Trump warns of violence if GOP loses midterms @CNNPolitics https://t.co/l4afEmZpfy
— Cheri Jacobus (@CheriJacobus) October 25, 2018
Unbelievable — a Fox News segment fear-mongering about the 'left-wing mob' and 'incivility' toward Mitch McConnell at a restaurant was interrupted by breaking news coverage of a string of bombs sent to prominent Democrats pic.twitter.com/UKZogGKHHA
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 24, 2018
Trump’s 2020 campaign manager apologizes for email sent out earlier today in Lara Trump’s name that criticized CNN and said the media needed “a wake up call.” Brad Parscale says it was “a pre-programmed, automated message” and they don’t condone violence against CNN or anyone. pic.twitter.com/cKCBR5oioO
— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) October 24, 2018
If you work in comms & are responsible for scheduling ANYTHING in advance, you need to make sure that if breaking news happens you do an item-by-item review of everything scheduled for near future and pull back anything that might come off wrong. https://t.co/hz4wlHeGM9
— Dara Lind (@DLind) October 24, 2018
Phenomenal timing, @NRA: NRA lobbyist @DLoesch says Trump supporters and gun owners may need to bring guns to polls to protect themselves from progressives. #bombscare https://t.co/sU7nw3aaBN
— Shannon Watts (@shannonrwatts) October 24, 2018
It is very weird to watch Trump speak in this tone at a rally, and to avoid most of his gleeful personal disparaging of people. That's so much of the schtick. https://t.co/2UtwiT2ZoJ
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) October 25, 2018
"I'm not the hatemonger. YOU'RE the hatemonger!" https://t.co/ptPR4ujC3R
— Ragnarok Lobster (@eclecticbrotha) October 25, 2018
Per @jeffzeleny: The White House did not reach out to former President Obama, the Clintons or any of the other Democratic officials who received pipe bombs, according to two officials familiar with the matter.
— Sarah Boxer (@Sarah_Boxer) October 24, 2018
Just an FYI: in the last month Trump has called Democrats “arsonists,” “evil people,” & “too dangerous to govern,” and accused them of seeking to “destroy American prosperity” and “unleash violent predators & killers.” https://t.co/g13255dBDU
— Michael Cohen (@speechboy71) October 24, 2018
Before we move on to the next thing, please remember that our nation suffered a terror attack today, directed mainly at leaders of the opposition party, right before an election. Please consider how this would sound if it happened in another country.
— Seth Masket (@smotus) October 24, 2018
When typos get Freudian: pic.twitter.com/Xc9ET99OGv
— Kashana (@kashanacauley) October 24, 2018
danielx
Timing is all.
HumboldtBlue
You know these motherfuckers are gonna steal this shit.
They are.
Some folks got songs about it.
Raoul
Chris Kluwe is not having any of this.
Raoul
I know this isn’t a thread to talk about the site, but it’s completely constipated on Chrome. Working OK on Safari.
eta: Not really even on Safari.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Raoul: I had to load the main page to get it to work.
Ken Shabby
I’ve never seen anything like this in my entire lifetime and, I grew up during Nixon. That’s saying a lot. There was a lot of weird shit then but, perhaps one measured comment is much if it was not organized, orchestrated or focused by both media and one political party, i.e. GOP and Fox, to both extent and effect it is now. There were plenty of ridiculous people, it was more extreme, including violence. Cities burned, important and valued people were assassinated and, in one case, on live television. I’m babbling…there’s no way to condense this into an effective comparison without taking too long and trying everyone’s patience,
I just stopped by to say:
Like many older people who comment here, I’ve grown up with and also seen a lot of tragic, hateful, weird shit but, this – this – is something I’ve never seen before. No single person, no news organization, no collective political party and, certainly no president, including the awful person Nixon was, ever stood up anywhere, at anytime and said thecappalling shit that pours out of this collective group. Not.Ever. Silly shit? Sure. Stupid or bland or vapid? Sure. For some of them, then, almost all the time. e.g. it takes a somewhat peculiar individual to believe racism, misogyny or violence is a Good Idea or, that Viet Nam was a Great Idea. But no one ever methodically, unethically, immorally and systematically whipped up these linds of frenzies. And, as weird as some of our presidents have been, none were ever certified pychopathic lunatics, acting out on an almost hourly basis. And, without being checked. Even Nixon did not do this. Not in public and, not as blatantly dangerous, ugly, awful and as ongoing Spectacle.
