Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

It is not hopeless, and we are not helpless.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.

Polls are now a reliable indicator of what corporate Republicans want us to think.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

This really is a full service blog.

The real work of an opposition party is to hold the people in power accountable.

If you voted for Trump, you don’t get to speak about ethics, morals, or rule of law.

Republicans: slavery is when you own me. freedom is when I own you.

DeSantis transforming Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

Republicans don’t lie to be believed, they lie to be repeated.

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

There are some who say that there are too many strawmen arguments on this blog.

Dumb motherfuckers cannot understand a consequence that most 4 year olds have fully sorted out.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

The unpunished coup was a training exercise.

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

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

This chaos was totally avoidable.

T R E 4 5 O N

You are so fucked. Still, I wish you the best of luck.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Saturday Morning Open Thread: They’re Trying to Circle the Wagons, But the Wheels Keep Coming Off

Saturday Morning Open Thread: They’re Trying to Circle the Wagons, But the Wheels Keep Coming Off

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  2. 2.

    Baud

    “You know, a poll came out, they said everybody’s going out in 2020 because they want to vote for you…But they’re not maybe coming out in 2018. Get out in 2018 because you’re voting for me in 2018. You’re voting for me.”

    What a better world this would be if Obama voters realized this in 2010.

  4. 4.

    JMG

    I’d guess the percentage of people who attend any rally for any candidate who go on to vote is 100 percent. It’s the Trump voters who don’t watch cable news *a much larger group than those who do) the Republicans ought to be worried about.

  5. 5.

    MomSense

    Good morning, Jackals. I’m cleaning my house early this morning before I leave to pick up an elderly relative in Massachusetts who is going to stay here for a week. She is selling her house and can’t cope with being there for the open house and visits this week.

    It’s a long drive so we are going to make some stops along the way and play tourist.

    In an ironic twist, I was apparently too pleased about being carded last night because I did something to my knee while dancing later. No swelling but it is definitely not happy with me. I heard a popping sound followed by discomfort.

  8. 8.

    NotMax

    OT. For the foodies.

    Good idea but falls a little all over the map on the execution, International Chef Exchange on Amazon Prime. Still, there are much less savory choices of video pastimes.

    You won’t learn any recipes or cooking techniques. On the plus side, no competitions or up against the clock nonsense. Yet there’s something so amiable and comfortable, almost cozy about it that one becomes hooked. Two chefs, one from the U.K. and one from another country or province, cook in each others’ restaurants/kitchens for one meal. Only six episodes, so flies by.

    Favorite scene? The Dutch chef who mentioned he has worked for 23 years in the restaurant biz and looked (to this oldster) to be about 22 years old.

    @MomSense

    Ouchie. Take care.

  15. 15.

    Bruuuuce

    As a sideshow to the circus in the Senate, here’s one in Alaska:

    A man in Anchorage, Alaska, pleaded guilty to assaulting a woman who said he strangled her unconscious and sexually assaulted her.

    The man then walked out of court with no prison sentence.

    …

    [Prosecutor Andrew ] Grannik said Schneider had lost his job as an air traffic controller for the federal government as a result of the case. Grannik said that was a “life sentence,” according to KTVA.

    What a crock. Living free, drinking beers with his buddies, is not a “life sentence”; he was fired for cause, which is the very least that ought to have happened. And which is the least that should happen to the prosecutor and the judge, as well.

  19. 19.

    Bruuuuce

    @WereBear: Yes. With emphasis on “they”; I’m pleased to note that most of the folks I know (both jackals and other animaux) are all too aware of the real-world issues there and are working to make them nonissues

  21. 21.

    Ken

    @JPL:

    Chuck Grassley is a mean man.

    I thought the tweet sounded more whiny and sniveling, especially the last bit where he says “this really isn’t like me”. Actually the whole thing reads as “bully forced to back down”.

  22. 22.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @MomSense: Popping not good. :-( Ice for the first 24-48 hours. Heat after that. If the swelling returns with the heat, go back to ice, then go to Doctor.

  23. 23.

    prob50

    @RandomMonster: I also loved Krugman’s quote. BTW, last time I was here (quite a while ago) in response to a comment from another poster’s medical situation I mentioned that I was facing a similar situation and I received much support and many good wishes. It took several different tests and a couple biopsies, but the spot on my liver was found to be non-cancerous.

    I stopped posting at that point but it was not about my physical health concerns per se, but because I was just developing too much anger and frustration for my mental peace of mind to deal with.

  25. 25.

    prob50

    @Ken:

    Chuck Grassley is a mean man.

    I thought the tweet sounded more whiny and sniveling, especially the last bit where he says “this really isn’t like me”. Actually the whole thing reads as “bully forced to back down”.

    I don’t think these traits are mutually exclusive. To me “Mean”, “whiny”, and “sniveling” quite accurately describe much of the collective GOP presence in public office today

  26. 26.

