Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Republican speaker of the house Mike Johnson is the bland and smiling face of evil.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

We know you aren’t a Democrat but since you seem confused let me help you.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

Baby steps, because the Republican Party is full of angry babies.

Speaker Mike Johnson is a vile traitor to the House and the Constitution.

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

“In the future, this lab will be a museum. don’t touch it.”

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

Relentless negativity is not a sign that you are more realistic.

Spilling the end game before they can coat it in frankl luntz-approved dogwhistles.

Prediction: the gop will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

Russia bombs Ukraine’s maternity hospitals; Republicans in the House can’t sort out supporting Ukraine.

When you’re in more danger from the IDF than from Russian shelling, that’s really bad.

People are complicated. Love is not.

Maybe you would prefer that we take Joelle’s side in ALL CAPS?

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

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

Can we lighten up on the doomsday scenarios?

You are here: Home / Civil Rights / LGBTQ Rights / LGBTQ Rights Are Human Rights / Saturday Morning Open Thread: For the Win

Saturday Morning Open Thread: For the Win

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Yeah, I don’t pretend to understand soccer, but I’m enjoying this. Per the Washington Post:

… Rapinoe’s contributions punctuated a glorious night for women’s soccer, which is trying to make gains in a male-dominated sport. The United States and France were the top two favorites in the tournament, but the draw had placed them in the same bracket for a likely meeting in the quarterfinals.

“I hope this will help this women’s game go further and move into that next level,” said French Coach Corinne Diacre, whose third-ranked team has lost in the quarterfinals in each of the past five major world tournaments…

As kickoff neared, streets leading to the venue filled with fans singing and marching with flags and traditional scarves. Among the chants: “Equal pay!” — a reference to the U.S. players’ efforts for gender equality within the U.S. Soccer Federation…


… “Go gays!” she said after the 2-1 quarter-final victory over France in Paris and when asked to comment on whether it being Pride month made her contribution more personally significant. “You can’t win a championship without gays on your team – it’s never been done before, ever. That’s science, right there!

“I’m motivated by people who like me, who are fighting for the same things. I take more energy from that than from trying to prove anyone wrong. That’s draining on yourself. But for me, to be gay and fabulous, during Pride month at the World Cup, is nice.”

Her latest comments follow the 33-year-old’s row with Donald Trump, after footage shot earlier this year emerged showing her saying: “I’m not going to the fucking White House,” when she was asked whether she would visit if her her team won the World Cup.

She urged her USA teammates to “think hard” about associating themselves with Trump before the win over France, whilst apologising for using an obscenity, but repeating she would not visit the White House if the team won…

Reader Interactions

88Comments

  1. 1.

    OzarkHillbilly

    One huge difference between Donald Trump and Megan Rapinoe is she doesn’t have to pay 130k to score.

    That’s gonna leave a mark.

  4. 4.

    Anne Laurie

    @OzarkHillbilly: Yup, only two kindsa people in Donny Dollhand’s world — HIS people and those people. Old man can’t waste precious brain cells sorting out distinctions among “those”…

  5. 5.

    satby

    Don’t normally watch any kind of sports ball, but may have to make an exception for her and her team.

    Good morning everyone ?. Going to be hot, humid, and miserable at the farmer’s market today. Already looking forward to being done.

  6. 6.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @satby: Can you plug in a fan? If not they make battery operated fans. A breeze always helps me reduce ‘abject misery’ to ‘survivable’.

  7. 7.

    OzarkHillbilly

    This’ll make your asshole pucker.

    Lukas Irmler balances on an 800-metre-long highline, 200 metres above Segnesboden, at the Sardona Unesco world heritage site

  10. 10.

    Kathleen

    Good Morning and Happy Blechtivus! Proud to say Megan Rapinoe graduated from my alma mater, University of Portland (though I preceded her by mumble mumble years). She played on UP’s NCAA championship women’s soccer team in 2005. Ironically, UP, a very small Catholic university (Holy Cross fathers), has never been known as hotbed of radicalism so I’m loving her taking the knee and blasting Trump.

