals — especially shelter pets — they always have to take the back seat of the bus. But I’ll give them their own bus. If I have to I’ll pay for all the fuel, or even a boat, to get these dogs out of there.”

    Alsup, who wants to open his own animal shelter one day, has been rescuing shelter pets from floodwaters with his school bus since Hurricane Harvey ravaged the Texas coast last year. When Alsup saw on the news how numerous animal shelters had become overcrowded with lost or rescued animals, he thought he could help. He wanted to help transport the animals to vacant shelters — but he knew he couldn’t put them in a semitrailer.

    “I thought, well what can I do?” he said. “I’ll just go buy a bus.”

    He has since helped with rescues during Hurricanes Irma and Maria (no bus for the latter; he was feeding horses) and now during Florence.

    …. In less than 48 hours, he stopped at the Humane Society of North Myrtle Beach (S.C.), the Dillon County (S.C.) Animal Shelter, another in Orangeburg, S.C., and Saint Frances Animal Center in Georgetown, S.C., which sang his praises on social media Sunday. In a Facebook post late Sunday, the Saint Frances Animal Center said that Alsup was rescuing all the “leftover” pets — the dogs and cats the shelter couldn’t seem to hand off to anyone else.

    “It’s all true. Tony swooped in at 4am Wednesday morning to pick up our ‘leftovers’ — the dogs with blocky heads, the ones with heartworm,” the center wrote on Facebook. “The ones no one else will ever take. And he got them to safety. Not the most conventional evacuation, but surely the one with the most heart.”

    Once he had them in his bus, Alsup drove to Foley, Ala., where his friend, Angela Eib-Maddux, opened her privately run dog shelter to the new arrivals for the night. She gave them baths and fluffy blankets and “spa treatment,” Alsup said, until they could find enough shelters or foster homes for the animals.

    And they did.

  85. 85.

    PVDMichael

    I’m convinced that Judge Kavanaugh will say anything he has to say to get on the SCOTUS.. and that Republicans will let him.

    So it’s at this point, that for personal satisfaction, I just want to get him to commit the most egregious, vile lie on the record.

    I hope he gets to testify again.. and I hope some Democratic Senator asks him, “Are you willing to go on the record and state that you and your friend behaved honorably to that young woman… and accordingly, you would be 100% ok if two boys (two years your daughters’ senior) acted in the same way to one of your daughters?”

  88. 88.

    The Thin Black Duke

    @JPL: No, I think Kavanaugh will voluntarily step down because he doesn’t want his wife and family to find out what a piece of shit he is.

  89. 89.

    Tony Jay

    @Immanentize:

    Well if that’s actually written down and codified somewhere, there you go, it’s a non-starter.

    If it’s not, though, and it’s just tradition, why not exploit that? The Republicans do.

  91. 91.

    NotMax

    @Tony Jay

    It was presented as an order of business to the 114th Congress, which no longer exists to conduct business.

    Had HRC taken office and wanted Garland on the court, she would have had to present a fresh nomination of him to the 115th Congress.

  97. 97.

    JMG

    As a Wesleyan alumnus, the thought of a recent grad wanting to become a farmer is just so awesome. I mean, here’s a guy who had some interesting thoughts in his college years, which I pretty much did not.

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