    Chief Oshkosh

    The Grassley own-goal seems like it should be a bigger deal. I guess it’s just SOP for the GOP shitshow. What an embarrassment.

  28. 28.

    debbie

    @JPL:

    But stupid. That tweet couldn’t have been intended for broadcast. I remember back in the early days of Twitter, Grassley was the one who sent out a talking point tweet, but neglected to add the person’s name, something like this: “We can’t allow (insert name) to get…”.

  29. 29.

    debbie

    @NotMax:

    Nix the moderation. I’ve had five serious falls landing on my right knee. Constant icing saved me when nothiing else would have.

  31. 31.

    OzarkHillbilly

    Nasa launches satellite to precisely track how Earth’s ice is melting

    While Donald Trump doubts the scientific consensus around man-made climate change and his administration is rescinding standards to stall warming, Neumann said multiple federal agencies want to see the satellite data when it starts coming back in October.

    The US Geological Survey is interested in the elevation data, and the navy would like to look at how changes will affect shipping channels, he said. With ice melt, new routes are expected to open through the Arctic, significantly reducing shipping times.

    Nasa has an entire fleet of satellites observing Earth, including for signs of climate change. Trump this year proposed cutting the budget that funds many of the others.

  35. 35.

    MagdaInBlack

    Why does the Guardian seem to be better than any American news source about things happening in the US of A?

    Ownership

  36. 36.

    hueyplong

    @prob50: Best I can tell, the country could use a sequence in which GOPers like Grassley consciously act in a way that “isn’t like me.”

    Seeing as how that will never happen, gotta vote them out ont.

    Which is kind of the point of the current narrative. Trump is little more than the assholes’ id and moral weaknesses on full display, like some kind of figurehead monarch for a rancid regime.

  38. 38.

    OzarkHillbilly

    Antibiotics crucial to human medicine are still being used in “unacceptable” quantities on US livestock farms, despite rules brought in last year to curb their use and combat the spread of deadly superbugs.

    Tests on thousands of meat samples by the US Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) show that powerful antibiotics classified as “critically important” to human health are still being used. The widespread use of such drugs on livestock is one of the key drivers of antibiotic resistance, a growing public health crisis.

    Regulations brought in by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in January 2017 banned the use of antibiotics on livestock without a prescription from a vet and made it illegal to use the drugs solely to make animals fatter, which for years had been common practice on industrial farms.

    The new rules aimed to ensure antibiotics were only used when medically necessary. But tests on livestock slaughtered at dozens of US meat packing plants – including some operated by major processors such as Tyson, Cargill and JBS – found “critical” antibiotics were still in use in many meat supply chains. There had been no reduction in the number of antibiotics found in samples from the year before the regulations came into effect.

    Analysis by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism also shows how a loophole allows US farmers to continue to use many antibiotics targeted by the ban in much the same way as they could before the ban, including drugs previously used for growth promotion.

    The findings indicate that more needs to be done to combat overuse of antibiotics on farms, critics say.

    But meat industry representatives said it was impossible to draw meaningful conclusions from the data. The samples only indicated the presence of antibiotics, they pointed out, with no information about what diseases were involved or how the drugs were administered. All the drugs in question were approved for use on animals by the FDA.

  39. 39.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Lapassionara: @Immanentize: Florence was a dirty girl who left a mess everywhere she went. People loved reading about all her sloppy wet bj’s, but the cleanups aren’t very sexy. Especially when it comes to the flooding of CAFOs.

  40. 40.

    debbie

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    I may stop eating any produce that could possibly have come from North Carolina. I don’t like the thought of eating something that might have soaked in pig-shit enhanced water.

  41. 41.

    paul robinson

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    Florence was a dirty girl who left a mess everywhere she went. People loved reading about all her sloppy wet bj’s, but the cleanups aren’t very sexy. Especially when it comes to the flooding of CAFOs.

    Much like the tendency in popular movies to emphasize Fx and explosions over actual plot & story lines. Houses and people floating away much “sexier’ than people shoveling muck out of their living room.

  42. 42.

    HeleninEire

    Morning, morning crew. I am now up and +0. Yeah I hate that asshole again.

    I’d anyone is confused go see me at 53 in the Rod Rosenstein post from last night.

    Grey dry(ish) day here. Not unusual, but we were expecting a big storm. So it’s all good.

  43. 43.

    Immanentize

    @OzarkHillbilly: @debbie:
    I like how Pierce refers to North Carolina as t”the recently insane state of N.C.” I don’t remember where I saw the map, but most of the pig shit pools and coal coffins were right near the shore most vulnerable to hurricanes. I get the pig farms — they used to just let the effluvient flow downstream. And I guess the coal Ash used to do that too. What a horror show for the people in the southeast of that State.

  44. 44.