If it were blatantly self evident, it wouldn’t be happening. It would not be aided and abetted by so many in so many positions of responsibility and power. Half the country is out of its fucking mind or asleep at the wheel.
I’m not Chicken Little here or Capt. Obvious. I just stopped by to say this is without precedent and extreme. If you’re 20 or 30 or 40, No, this is not how things usually work. If any of you wonder if things were ever this fucked up, they weren’t. And, that’s taking assassinations, multiple years of riots, Viet Nam, racial hatred and a number of other completely stupid things into account. No president, political party or news organization ever said, you better elect us or there’s going to be violence. Not like this.
That’s all I wanted to say. And, I’m saying it because it is that fucked up.
Vote. This will take a decade or perhaps longer to unpack and correct but, it can only begin to happen by voting. Every goddamn chance you get. Vote. And, be patient. And, vote again and keep voting. Math is on your side.
Redshift
Even that is too tame. Our country just had assassination attempts on two former presidents.
Ken Shabby
@Raoul:
No.
This is as recklessly irresponsible as Trump.
No.
Violence doesn’t even begin predictably or reliably let alone end that way.
No.
Violence is the last idea after every single other idea has been exhausted; it’s often desperate and with profound consequence.
So, no.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Ken Shabby: TRUTH.
suffragettecity
@Ken Shabby:
Newt Gingrich is on line one.
He’s foaming at this and is realizing his dream come true. I’d also be inclined to send him Chris Kluwe’s way
NotMax
Posthumous pardons for Timothy McVeigh and James Earl Ray any day now…
Amir Khalid
@HumboldtBlue:
If they’re confident they can steal the election, why are they so down in the mouth?
Ken Shabby
@suffragettecity:
I’m …inclined…to send them All that way. It’s better, checked. My entire life, I’ve never been anyone’s idea of a …pacifist. It’s taken that long to stop feeding That Dog. It’s an inclination but, it is not the only one and, not a wise one.
To speak plainly:
Are you more …satisfied seeing Bill Cosby in prison?
Or, would you have liked some more final outcome?
I’m content with the former. It’s justice, the women he harmed are recognized and the truth that may heal them is established.
I don’t want that threat of violence to any of these awful people. I want, instead, the satisfaction that their criminality is proved, their lives are finally held to account and, they spend either a good part of or the rest of it in an orange suit, behind bars. That would give a great deal of satisfaction and begin to square accounts.
I thought the same way about the financial sector. Start throwing these fuckers in prison and quit fining them.
Aleta
Repubs don’t want Russia or mueller or kavanaugh in the news going into the election. Dems need to get attention back to Russia and the R record in Congress. Saying outrageous stuff to keep Dems and the media busy responding is summer/fall 2016 again. The violence and bombs are extremely serious, but I think violence and unprecedented craziness works in favor of incumbents by unsettling people and making some people wish for order and continuity above all. So I hope the media waits for FBI /police info instead of going nuts speculating every which way. I could be wrong, but I’ll predict T will be only to happy to grandstand about the mail bombs and law enforcement for a few days. The important thing is, how do we increase chances of wining seats. I think focusing on the violence may be what Repubs want for the country.
opiejeanne
I can’t deal with the Eeyore’s any more.
Good night all.
Mnemosyne
Just got home from seeing Dear Evan Hansen. I deliberately went into it not knowing anything about it ahead of time, and I have one overarching comment:
Apologies to Dorothy A. Winsor and any of our other friends here who write YA, but when the fuck did YA take over popular entertainment to the point where I just watched what was essentially a YA novel set to music? It was good, and the performances were great, but … the story was a YA novel set to music.
I’m glad I went because it was good and sometimes moving, but there is life beyond high school.
NotMax
@Mnemsoyne
Should it ever be in the area, run, do not walk, to see The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Much more memorable theater going experience all around.
Pete Downunder
@NotMax: Curious Incident is terrific. Mrs Downunder and I have seen it twice. First during its Broadway run then in Brisbane Downunder. While the Bris run did not have quite the stage effects of Broadway it was still great. Don’t miss it.
