Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

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

Nothing worth doing is easy.

Sadly, media malpractice has become standard practice.

This isn’t Democrats spending madly. This is government catching up.

Every one of the “Roberts Six” lied to get on the court.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

Someone should tell Republicans that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, or possibly the first.

We still have time to mess this up!

Of course you can have champagne before noon. That’s why orange juice was invented.

In short, I come down firmly on all sides of the issue.

There is no compromise when it comes to body autonomy. You either have it or you don’t.

The Supreme Court is corrupt. Democrats must win in November and force court reform.

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

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

“When somebody takes the time to draw up a playbook, they’re gonna use it.”

President Biden is doing good where he can, and getting it done.

Dead end MAGA boomers crying about Talyor Swift being a Dem is my kind of music. Turn it up.

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

The revolution will be supervised.

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

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

Tick tock motherfuckers!

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Archives for 2018

The Trump Narrative

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I think that one reason people have taken up the Steele dossier as a key to Donald Trump’s election wrongdoing is that it is a relatively compact telling of events, from which a narrative may be extracted.

Most of the news coverage is of one small piece of the story at a time. The format of the articles tends to be a general statement of that small piece, perhaps with a bit of background, then a more detailed explanation of the small piece, and then more background. Space is limited, and the story is big. The cast appears to include thousands.

I find those articles largely unreadable and uninformative. Journalists seem to be having trouble too. Sally Buzbee, the executive editor of AP, said the Trump-Russia probes have “gone on so long that it’s difficult to be able to assess what in this investigation is truly very serious and what is not as serious. So that is one thing that journalists struggle with a little bit…” (video here; quote begins at 4:30) That certainly could be one reason that their articles are unreadable.

We need an overall story into which we can fit the breaking news. That will help us figure out what is truly very serious. Elliott Broidy, as far as we know now, is not as important to the story as Erik Prince, who is not as important as Donald Trump Jr. A master narrative can show where characters and subplots fit. Then the subplots can be written separately, noting the connections.

So I’m going to stick my neck out and provide a narrative. It is a bare-bones framework on which we can hang the many subplots and add in facts as they emerge. I’ve also added questions that need to be answered. I suspect that Robert Mueller has answers to some of those questions.

I invite you to suggest subplots. I’ll add them to my list and perhaps write another post in which I try to incorporate them into the narrative.

The narrative is below the fold.

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Open Thread: *[Crickets]*

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Remember the Great Bulk-Shipped Crickets Escape? We’re not the only Extremely On-Line People who appreciated it, per author Christopher Ingraham, reporting for the Washington Post:

For Christmas this year, my family adopted a young bearded dragon lizard as a pet.

Our dragon, whom we named Holly, eats a lot, and the thing she loves to eat most is crickets (typically about 10 a day, in addition to other things like mealworms and vegetables). From the get-go, I knew that keeping an ample supply of crickets on hand would require some planning. We live in a rural area of northwestern Minnesota. The closest pet shop is an hour away, in North Dakota. Restocking our cricket supply would require a time commitment of at least two hours out and back.

By Christmas Day this year, Holly’s cricket supply was running low. I decided to order crickets online, which I had never done before, to save a trip to North Dakota. I bought the crickets from Fluker Farms, one of the more well-established online insect vendors (yes, these exist and there are a lot of them). I decided on a shipment of 250 crickets, which seemed like a reasonable amount for a lizard who is theoretically capable of gobbling up to 50 of them every day…

The package arrived Friday. I anxiously met the FedEx delivery man at the door. He appeared to be relieved to unburden himself of the six-inch-square box emblazoned with the words “Live Insects” and decorated with life-size cricket silhouettes. We exchanged no words. If you’re a FedEx driver, you probably try to avoid conversations with the types of people who order boxes full of insects from the Internet…

Writer Nicole Cliffe took it to a whole new level. For once, it is safe to read the comments, as long as you don’t have anything in your mouth:

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Sunday Morning Open Thread: Never Mind ‘Be Best’, Just Be Better

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Terrence McCoy, in the Washington Post:

… Laura Calderwood, whose daughter, Mollie Tibbetts, 20, was allegedly killed by an undocumented immigrant and left to rot in a cornfield this past summer, closed the mailbox, walked up the steps to her house and turned on the stove. It was getting on toward 6, and she needed to get dinner going. The boys would be hungry.

There were two inside the house now. One was her son, Mollie’s younger brother, a high school senior named Scott. And the other was his friend, a courteous teenager named Ulises Felix. He was the child of Mexican immigrants. For years, his parents had lived and worked beside her daughter’s alleged killer at the same dairy farm on the other side of town, which they fled after the man’s arrest, leaving behind not only Brooklyn, but also Ulises, their 17-year-old son. He’d wanted to finish high school in the only town he’d ever known, and soon, remarkably, he had a new home — the home of Mollie Tibbetts — where Laura had promised to look after him in his parents’ absence…

The stories almost always begin the same way. A son or daughter is dead, and an undocumented immigrant is blamed. Aggrieved and adrift, the parents search for meaning in it all, some finding what they can in obsession and hatred. “In my life we’re going to find the trash who killed my kid,” said Scott Root of Council Bluffs, Iowa, whose daughter, Sarah Root, 21, was killed in 2016, allegedly by an undocumented drunk driver who was released after partially paying bail and then disappeared. Others find meaning in political transformation. “I became a Republican,” said Sabine Durden of Mineral Springs, Ark., whose son was killed by an undocumented immigrant in a traffic collision. And still others in activism: “My story needed to get out,” said Laura Wilkerson of Pearland, Tex., whose son, Josh Wilkerson, 18, was beaten to death in 2010 by an undocumented immigrant.

Then there is Laura Calderwood. Fifty-five, with curly blond hair and a halting gait, she is a lifelong liberal who didn’t abandon her politics. She feels anger like the others, but not toward an entire group of people. She’s not afraid of the demographic change remaking the country. But she does fear the deepening polarization. So she never goes to political rallies — never speaks publicly — because she believes that would just inflame things. Instead, she tries to live every day, including this one, just as she did before it all happened.

By late afternoon, Laura had finished up her shift at the grocery store, where she works in the catering department, and gotten into her white SUV. She drove through nearby Grinnell, pulling up to the public library, as always, seeking a sense of calm in its quiet. She went in and sat near the magazines, one of which she had been reading the afternoon of July 19, when her phone rang…

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Late Night Horrorshow Open Thread: Rep. Pete King Shames His Clan

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As a fellow member of the Irish-American community, I apologize for this… person.

You can be sure young Peter was taught to despise the cruel Brits and effete WASPS who hand-waved Irish suffering because “Those people don’t really care about their children — that’s why they have so many, so carelessly.”

We were not supposed to think “I can hardly wait to oppress other people the same way”… but then, in those days decent Irish-Americans didn’t become Republicans, either.

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Open Thread: Fake Wall, Real Suffering

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