    Kay

    POLITICO
    ‏Sep 20
    More
    75 percent of voters said it’s “very important” to keep Obamacare’s insurance protections, according to a new poll, and there’s greater trust in Democrats to deal with the issue

    Oh, voters. When do you think you’ll figure this out? I’m all for reaching out to them but they’re going to have to put in some minimal effort here. 75%! So 25% are same people who voted to get rid of the protections 2 years ago.

  49. 49.

    TS (the original)

    @RandomMonster: Krugman is the only pundit I miss reading since I cancelled the NYT – which fact I told them when I discovered the only way to cancel was via a telephone call.

  53. 53.

    Immanentize

    Meanwhile, today will be a fine mostly sunny day around 70 here near Boston. Overseeding some of the holes in the yard and other outdoor projects await. Later, jackals!

  54. 54.

    WereBear

    @MagdaInBlack: That’s wonderful!

    He’s such a darling. When we are handing out treats on the bed trays we use for such, he will get on his set of steps (so he’s not yet ON the bed) and look around with wondering eyes. Do I like cheese/treats/bits of dinosaur? Yes. Yes I do.

    And then he gets on the bed with the other cats.

  55. 55.

    HeleninEire

    @Immanentize: LOL. It was wine. If I don’t mix drinks I can drink a lot.

    I stayed in the pub WAY PAST when I wrote that post because I met a wonderful couple from Birmingham and we talked and talked and then they left. Then a fabulous woman from Australia then came up to me and wanted to talk about women traveling alone.

    That’s why I love it here. I meet people that I would never meet in the US.

  56. 56.

    HeleninEire

    @Immanentize: No I am in Dublin, but this is a small country. About as big as Ohio. Galway is only a 2 1/2 hour bus or train ride from Dublin and you are going clear across the country.

  57. 57.

    WereBear

    @zhena gogolia: I am frankly amazed: we got Tristan as a feral at 3 weeks (here’s our failed foster kitten) and he would let me juggle him, but Mithy, at 5 weeks old when rescued, is a total Ninja. He weighs almost 25 pounds, yet lands on the bed without us feeling anything. And is still a bit shy.

    I suspect Mithy’s mama was a lot better at the feral game than Tristan’s mama.

  58. 58.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @debbie: Most of the crops that got flooded are toast but it’s a problem to be concerned about.

    @Immanentize: The coal ash pits are by the rivers because the power plants need the water to create steam. There was a time not too far in the past, when our rivers were used as open sewers. I’m sure that certain industries would just love to repeal the Clean Water Act so they can once again use the rivers as God intended.

  62. 62.

    OzarkHillbilly

    The Followers of Christ is a Pentecostal church that believes in faith healing. Its members refuse to avail themselves, or their children, of modern medical care. In many states this exposes them to prosecution. But in Idaho, Nixon-era religious shield laws protect them from charges of child neglect. Critics – including ex-members – say that the Followers are getting away with murder, or something close to it. They also allege that the reclusive group permits other forms of abuse.

    The Guardian shone a light on the Followers in Idaho two years ago. Now the makers of a new documentary film have gained unprecedented access to the church.

    No Greater Law, directed by Tom Dumican, will be shown on A&E on Monday night, following screenings at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival and a nomination for best international documentary in Britain’s Grierson Trust Awards.

    If’ns ya gots nothing better to do on a Monday eve.

  65. 65.

    PPCLI

    @Ken: Indeed. Anyone who watches his reptilian performance in the Anita Hill hearings will realize that this is exactly who he is.

  69. 69.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @WereBear: They had a lot of fundamentalist allies in the enactment of these laws. There is a very real fear of governmental intrusion on the far out edges of Christianity and for good reason. These people are complete whack jobs who in a same world would be committed.

    I really don’t care what they do to themselves in pursuit of the Divine, but when it comes to God’s Will, it is their Holy Duty to let nothing stop them in their imposition of it. Mere law’s are the work of sinful men, but the Bible is the Inerrant Word of God

  70. 70.

    The Pale Scot

    @MomSense: If it doesn’t clear up a couple of days, go get an MRI if you can. a small tear in something can set off a chain reaction of chemical changes in the synovial fluid that aren’t welcome. From the voice of experience, I ignored injuries when I was young, and I’m paying for them now.

  71. 71.

    MagdaInBlack

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    Bubbly Creek is the nickname given to the South Fork of the South Branch of the Chicago River. It runs entirely within the city of Chicago, Illinois, U.S. It marks the boundary between the Bridgeport and McKinley Park community areas of the city. The creek derives its name from the gases bubbling out of the riverbed from the decomposition of blood and entrails dumped into the river in the early 20th century by the local meatpacking businesses surrounding the Union Stock Yards directly south of the creek’s endpoint at Pershing Road. It was brought to notoriety by Upton Sinclair in his exposé on the American meat packing industry entitled The Jungle.[1]

    MmmmHmmmmm

  72. 72.