Mnemosyne
@NotMax:
It already came and went, but it will probably be back again. I skipped it because I was not impressed by the book — is the play better?
satby
@Mnemosyne:
For a good chunk of our fellow citizens that isn’t true. High school was the peak of their lives socially and intellectually and it’s been downhill ever since. My opinion only, but the overlap with Republicans in general is probably pretty large.
Pete Downunder
@Mnemosyne: it is very true to the book, do if you did not like the book you probably would not like the play. The reverse is also true.
Mnemosyne
@Pete Downunder:
If Fun Home makes it down there, it’s well worth seeing. Not as many fancy special effects, but the writers pulled something out of their bag of tricks with the staging that turned me into a puddle.
NotMax
@Mnemosyne
Mesmerizing. Normally not a fan of plays which place such a heavy reliance of technical effects and electronic wizardry, but this was an exceptional exception.
Sort of trailer.
Mnemosyne
@satby:
G and I were debating that on the drive home because neither of us understand the prevalence of YA. I think we came up with five or six competing ideas for why that could be.
Pete Downunder
@Mnemosyne: We saw Fun Home on Broadway (yes we spend a lot of time in NYC which too damn far from Oz) and I sort of liked it but the music added nothing. The woman who played the lead was terrific but overall I couldn’t recommend it. Everyone’s taste is different.
Mnemosyne
@Pete Downunder:
I think it got to me largely because it was about fathers and daughters and I had a difficult relationship with my own late father.
The trick the writers of Fun Home pull that I’m referring to is when they have Narrator Alison be the one who goes on that final car ride with her father, because she is the only character on that stage who knows it’s the last time she’ll ever see him, and yet she can’t change anything they do or say because it’s in the past. I’m getting a little weepy just thinking about it now.
satby
@Mnemosyne: my 45th high school reunion is coming up. I’m not at all interested in going, but it’s weird to see how excited some of my former classmates are on the alumni page on FB.
They’re the same kind of people who share pictures of egg beaters on FB with a “bet you don’t know what this is if you’re under 40” caption.
mad citizen
Uncle Rico: We coulda won State!
Thinking about Ken Shabby’s long post above. I too grew up in Nixon’s time. I waited in line with my family to see RFK go into a 68 rally.
What I find weird today is no one around me talks about what is going down. The vote had better work.
Ken Shabby
@satby:
Also the same folk who show you as many pictures of their children, their grandchildren, everyone’s pets as you’re willing to stand there and witness and drone endlessly on about retirement, health and vacation. A greeter at a store is more interesting…
No wonder The Kids are totes so over it, can’t even and out of fucks to give. Somewhere along the line, our age group stopped thinking and reduced everything to either a timeshare presentation mission statement or thought process of a smiling person in a chair.
Ken Shabby
@mad citizen:
Yes, it had better. It’s not a magic wand. Correcting and cleaning up this mess will take a decade or more and be a slow grind.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Mnemosyne: Dear Evan Hansen has a big readership, so what do I know, but one of the benefits of writing fantasy is that I never have to use the words “high school.”
I haven’t read it and actually don’t know much about it, but some of the big YA contemporary books these days are package books, ie a publisher creates the idea they think will market well and gets someone to write it, sometimes in conjunction with a movie company.
BretH
@Ken Shabby: I’m 60 and I agree 100%.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Ken Shabby: The cloests the current period resembles is 1919, were racial violence was at it’s peak. Except, in 1919 between WWI and the Mexican Revolution spilling over into the South West, there were legitimate reasons for fear that the demagogs like Wilson (curse you Wilson!) whipped up. .
Kristine
@Mnemosyne: My bullsh*t hypothesis is that unlike many ‘adult’ novels, YA on average concentrates on a single storyline that moves. Like novellas, or the early SF novels that were 60-80K words.
Skepticat
@Ken Shabby: What he said.
kd bart
Poor Wilmer. Not worthy of a bomb?
schrodingers_cat
@Mnemosyne: I blame the stupendous success of the Harry Potter novels, now everyone wants to be the next Rowling.
