I feel so shitty every time I so much as get an alert I have received a text or email I mutter “Go fuck yourself.”
Also, fuck the patriots. And Trump.
Sunday Afternoon Non Football Related Open ThreadPost + Comments (77)
by John Cole| 77 Comments
This post is in: Go Fuck Yourself
I feel so shitty every time I so much as get an alert I have received a text or email I mutter “Go fuck yourself.”
Also, fuck the patriots. And Trump.
Sunday Afternoon Non Football Related Open ThreadPost + Comments (77)
This post is in: Excellent Links, Show Us on the Doll Where the Invisible Hand Touched You, I'm Too Big To Cry/Hurts Too Much To Laugh, Our Failed Media Experiment
I’m looking forward to reading Jill Abramson’s Merchants of Truth — I’d suggest it for a Balloon Juice Book Club post, except I doubt there’s room for such in the current era. A semi-review from historian Jill LePore, in the New Yorker:
… By some measures, journalism entered a new, Trumpian, gold-plated age during the 2016 campaign, with the Trump bump, when news organizations found that the more they featured Trump the better their Chartbeat numbers, which, arguably, is a lot of what got him elected. The bump swelled into a lump and, later, a malignant tumor, a carcinoma the size of Cleveland. Within three weeks of the election, the Times added a hundred and thirty-two thousand new subscribers. (This effect hasn’t extended to local papers.) News organizations all over the world now advertise their services as the remedy to Trumpism, and to fake news; fighting Voldemort and his Dark Arts is a good way to rake in readers. And scrutiny of the Administration has produced excellent work, the very best of journalism. “How President Trump Is Saving Journalism,” a 2017 post on Forbes.com, marked Trump as the Nixon to today’s rising generation of Woodwards and Bernsteins. Superb investigative reporting is published every day, by news organizations both old and new, including BuzzFeed News.
By the what-doesn’t-kill-you line of argument, the more forcefully Trump attacks the press, the stronger the press becomes. Unfortunately, that’s not the full story. All kinds of editorial decisions are now outsourced to Facebook’s News Feed, Chartbeat, or other forms of editorial automation, while the hands of many flesh-and-blood editors are tied to so many algorithms. For one reason and another, including twenty-first-century journalism’s breakneck pace, stories now routinely appear that might not have been published a generation ago, prompting contention within the reportorial ranks. In 2016, when BuzzFeed News released the Steele dossier, many journalists disapproved, including CNN’s Jake Tapper, who got his start as a reporter for the Washington City Paper. “It is irresponsible to put uncorroborated information on the Internet,” Tapper said. “It’s why we did not publish it, and why we did not detail any specifics from it, because it was uncorroborated, and that’s not what we do.” The Times veered from its normal practices when it published an anonymous opinion essay by a senior official in the Trump Administration. And The New Yorker posted a story online about Brett Kavanaugh’s behavior when he was an undergraduate at Yale, which Republicans in the Senate pointed to as evidence of a liberal conspiracy against the nominee.
There’s plenty of room to argue over these matters of editorial judgment. Reasonable people disagree. Occasionally, those disagreements fall along a generational divide. Younger journalists often chafe against editorial restraint, not least because their cohort is far more likely than senior newsroom staff to include people from groups that have been explicitly and viciously targeted by Trump and the policies of his Administration, a long and growing list that includes people of color, women, immigrants, Muslims, members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community, and anyone with family in Haiti or any of the other countries Trump deems “shitholes.” Sometimes younger people are courageous and sometimes they are heedless and sometimes those two things are the same. “The more ‘woke’ staff thought that urgent times called for urgent measures,” Abramson writes, and that “the dangers of Trump’s presidency obviated the old standards.” Still, by no means is the divide always or even usually generational. Abramson, for instance, sided with BuzzFeed News about the Steele dossier, just as she approves of the use of the word “lie” to refer to Trump’s lies, which, by the Post’s reckoning, came at the rate of more than a dozen a day in 2018.
Excellent Read: “Does Journalism Have A Future?”Post + Comments (30)
by TaMara| 45 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
I’m assuming someone will hop in later with a super bowl thread. Until then, here’s a pre-game thread. I’m recording the kitten bowl because Scout is fascinated with the commercials. Meanwhile, cooking and cleaning is how my day is going. Just made a big batch of puppy training treats.
Sundays are generally politics free for me.
Open thread
by Betty Cracker| 171 Comments
This post is in: Foreign Affairs, Immigration, Open Threads, Politics, Republican Stupidity, "Lock Her Up!!", Assholes
Well, first things first. Via NBC News:
The Trump administration said in a court filing that reuniting thousands of migrant children separated from their parents or guardians at the U.S.-Mexico border may not be “within the realm of the possible.”
The filing late Friday from Jallyn Sualog, deputy director of the department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, was an ordered response in an ACLU lawsuit challenging the government’s separation of at least 2,737 children of migrants detained at the border since summer 2017.
Sualog said her office doesn’t have the resources to track down the children, whose numbers could be thousands more than the official estimate.
“Even if performing the analysis Plaintiffs seek were within the realm of the possible, it would substantially imperil ORR’s ability to perform its core functions without significant increases in appropriations from Congress, and a rapid, dramatic expansion of the ORR data team,” she said.
Perhaps the Democrats could appropriate $5.7B to expand the data team and fund the analysis. Then, every time Trump or his minions bleat about WALL money, they could reply, “Oops, sorry — the very sum you requested had to be diverted to fund family reunification activities because your administration’s inhumane family separation policy was enacted by incompetents who took less care tracking human beings than an Ace Hardware store uses to track $.01 nails.
Then, file articles of impeachment on Nielsen and hold hearings to dig into the details of this horror, including the depraved indifference, the incompetence and the profiteering. I’m not a Constitutional scholar, but I’m pretty sure lying to Congress in sworn testimony (perjury) is an impeachable offense and that cabinet members are subject to removal via that mechanism.