    Chyron HR

    @Kay:

    75%! So 25% are same people who voted to get rid of the protections 2 years ago.

    No, 25% of them wanted both nazi death camps and insurance coverage for white people’s pre-existing conditions, and Trump promised both.

  73. 73.

    MagdaInBlack

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    Even better!

    It eventually got to the point where a layer of black tar-like sludge rose to the surface, thick enough to walk on in some parts (stories exist of people accidentally wandering out onto it and sometimes falling through as if it were ice). These putrid, toxic, floating sludge-bergs caught fire (with the gasses) multiple times, and most disgustingly, were, as part of a scheme by some harebrained entrepreneurs, hacked into blocks like peat under the cover of night and rendered into a lard-like substance to be sold to consumers!

  74. 74.

    geg6

    Like our esteemed blog host, I hate watch House Hunters. Last night’s episode took place right here in Beaver County, PA. It’s was kind of fun watching it and seeing them look at houses I actually recognize and could drive you to. They bought the one closest to our house. As always with this show, it was not the one I would have chosen.

  75. 75.

    PST

    @debbie: Food from North Carolina and other hog producing areas may come from fields soaked in pig waste whether or not flooded. Its standard use is as fertilizer.

    To handle all that waste, farmers in North Carolina use a standard practice called the lagoon and spray field system. They flush feces and urine from barns into open-air pits called lagoons, which turn the color of Pepto-Bismol when pink-colored bacteria colonize the waste. To keep the lagoons from overflowing, farmers spray liquid manure on their fields nearby.

  76. 76.

    japa21

    @geg6: Remember, the people have already bought a house and the show picks a couple other houses for them to look at which might not even actually be for sale.

  78. 78.

    Luthe

    I got my first tattoo yesterday and I am so very thankful for the existence of Tylenol Rapid Release. My shoulder hurts like a mofo and I can only sleep in one position without in complaining (the rest of me is not thrilled with this situation). Getting the tattoo wasn’t as bad as I expected, but the aftermath is worse than I thought it would be.

    For the curious, here’s what it looks like.

  79. 79.

    Bruuuuce

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: Hm. Non-demanding is a good word for hospital TV. For me (in much of 2016 and some of 2017) it was Food Network, BBC America, and sports. Not really a time to be focusing on science lectures.

  80. 80.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @MagdaInBlack: Bubbly Creek, great story, horrific results.

    In South St. Louis we have “the worlds largest open sewer” otherwise known as the River Des Peres.

    The River des Peres (French: rivière des Pères) (English: /diˈpɛər/) is a 9.3-mile (15.0 km)[1] metropolitan river in St. Louis, Missouri. It is the backbone of sanitary and storm water systems in the city of St. Louis and portions of St. Louis County. Its largest tributaries are Deer Creek and Gravois Creek.

    Back in the day when they were putting in the sewers they did not differentiate between storm and sanitary. There has been a very expensive (and ongoing) upgrade to the system done by MSD (Metropolitan Sewer District) to treat all the water that enters the system but it gets overwhelmed every time there is a big rain and raw sewage gets dumped into the area rivers. (I think most if not all of the older inner suburbs have been upgraded but the city is a couple billions $ job)

  81. 81.

    Bruuuuce

    @Luthe: A Bryn Mawr owl! Cool! My wife has several times expressed a desire for something like that (and, if you’re interested, sells lantern pendants). Curious where you got it, in case you’re within our range and she decides to do it.

  83. 83.

    geg6

    @japa21:

    Nope, all of them were for sale recently. I haunt Zillow. ? Doesn’t mean that’s not how it works sometimes, but in this case, at least all the houses were really for sale.

  84. 84.

    OzarkHillbilly

    Another Must Read from Michael Lewis: The Fifth Risk.

    To understand more about the kind of risk the US government helps cushion its citizens from, Lewis looked at three agencies that are little discussed and poorly understood by the public: the Department of Energy, the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Commerce. What results, in the new book, is a surprising “civics lesson” that seeks to reverse some of Americans’ deepest prejudices about government.

    Slothful, wasteful, idiotic – this is how the bureaucracy is often portrayed. Many people are fed a media diet of government flops, and are not encouraged to appreciate what it gets right. There are of course real failures. The rollout of HealthCare.gov by Obama “was unforgivable”, Lewis says, the result of not paying enough attention to the civil service. But he is quick to add that Obama learned his lesson, and was never at “Trumpian levels of neglect”.

    But Lewis found that many of the people working in the government are scientists and administrators at the top of their fields working on some of the thorniest problems facing the world, such as cancer and climate change. (Much of the innovation we attribute to Silicon Valley started life inside a government programme.)

    They are the opposite, in other words, of Rick Perry. And they often shared something else. Lewis not only found “hundreds of fantastically important success stories in the United States government”, but that “a surprising number of the people responsible for them were first-generation Americans who had come from places without well-functioning governments”.