  11. 11.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @raven: Fuck that shit! In my yoot I had no fear of heights, gloried in it even (not that I was ever capable of that). Loved working on the tall stuff. Dropping into vast gaping pits like Golandrinas was the stuff of dreams. Not any more. I addition to fragility old age gives one perspective.

  12. 12.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Baud: My sense of balance began to degrade around about 40. Before that, walking the walls was nothing to think about. Afterwards… Sometimes I wonder if my degraded hearing had anything to do with it.

  15. 15.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Raven: I can still manage ladders. We’re getting a new roof this year on 9/12 and 12/12 pitches. I will gladly pay somebody else to do that for me.

    @JPL: Why??? ;-)

  16. 16.

    biff murphy

    I watched yesterday as she scored 2, and 2 in the game before that bringing her world cup goals to 5. Tuesday at 3pm, Britain. Go get em girls!!!

  18. 18.

    Raven

    @OzarkHillbilly: my office windows looked out toward the addition while is was being built. Watching the framers work up there was awesome. Of course, a couple months later, when one of them killed another and buried him in a shallow grave. . .

  21. 21.

    PAM Dirac

    @Baud:

    How do they enforce that? Are Scots not allowed on the English team?

    In international soccer England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland all have separate teams. Scotland made it to this final, but were knocked out when they gave up 3 goals in the last 20 minutes of their last group game.

  22. 22.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Raven:

    Of course, a couple months later, when one of them killed another and buried him in a shallow grave. . .

    ??? I missed that story.

    @Baud: Scotland and Wales have their own teams. Not sure what they do with the Northern Irish.

  25. 25.

    ?BillinGlendaleCA

    Went to the Point Vicente lighthouse to see if it’s a good site to shoot the Milky Way. The good news is that I could see the galactic core, bad news is that the Sheriff will stop by and tell you to leave.☹

  26. 26.

    Baud

    @PAM Dirac:

    Ouch. Thanks for the info. Do people in UK have separate citizenships? How do they check to make sure a Scot doesn’t play on the English team?

  28. 28.

    Amir Khalid

    @Baud:
    I’m not sure, but the idea of England, Scotland, and Wales as separate nations is enforced in a lot of sports, among other things. I think it has to do with birthplace and/or parentage, but I don’t know the details. You’d need to ask a British jackal how it works.

  35. 35.

    TS (the original)

    @Baud:

    How do they check to make sure a Scot doesn’t play on the English team

    No true Scotsman would ever want to play on the England team, so it’s not an issue – but if you are still concerned – Scotsmen only have to speak and you know they are not English.

  37. 37.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @TS (the original):

    Scotsmen only have to speak and you know they are not English.

    You didn’t make the mistake so many do of saying “Scotsmen only have to speak English…” because whatever it is they speak, it bears little resemblance to English.

  39. 39.

    SRW1

    @Baud:

    Gathered from following futis:
    There are four different football federations in Britain (actually the ones that historically founded the international footis federation). I suspect what usually happens in Britain is that you get registered with one of them once you start playing in competitive leagues as a kid and you stay with that federation. Nonetheless, you can declare for another one of the four British federations with pretty flimsy justifications as long as you have not played a competitive ‘international’ fixture at the adult level. Then you’re stuck.

  40. 40.

    Immanentize

    @debbie:
    He must be rattled. He went way out on a limb twisting judges’ arms then lost hugely the second time.

    Trump probably asked him why he doesn’t just get rid of the new Mayor….

    ETA Sorry, I answered talking about Erdogan…. For Putin it is probably a win. A more divided Turkey is less of a threat to Putin’s work in Syria.