Although nothing can atone for the trauma wrought in our name by the racist policies of these heartless liars, impeaching Nielsen would focus attention on the thousands of families who’ve been destroyed. It would force Republicans to go on record in support of the whole putrid Trump administration approach to immigration at the southern border — the cruel, ineffective policies, the rank carelessness, the repeated lies, etc. It would also serve as dress rehearsal for impeaching Nielsen’s boss.
This post is in: How about that weather?, Open Threads, Religion, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome
Punxsutawney Phil has made a career of delivering empty promises.
It’s time to give young, progressive groundhogs a chance.#GroundhogDay pic.twitter.com/ho8n2X84W1
— The Hoarse Whisperer (@HoarseWisperer) February 2, 2019
Me, I prefer to trust the old proverb:
If Candlemas is bright and clear, there’ll be two winters in the year;
If Candlemas has snow and rain, old winter shall not come again.
It was *delightfully* bright & sunny here north of Boston yesterday… but of course we all knew we’d pay for it later.
[Candlemas is the ‘cross-quarter day’ halfway between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox. In the Christian tradition, February 2 is the Feast of the Presentation, and parishioners would bring their household’s candles to be blessed to ensure good fortune. But the cross-quarter day ceremonies all involve fire — candles in February, bonfires for May Day, hearth fires (for bread-baking) on August 1st, and lanterns for Halloween.]The groundhog’s got a lousy track record anyway, according to actual meteorologists:
… In the past decade, Phil has predicted a longer winter seven times and an early spring three times. He was only right about 40% of the time, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which says the groundhog shows “no predictive skill.”…
So, what do the experts say the next month or so will actually feel like?
Well, the past week spread record cold across the United States. More than 200 million Americans experienced temperatures below freezing. The polar vortex killed at least 23 people and left others with lasting frostbite injuries.
Next comes the thermal whiplash as the bone-chilling cold is expected to melt away through early next week.
As for the rest of winter, temperatures over the next six weeks look about average — if not below average in most of the country, Jones said, nodding in the direction of a bit more winter.
thinking about one groundhog who isn't here to celebrate with us ???????????? pic.twitter.com/1OQbmWKJ3O
— Josh Billinson (@jbillinson) February 2, 2019
Sunday Morning Open Thread: The Groundhog Is A LiePost + Comments (188)
This post is in: Dolt 45, Open Threads, Republican Stupidity, Assholes, Our Failed Media Experiment
The Paper of Record, chasing the important stories…
Trump's perma-tan is the result of “good genes,” according to a senior administration official who would speak only on the condition of anonymity. https://t.co/Tu6LCCBbjo
— Catherine Rampell (@crampell) February 2, 2019
… Mr. Trump’s former boarding school classmates have described him as a fan of ultraviolet rays, someone who would pop a tanning bulb into a light socket to go “to the beach.” Even James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director turned presidential foe, speculated on Mr. Trump’s glow. The president’s “face appeared slightly orange,” Mr. Comey wrote in his memoir, “with bright white half-moons under his eyes where I assumed he placed small tanning goggles.”
But according to three people who have spent time in the White House residence, no such bed or spray-tan booth exists in a hidden nook of the residence, a cranny of the East Wing or a closet on Air Force One. Two senior White House officials insisted that no such apparatus exists…
Aside from a tanning bed, another plausible theory is that Mr. Trump uses self-tanning creams or lotions. Dr. Tina Alster, a top Washington dermatologist who said she had treated officials in every White House, including this one, posited that the president, whom she does not treat, was using tanning creams or sprays to achieve his look…
Certainly Mr. Trump, who has long taken antibiotics to treat rosacea, a condition that can make the skin appear rosy and ruddy, is attentive to how he looks on television. He has complained that his skin and hair appear too yellow or orange on the screen, according to one person familiar with his views.
As a result, events in the White House are now more dimly lit than in previous administrations. The president has also become a fan of natural light, like the setting of the White House Rose Garden, where Mr. Trump chose to announce the end of the government shutdown in 40-degree weather…
Assuming the Big Macs or Mueller’s minions don’t carry him off before then, we’ve got some more prime body-shaming opportunities to look forward to next week…
Curious if the fittest president in history will once again clock in at a svelte 239 when we all know he's pushing three bills. https://t.co/0UWMXGAnfY
— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) February 2, 2019
“Pushing” 300 pounds? From which direction?
This post is in: Open Threads, Post-racial America, Republican Venality, All Too Normal, Fucked-up-edness
Every time you see this picture, remember: Kentucky was NEVER part of the Confederacy. Ever. https://t.co/DYb0bfEdBj
— Zeddy (@Zeddary) February 2, 2019
Ah, Kentucky. The Switzerland of the South. They send mercenaries in funny outfits to guard Franklin Graham.
— Amenophis Fikee (@Angrifon) February 2, 2019
you know who was from Kentucky? Abraham f***ing Lincoln.
— Zeddy (@Zeddary) February 2, 2019
Republicans used to be known for their strides in civil rights and Kevin Spacey used to be known for acting.
— Schooley (@Rschooley) February 2, 2019
Northam is going to come to his next press conference in blackface and a MAGA hat and announce he's switching parties and not resigning. Masterstroke.
— Mig Greengard (@chessninja) February 3, 2019
Meanwhile https://t.co/uchYpZb6wL
— Zeddy (@Zeddary) February 2, 2019
ALL the racist politicians must resign -starting at the top pic.twitter.com/Xi4x2hDPqR
— Mexican Judge (@laloalcaraz) February 2, 2019
Open Thread: While We’re Rejecting Racist Politicians…Post + Comments (38)