    For Lewis, the most interesting character was a man named Ali Zaidi. A Muslim immigrant growing up poor in rural Pennsylvania, Zaidi became a staunch small-government Republican, devoted to the myth of pulling yourself up by the bootstraps. After volunteering in post-Katrina New Orleans, however, Zaidi began to suspect that “there were no bootstraps”. He eventually joined the Obama administration, where at a very young age he was put in charge of overseeing budgets at the Department of Agriculture. It was only then he realised that one of the services he was helping to administer, a school-lunch programme, had kept him from going hungry as a child.

    The people who eventually turned up to run Trump’s federal government were nothing like MacWilliams, Zaidi or the other public servants Lewis met. They are more like intellectually limp versions of the arrogant “Big Swinging Dicks” Lewis described on the Salomon trading floor. Many government positions remain unfilled, but those who are in office are there not by dint of intelligence or expertise, but through cronyism and loyalty to Trump.

    “The woman who ran the Obama department’s energy-policy analysis unit received a call from Department of Energy staff telling her that her office was now occupied by Eric Trump’s brother-in-law,” Lewis writes (Eric is Donald’s son). “Why? No one knew.” Trump’s people, Lewis makes clear, are largely inept and animated by greed, anti-government ideology and a “commitment to scientific ignorance”. Trump himself is, in Lewis’s view, “the single worst business manager that’s ever occupied the office. He’s obsessed only with himself, he doesn’t manage anything.”

  85. 85.

    Bill Arnold

    @MagdaInBlack:

    Why does the Guardian seem to be better than any American news source about things happening in the US of A?

    Ownership

    Similarly, e.g. Bloomberg has been breaking interesting UK-specific stories, particularly related to Brexit.
    This ownership/intimidation dynamic is a good reason for having a few foreign news sources in one’s feed, just check the ownership first. (But skip RT, IMO, unless one is sufficiently skilled at seeing the propaganda and disinformation. And the US right wing news feeds are similar.)

  86. 86.

    Immanentize

    I just read Brett Stevens op ed in the NYT today. He writes (after explaining how fair minded he is)

    I believe that Blasey has yet to offer definitive evidence of what she alleges.

    This is pig ash coal shit of the highest order. “I was the victim of a specofic criminal act and that person did it to me” is almost the very definition of dispositive and diginotive evidence. The whole world for these male fucks included the idea that the words of women are not enough. Ever.

    Believe me, there are hundreds, maybe thousands of people doing serious time right now on less than what Blasey Ford has testified to.

  87. 87.

    OzarkHillbilly

    testing testing….

    In Moderation again! Something in the quote is verbotten, FYWP! (none of the usual suspects) NOW A 3RD TIME!!!!

    So go read the Guardian review of Michael Lewis’s Latest book, and then go buy the book.

  88. 88.

    Immanentize

    PS, I am at the end of my thin rope over what is being done to Blasey Ford. No prosecutor anywhere would allow such treatment of a (white) attempted rape victim.

  90. 90.

    OzarkHillbilly

    OK, FYWP doesn’t like the link: So I’ll give the article quote again:

    To understand more about the kind of risk the US government helps cushion its citizens from, Lewis looked at three agencies that are little discussed and poorly understood by the public: the Department of Energy, the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Commerce. What results, in the new book, is a surprising “civics lesson” that seeks to reverse some of Americans’ deepest prejudices about government.

    Slothful, wasteful, idiotic – this is how the bureaucracy is often portrayed. Many people are fed a media diet of government flops, and are not encouraged to appreciate what it gets right. There are of course real failures. The rollout of HealthCare.gov by Obama “was unforgivable”, Lewis says, the result of not paying enough attention to the civil service. But he is quick to add that Obama learned his lesson, and was never at “Trumpian levels of neglect”.

    But Lewis found that many of the people working in the government are scientists and administrators at the top of their fields working on some of the thorniest problems facing the world, such as cancer and climate change. (Much of the innovation we attribute to Silicon Valley started life inside a government programme.)

    They are the opposite, in other words, of Rick Perry. And they often shared something else. Lewis not only found “hundreds of fantastically important success stories in the United States government”, but that “a surprising number of the people responsible for them were first-generation Americans who had come from places without well-functioning governments”.

    For Lewis, the most interesting character was a man named Ali Zaidi. A Muslim immigrant growing up poor in rural Pennsylvania, Zaidi became a staunch small-government Republican, devoted to the myth of pulling yourself up by the bootstraps. After volunteering in post-Katrina New Orleans, however, Zaidi began to suspect that “there were no bootstraps”. He eventually joined the Obama administration, where at a very young age he was put in charge of overseeing budgets at the Department of Agriculture. It was only then he realised that one of the services he was helping to administer, a school-lunch programme, had kept him from going hungry as a child.