    And PS — re: Trump’s odd conversation about “fake news?”. I’ve read it over a few times and I think Trump believes Putin just kills (gets rid of) journalists that do not toe the party line. That’s what Trump might have meant when, after saying “just get rid of them” he says that Russia doesn’t have the problem he does.

  51. 51.

    JPL

    @debbie: I guess that happened.

    Today he was asked whether or not he agreed with Biden or Harris on busing, and he said he tell them in four weeks. lol
    Asked again about busing, Trump says: “It has been something that they’ve done for a long period of time. There aren’t that many ways of getting people to schools.”
    https://twitter.com/maggienyt

  54. 54.

    Kay

    Good insider’s account of how Sarah Huckabee is and was a horrible, sleazy actor in her own right, and not just as a mouthpiece for the Trump Administration:

    I Got Smeared by Sarah Huckabee Sanders
    Conservative women, don’t kid yourselves. Her record has been shameful.
    By AMANDA CARPENTER June 28, 2019
    Amanda Carpenter is a CNN contributor and former communications director for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) .
    If Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ departure as White House press secretary meant she would be leaving public life, I’d be toasting her goodbye this week. Unfortunately, since it probably represents only a brief pause in her now well-established history of sliming people, a firm marker should be laid down about her right now.
    Sanders reportedly is considering following in her father’s footsteps and running for governor in her home state of Arkansas, where Mike Huckabee served from 1996-2007. With high built-in name ID and the benefit of riding President Donald Trump’s coattails in a ruby red state, she is already talked about as the favorite in the race, which isn’t until 2022. This says far more about the sorry state of our political system than it does about any merits she has as a potential candidate.

    After failing to perform her basic job as a press secretary and refusing to hold a briefing for a record 94 days as of the day she announced her resignation earlier this month, Sanders was asked recently whether she had any regrets about stonewalling the press. She said it was more important that the American people hear from the president directly, rather than from her. “No one elected me to anything,” she told reporters.
    That’s a statement that will, hopefully, remain true—because there is no reason to believe Sanders would change her ways if elected governor. Arkansas, you’ve been warned.

    Mike Huckabee is a nasty piece of work – that anyone on the planet buys his folksy act amazes me- it surprises me not at all that the 2nd generation produced Sarah.

  55. 55.

    Immanentize

    @debbie:

    According to Bloomberg News reporter Jennifer Jacobs….:

    “Get rid of them. Fake news is a great term, isn’t it?” Trump said. “You don’t have this problem in Russia, but we do.”

    “We also have,” Putin answered, in English. “It’s the same.”

    They then “shared a chuckle,” she reported.

    That this happened on the first anniversary of the massacre of five employees of the Capital Gazette in Annapolis probably never occurred to him — nor would his staff remind him of something as apparently inconsequential to the administration as that horror.

  56. 56.

    PST

    @Amir Khalid:

    you have different names — you can say “England,” you can say “UK,” you can say “United Kingdom” so many different — you know you have, you have so many different names — Great Britain. I always say: “Which one do you prefer? Great Britain? You understand what I’m saying?’

  61. 61.

    Kay

    Mike Huckabee is exactly the sort of mean-spirited, bullying “religious” man I went out of my way to avoid as a child, and there were quite a few to avoid so it took some effort. I was afraid of them, and I think that was gut instinct and 100% accurate. They’re mean. I knew it then and everything I have seen since convinces me that I had it right at 6 years old.

  62. 62.

    Eric U.

    @rikyrah: oh, great, Corman is my state senator. He also recently drove through legislation that wouldn’t let municipalities ban plastic bags, because one of the townships in his district was about to ban them.

  65. 65.

    Betty Cracker

    Jeebus, y’all:

    So he thinks the busing argument was about…transportation.

  69. 69.

    Amir Khalid

    @PST:
    Okay. An Englishman once explained this to me:
    Great Britain consists of the nations England, Scotland, and Wales. (Little Britain consists of comedy sketches; it is a TV show.) The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is not exactly united, given its troubled history, but those are its parts.