Gravenstone
@Mnemosyne: I’d say the last 10-15 years the majority of releases have been either YA based movies or superhero movies. YMMV
Walker
@Mnemosyne:
School reading programs that encourage students to read outside of school. And adults who continue to read this material as escapism afterwards. This is well documented.
smintheus
Dara Lind is not the most credible person on the need to clean up your messes when stepping into a national debate. On July 23 she published this fiasco of an “explainer” on the history of birthright citizenship. All she demonstrated was that she had never bothered to educate herself on the subject. Take this preposterous paragraph:
Almost every sentence has at least one error; the worst of them is in bold. Birthright citizenship has been the law in America since the Revolutionary War, a cardinal fact that Lind effaces by her own incompetence. She produced this steaming pile of garbage in the middle of a fairly strong attack by conservatives on the principle of birthright citizenship.
Should have been corrected prior to publication, or at least cleaned up afterwards. I wrote to Lind repeatedly in July explaining the legal history and urging her to correct her “explainer”. No response and no correction was forthcoming, however. But now she’s lecturing others about how not to step in a pile of your own making?
Mnemosyne
@schrodingers_cat:
I would love that for myself, but there’s only one Joanne Rowling. The next literary mega-star who makes mega-bucks will be in an entirely different genre.
@Kristine:
G was saying yesterday that “literary” novels had a long run of being about unhappily married English professors with writer’s block starting an affair with an undergraduate. No wonder people decided they wanted to read books that were more plot-driven.
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
I watched the whole thing and realized that it would have been a horror movie from his girlfriend’s POV. Now I’m wondering if there’s a sequel explaining exactly how exposing his series of massive lies brought her parents back together as she says in the show’s epilogue, because I ain’t buying it as presented.
Miss Bianca
@Mnemosyne:
Funny, this sounds like the exact plot of “The Wife”, which was the movie we just showed last weekend. With the plot twist that “the wife” is actually the Nobel Prize-winning author, not the English professor husband. Dear God, you mean there’s *more* of those out there?
Mnemosyne
@Miss Bianca:
It’s such a common trope that Meg Wolitzer was able to play with it in her novel that the movie was based on.
Michael Chabon did his own version with Wonder Boys, but he was smart enough to make it a road trip story to get some action into it.
Mnemosyne
@Walker:
To be clear, I don’t have a problem with actual young adults reading YA. What I find weird is full-grown adults who refuse to read anything other than YA. As a romance reader, I understand the appeal of reading something safe and not too challenging, but I read books other than romance, too.
WaterGirl
@Mnemosyne: What makes you think there are a bunch of adults who refuse to read anything besides Young Adult fiction?
People are reading; I think that’s good. Why judge people who prefer genres that you don’t?
Mnemosyne
@WaterGirl:
Other than because I know them IRL? G joined a “GenX” book club and the other members — all in their 30s and 40s — complained every time they had to read anything that wasn’t a YA book. No classics, no adult novels, not even something as mainstream as Jodi Picoult. It was YA or nothing.
And, yeah, I worry about people who can’t mentally move beyond their high school years and their ability to cope with adult life. It also reminds me of the dangerous nostalgia of the Reagan years.
But, then, my childhood and teen years kind of sucked, so I have zero nostalgia for those days. I far prefer being an adult and wouldn’t go back to being 16 if you paid me. YMMV.
Tehanu
@Mnemosyne: YA doesn’t necessarily mean “a story set in high school” or “a story about high-school kids”. If you’re wondering why there are so many stories that ARE in or about high school, I have no answer to that except, as somebody noted above, for lots of people high school was the best time of their lives. But please don’t conflate “YA” with “high school.” (In fact, if you want a wonderful read about young people growing up that’s not just about mean girls and other h-s yada yada, read Ursula LeGuin’s “Gifts / Voices / Powers” trilogy.)
Mnemosyne
@Tehanu:
We may partly have a terminology issue, because I wouldn’t consider anything by Le Guin to be “YA” even if the protagonists are under 18. That’s like calling Stephen King’s It a YA novel because the protagonists are all around 12 years old when the main action happens.
I’m a little cranky about this because, as I said above, I realized after the show ended that if the story had been told from his crush/girlfriend’s POV, it would have been a VERY different and extremely creepy story, and it bothered me that it was supposed to be cute and naive behavior on his part.
Celebrity Bowling
What do you do if you’re a vegetarian?