    The people who eventually turned up to run Trump’s federal government were nothing like MacWilliams, Zaidi or the other public servants Lewis met. They are more like intellectually limp versions of the arrogant “Big Swinging Dicks” Lewis described on the Salomon trading floor. Many government positions remain unfilled, but those who are in office are there not by dint of intelligence or expertise, but through cronyism and loyalty to Trump.

    “The woman who ran the Obama department’s energy-policy analysis unit received a call from Department of Energy staff telling her that her office was now occupied by Eric Trump’s brother-in-law,” Lewis writes (Eric is Donald’s son). “Why? No one knew.” Trump’s people, Lewis makes clear, are largely inept and animated by greed, anti-government ideology and a “commitment to scientific ignorance”. Trump himself is, in Lewis’s view, “the single worst business manager that’s ever occupied the office. He’s obsessed only with himself, he doesn’t manage anything.”

  91. 91.

    MagdaInBlack

    @OzarkHillbilly:
    St. Louis, and my dear friend.

    “Coldwater Creek—Just the facts please,” has more than 7,000 members. Another one of its members, Shari Riley, grew up in Florissant. She talked to News 4 in March, 2013, and recalled playing in Coldwater Creek as a child, finding crawfish “that were clear—you could see through them. Some had two heads.”

    In 2010, Riley was diagnosed with stage 4 appendix cancer. She has since been given a clean bill of health, but said she knew of at least two dozen other appendix cancer cases from the area. Appendix cancer is rare, with fewer than 1,000 new cases in the U.S. each year.

    That clean bill of health? She died in 2014.
    But who needs regulation anyway

  92. 92.

    Suzanne

    @JMG:

    I’d guess the percentage of people who attend any rally for any candidate who go on to vote is 100 percent.

    SuzMom and I attended a Trump rally and heckled. We also enjoyed scandalizing the MAGAts with full-throated defense of Al Sharpton.

  93. 93.

    Bill Arnold

    @Immanentize:

    PS, I am at the end of my thin rope over what is being done to Blasey Ford. No prosecutor anywhere would allow such treatment of a (white) attempted rape victim.

    A positive aspect of this is that America is getting an apparently-needed refresher course on how ugly the current aggregate Republican party is. (We all (well most of us) know decent Republican voters, though I’ve personally lost patience with still-proud DJTrump supporters. Walked out of a party over the weekend after losing control and using the word “bullshit”. gish gallop of radical right wing news feed talking points and QAnon stuff.)
    A few percentage points shift in the electorate away from Republicans and Republican Party is toast, or minority party at best. Measures like voter suppression and gerrymandering and encouragement of third parties that draw majority-otherwise-Democratic voters and etc will be what they have left, and these can be fought. (Redistricting in 2021 after new census?)

  96. 96.

    Luthe

    @Bruuuuce: I don’t know where you are, but I’m in the wilds of western CT, so I went to Danbury Tattoo and Piercing.

    Does your wife have a website for her pendants?

  98. 98.

    Wapiti

    @JMG: I’ve heard rumor that some fraction of Trump rally attendees are there for the $50 cash for 3 hour performance. It’s a gig.

  99. 99.

    Bill Arnold

    @TS (the original):

    Krugman is the only pundit I miss reading since I cancelled the NYT – which fact I told them when I discovered the only way to cancel was via a telephone call.

    https://twitter.com/paulkrugman
    https://www.nytimes.com/column/paul-krugman
    (I do buy the hard copy every couple of days.)

    I disagree a bit with his tweet, unless I’m misinterpreting it. Poorly-formed morning musing: Very few of “the horrible people” think of themselves as bad; most think that they are good measured against the hodgpodge mostly-horrible value system that they order their lives with. Some of these horrible values are learned in adulthood; that’s one of the things propaganda is for. They can be unlearned/replaced. Similarly the fear triggers that people are (deliberately) taught can be unlearned.
    One point is high-profile defections. A respected pundit/commentator/vocal business person/politician/entertainer/etc who shifts to very different place in the ideological space draws followers with them.
    (Jennifer Rubin, for instance, has been surprising recently.)

  100. 100.

    Miss Bianca

    @MagdaInBlack: The man I was engaged to once upon a time died of appendix cancer a few years back. He was an Oxford PhD, worked for the automotive industry – his specialty was carbon-boron-nitrate grinding wheels. I’m now wondering what kind of toxic chemicals *he* may have been exposed to, since it is so rare – hell, I didn’t even know your appendix *could* get cancer!

    This was outside Detroit, btw.

  102. 102.

    bemused

    @RandomMonster:

    Krugman had another good tweet yesterday: The Kavanaugh mess has structural roots…R’s needed someone ideologically reliable and at no risk of developing a conscience when it came to defending trump. So it had to be a bad person which meant good odds of nasty stuff surfacing.

    One quibble is that I’d say Kavanaugh is at no risk of developing a conscience on any issue.

  104. 104.