  70. 70.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @debbie:
    @Immanentize:
    @JPL:
    The basic TIME cover on Trumpism outlasting Trump was real. I saw it at the drugstore a week or so ago.

    The video in Debbie’s link is fake — TIME had nothing to do with putting that together.

  74. 74.

    burnspbesq

    Oddly, UEFA is using the World Cup as its qualifying tournament for next year’s olympics, so England reaching the semis means that Team GB (which is likely to be overwhelmingly made up of England players) is in.

  75. 75.

    catpal

    @rikyrah: Thank you for this – it made my day. and Thank you State Senator Katie Muth, PA. Horrible Republican men constantly screaming over women. Go Senator Katie!!!
    Need to support more and better women Democratic candidates like Katie Muth – who started with support from Emerge and Represent PA and can donate here

  76. 76.

    Lee

    AOC via Twitter invited Megan and the team to the House if they win. I believe Megan replied to the tweet.

    I really hope that happens.

  77. 77.

    burnspbesq

    @David Koch:

    In addition to that smile, Sue Bird has quite a trophy case: four world championships, three Olympic gold medals, and three WNBA championships.

  80. 80.

    PST

    @Amir Khalid: I once saw one of those “What’s wrong with our youth” stories that was hung up on the low percentage of high school students who could not answer the question, “what kingdom did the United States win its independence from?” I realized I couldn’t answer the question either. I knew it was an island kingdom in the North Atlantic with its capital in London, but what exactly was it called in 1783? My embarrassment forced me to get the timeline straight: England until 1707 (just about the time of The Favourite), Great Britain through the end of 1800, and the United Kingdom of [it changes from time to time] since then.

  81. 81.

    J R in WV

    @rikyrah:

    I saw that last night. He is a despicable piece of ass-wipe, and the sargent at arms should have put him out of the chambers while the body condemned him for breaking the rules. A bully coward is what I’m saying…

    He needs a harsh lesson in manners that his daddy should have taught him when he was little.

  83. 83.

    Fred Fnord

    @Baud: ???

    How do people from Massachusetts make sure that people from Vermont don’t play on the Red Sox?

  84. 84.

    Don K

    @OzarkHillbilly:
    I never had a sense of balance. I was paranoid about crossing a stream in the mountains on a fallen tree trunk, and would scoot across on my butt (or would find a less treacherous crossing nearby where I could splash across in my sneakers). And this was in my 20s and 30s.

  86. 86.

    Ruckus

    @J R in WV:

    He needs a harsh lesson in manners that his daddy should have taught him when he was little.

    Sounds like he wasn’t going to get that lesson from the old man and in fact got the exact opposite one.

  87. 87.

    Kent

    Slate did an explanation of why England has its own team rather than there being a UK team like in the Olympics: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2010/06/why-does-england-get-its-own-team-in-the-world-cup.html

    Basically Soccer was invented in England and for the first several decades the top international competitions were between England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. By the time the sport had spread across the continent and the world cup came along 30 years later in 1904 the individual teams of England, Scotland, and Wales were thought too powerful to combine into one united UK team that would be able to dominate the rest of Europe. So they were left separate and it’s been that way ever since.

    As for the naming. As I understand it:

    Great Britain is the name of the Island which contains England to the south, Wales to the west, and Scotland to the North. So it is a geographic term like “North America”

    The United Kingdom is the name of the country or nation-state that contains Great Britian and Northern Ireland. The official name is The United Kingdom of Great Britian and Northern Ireland.

    England is by far the largest nation within the UK and therefore dominates the politics, language, economics, and culture. England, Wales, and Scotland can be considered separate countries or separate nations but they are not independent states.

    A lot of Americans don’t really understand these distinctions and just think the whole place is England and that they are all British.

  88. 88.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Kent: It’ll be a lot less confusing when the UK disintegrates in a few years. Of course the US will probably disintegrate around the same time so we may be too busy to care.

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