    Bruuuuce

    @Luthe: We’re in Queens (Jackson Heights), NYC, and I drive, so Danbury is not inaccessible. (We’ll wave as we turn the other way on I-84 today, as we head up to Fishkill to visit her mom. :-) ). Her store is at Shapeways, so you can have the pendants 3D printed in any of several materials. Here’s her store.

  106. 106.

    Bill Arnold

    @Wapiti:

    I’ve heard rumor that some fraction of Trump rally attendees are there for the $50 cash for 3 hour performance. It’s a gig.

    Some raw links:
    How Much Does Trump Pay People to Cheer at His Rallies? (March 4, 2018)
    Democratic Underground threads, with some interesting links (August 3, 2018)

    And the projection corrolary of Cleek’s Law suggests that Republicans do it.
    Did George Soros Pay ‘March for Our Lives’ Protesters $300 Each? (False)

  108. 108.

    patrick II

    I keep reading that Republicans have not learned anything since the Anita Hill hearings in 1991. I think they did. They learned they can appoint a misogynist right wing extremist who has been on the court remaking laws for partisan purposes for twenty seven years and they don’t seem to have paid a political price. It’s a different lesson than one might hope for, but a lesson nonetheless.

  110. 110.

    TS (the original)

    @Bill Arnold: I’ve always agreed with Krugman’s economics which has been my main reason for following him. His tweets come and go but his financial methodology hasn’t changed. Jennifer Rubin is another story. When trump is gone and the GOP as usual wheedles its way back into power – she will probably return to being a conservative. She has, however, been the most consistent “never trumper” of all the pundits who claim to be that way. I subscribe to the WP because they offered a super deal for online access, which I thought was for 1 year only, they have since renewed it at the same price so I still subscribe.

  111. 111.

    japa21

    @bemused: That is basically what he is saying. Kavanaugh was picked precisely because there was no chance of a conscience getting in his way.

  115. 115.

    TS (the original)

    @MagdaInBlack: I also send sympathy in the death of your friend – and add that I have never before heard of cancer of the appendix, so to me it sounds rarer than rare. There surely has to be cause to have it grouped in an area.

  116. 116.

    WereBear

    @patrick II: That is the point. We are the ones who should have learned a lesson — make them pay the price.

    I think the current hell we are living through is a lesson in itself: some people will not see the obvious until it does hit them with a 2×4.

    And they apparently comprise a “critical mass” because only NOW, after liberals have been screaming since W stole his first election, have they noticed the Republican party has become a craven travesty of humanity.

    I sigh and tell myself at least they notice now. When it’s late in the day and the cows are partying in the barn with shotguns.

  123. 123.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @MagdaInBlack: Yeah, I follow that situation religiously. My brother and his wife are still underwater on their mortgage from the 2008 crash and with that evolving situation I wonder if maybe they’d just be better off declaring bankruptcy.

  126. 126.

    J R in WV

    Well, I’m tired of commenting about how despicable these despicable people are. I’m still donating to good candidates, though.

    And the despicable people are, sadly, still and even more despicable than ever.

  128. 128.

    The Thin Black Duke

    @WereBear: Bottom line, until Republicans pay a cost for being Republicans, they’re going to keep on doing the awful things that Republicans do.

  131. 131.

    James E Powell

    @Bill Arnold:

    Some of these horrible values are learned in adulthood; that’s one of the things propaganda is for. They can be unlearned/replaced. Similarly the fear triggers that people are (deliberately) taught can be unlearned.

    No doubt humans can change, but I’ve never seen it on anything but a small scale. 2016 showed that horrible values and fear triggers are still dominant.

    And the people who taught the horrible values and installed the fear triggers never stop. They own all the press/media, they have more money than anyone, and they are never going to stop.

  132. 132.

    Luthe

    @Bruuuuce: If she chooses to go to Danbury, ask for Mikey Vee.

    I know another Mawrtyr who lives in Queens. She’s class of ’90. (if you want more deets, we should switch to email)

  133. 133.

    raven

    @Duane: I harken back to the history of Mizzou ruining things for the Illini from Phil Bradley to Shorthose to Macklin! I hate that they ended the series but I’ve been a Dawg for 35 years so!!!!!!

  134. 134.

    AThornton

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    Removing antibiotics from animal feed means the destruction of CAFOs meaning a major, major, financial hit to the big meat packers which simply are the meat industry. For example, IBP owns ~40% of the US meat industry. The meat industry doesn’t care about the long run and our institutions that are supposed to care are controlled by Republicans, which is to say sociopaths, psychopaths, and psychotics so they don’t care either.

  135. 135.

    AThornton

    @Immanentize:

    What a horror show for the people in the southeast of that State.

    They got what they wanted and voted for: the right of a property owner to do what he wants on his land without pesky gov’mint tellin’ ’em what to do.

    They should enjoy and revel in their freedumbs.

  136. 136.

    Ella in New Mexico

    He has been privately dismissing polls and saying all will be well, worrying those close to him his supporters will be complacent.

    This is the only thing that has me at all worried about this fall. What does he know that the rest of the country doesn’t? Why is he so sure he and the Republicans are safe?

  138. 138.

    MagdaInBlack

    @AThornton:
    This is part of why I’m somewhat cynical about living a healthy lifestyle. I/We do the best we can, but ffs, it’s in the air, it’s in the water, it’s in our food, and our clothes and our cosmetics.

    Greed is an amazing motivator, they genuinely don’t care.

  140. 140.

    Bill Arnold

    @James E Powell:

    but I’ve never seen it on anything but a small scale.

    Only need a few percentage points of the electorate, in the current evenly-matched two-party system. (including gerrymandering and vote supression; without these Republicans lose).

    And the people who taught the horrible values and installed the fear triggers never stop.

    Progressives (and Democrats in general) need to compete. And so does anyone else, e.g. anarcho socialists or whatever, that can offer more ethical alternatives, at least in regions where this doesn’t throw elections to horrible people.

  142. 142.

    Bill Arnold

    @Ella in New Mexico:

    This is the only thing that has me at all worried about this fall. What does he know that the rest of the country doesn’t? Why is he so sure he and the Republicans are safe?

    Given 2016, one good possibility that he or rather his more competent evil minions have one or more October surprises in plan, and the plan/plans hasn’t/haven’t leaked yet.
    Another is that he has been assured by backers of some sort that the Republicans will win.
    Another is that his intuition, perhaps backed by voices in head, as Goku suggests, is telling him this; he thinks of himself as having a world-class intuition. Which I think was perhaps partially true in his younger days but he has an intellectual diet of near pure garbage and it and the “hard work” are taking a toll.

  144. 144.

    Origuy

    @MomSense: I heard a pop in my knee while dancing in May. After an MRI showed a torn meniscus, I had arthroscopic surgery in June. Get it checked out.

  145. 145.

    prob50

    I’ve been absent from the site for a while and I’ve been unable to see how to navigate from thread-to-thread. There used to be a list of recent threads and comments along the right-side of the page, but it’s no longer there. HELP!!

  146. 146.

    Raven

    @Duane: Being an Illini is not a choice. I was born in Urbana, lived there 16 years as an adult and did my undergrad there (in 9 years)!

  147. 147.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    @Bill Arnold: I’m suspecting a repeat of Karl Rove 2012. Everything about his behavior screamed that Ohio had been rigged, that he knew absolutely the fix was in. But the voters overwhelmed whatever fiddling had been done on the Republicans behalf.

    I’m sure Trump and/or his minions have been told by Putin (what was that mysterious meeting in Moscow this summer?) that the Russian vote-screwing machinery will be in full force.

    But I keep using the phrase “cautiously optimistic” because I think we have the numbers, on average, in most places, to overwhelm the fix again. Notice all the weasel words in that sentence.

  148. 148.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Bill Arnold: Re intuition, pace Godwin, it may be worth remembering that a guy once known as Schicklgruber made a series of astoundingly successful intuitive foreign-policy/military decisions from the reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936 through late 1942. Events had proven him right (& the supposedly knowledgeable professionals wrong) so often that it was more than the fear of punishment that kept diplomats & soldiers chary of disagreeing with him. Even when it became clear (post-Stalingrad) that his intuition had abruptly become deeply fallible – it took a whole string of defeats over 18 months before the opposition could organize an (unsuccessful) attempt to move against him.

    The current situation may be similar in that nimrods like Yertle & ZEGS are unwilling to lock horns with Twitler because they fear he understands the political landscape far better than they do. And he might. Until he doesn’t, & the whole house of Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free cards collapses on them.

  149. 149.

    Ruckus

    @Miss Bianca:
    Every bit of your body can develop cancer (link). Some cancers are much rarer than others but there isn’t any part that is immune to cancer. And on doesn’t get cancer, like one gets a cold. Cancer is your bodies cells going rouge. A change in cell reproduction, a mutation. Yes your cells can go through this mutation from outside sources, such as some heavy metals exposure or some infections. But it also can happen spontaneously or from genetics.

  150. 150.

    Ruckus

    @prob50:
    We are in a rebuilding phase right now.
    It’s like living in your house while an entire rebuild is being done. Very little is the same as you were used to.
    Edit is missing. Recent comments – what you mentioned, is missing. The reply button works funny for some of us – you hit reply and nothing appears to happen because you don’t zip to the reply box, but the reply name and comment number is in the box. I’m sure there are others.
    Alain is working on fixes, things are progressing.

  151. 151.

    WaterGirl

    @prob50: If you’re on a computer, you should be able to use the arrows to the right and left edges of the Balloon Juice screen. The arrow on the left takes you to the previous thread; the one on the right takes you to the next one.

    Other than that, yeah, what Ruckus said. The site it not functioning at its finest.

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