Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

Infrastructure week. at last.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

Consistently wrong since 2002

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

Second rate reporter says what?

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

“Can i answer the question? No you can not!”

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

Good lord, these people are nuts.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

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

A lot of Dems talk about what the media tells them to talk about. Not helpful.

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

I did not have this on my fuck 2022 bingo card.

You are here: Home / Climate Change / How about that weather? / Wednesday Morning Open Thread: Tis the Season

Wednesday Morning Open Thread: Tis the Season

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On the one hand, yeah, I’m sorry to be so repetitive. On the other hand… Stay safe, y’all…

Small good thing: Chella Phillips and her 97 ‘Voiceless Dog’ refugees came through battered but (relatively) safe, per the Washington Post:

… Dorian lingered in the Bahamas for much of the weekend. Phillips told news outlet WFTS on Monday that she lost power and water came into her home at one point, but that all inhabitants — human and canine — were doing okay.

She posted another update to Facebook a few hours later, noting she and her brother had passed “a stressful night” trying to combat serious flooding. All her TVs were “fried” from the lightning, Phillips wrote, which meant “no more cartoons for the sick dogs.”

Her brother slept just an hour, and Phillips went without sleep, she wrote. She stayed awake all night to dry the house and care for the “terrified” animals.

Phillips’s online fundraiser for her refuge, which she launched in August and was unrelated to Hurricane Dorian, had raised roughly $63,000 as of Tuesday morning, far surpassing her original goal of $20,000…

And it’s not over, by a long shot…

Reader Interactions

127Comments

  1. 1.

    Cermet

    A Cat 5 Hurricane sat on them for over two days – the level of destruction from such a storm for a essentially sea level island is simply beyond anything anyone has seen in close to hundred years. These people will need our help. Even evacuation to the US should be allowed until rebuilding can be done in a serious manner. Being an island this will really make it both difficult and expensive but unlike poor Puerto Rico, is at least far closer to the US.

  7. 7.

    p.a.

    Is Bahamas still a Commonwealth nation? (Is there still a Commonwealth?) Given Brit ‘government’ current buffoonery, how much aid can be expected from that direction?

  10. 10.

    WereBear

    The scale of the destruction is horrifying. I’ve never seen anything like it.

    One of the ways I’m keeping my sanity, is reminding myself this is the “new normal” and my down feelings are thus perfectly logical.

    We are in touch with the local Democratic committee and we donate as we can: which isn’t much lately. Mr WereBear is just now able to get out of bed reliably because that virus they didn’t name took him down so hard last winter.

    But we did get our Moscow Mitch buttons from Kentucky to help out that effort :)

  11. 11.

    Baud

    Well, it’s good timing for today’s climate change marathon town hall on CNN. Everyone is dropping climate change plans.

  12. 12.

    JPL

    @WereBear: CNN had terrific coverage yesterday with reporters in the Grand Bahamas. One person has been covering hurricanes for decades including Katrina, and he said he had never seen anything like it. The comment that struck me was when the storm moves out, things start getting better , but in Freeport they are just getting worse.
    Jose Andres and his team arrived in Great Abaco yesterday and is starting to distribute some food.

  16. 16.

    satby

    @JPL: Chef Andres is fantastic, because he’s often on the ground before other NGOs can even respond.
    I just filled out the form to volunteer with his organization, they do take non-chefs. And I have previous disaster response experience, so we’ll see.
    Just like after the earthquake in Haiti, the need for support will be there for years.

  22. 22.

    tybee

    i’m stuck in statesboro waiting on dorian to get a move on and get past savannah so i can drag my tired carcass back to the island.

  23. 23.

    My Side of Town

    Lots of goods piling up in Bars and Pool Halls in Lakeland, but nobody knows yet how to get it to the Bahamas. There is a Facebook campaign to get the party boats to line up and respond by getting their ships there to provide temporary relief, especially since they make big money ferrying tourists to the islands. Seems a lot of folks are sharing this idea. I think it’s a great idea. Room. board, kitchens, showers. etc.

  25. 25.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @WereBear:

    But we did get our Moscow Mitch buttons from Kentucky to help out that effort :)

    Doing your part.

    During a radio interview Tuesday on “The Hugh Hewitt Show,” McConnell said it was “unbelievable” for a “Cold Warrior like me” to be mocked as a Kremlin ally for repeatedly blocking both Democratic and bipartisan bills aimed at curbing Russian election interference.

    “It’s an effort to smear me,” the Kentucky Republican told Hewitt. “You know, I can laugh about things like the Grim Reaper, but calling me Moscow Mitch is over the top.”

    McConnell also repeated his previous complaint that the moniker was “modern day McCarthyism.”

    Po po po MMM…. he’s got his wittew feewings huwrt.

  26. 26.

    My Side of Town

    It never ceases to amaze me at the generosity and goodness of the American people. If only our government would take heed.

  27. 27.

    debbie

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    I know, right? NPR just reported there are six recall efforts in Colorado, all by the GOP. They’re ticked off the policies they love are being changed. Sore losing pussies, all of them.

  28. 28.

    NotMax

    Early TCM notice.

    Friday, beginning at 7 a.m. Eastern is a compilation of cartoons by Winsor McKay, a pioneer of both movie animation and of newspaper cartooning. At 114 minutes, it’s a lot to take in one dose of material meant to be seen in smaller bites, so those with any interest in the art of animation might want to fire up the DVR so as to watch it at leisure over several days instead.

  31. 31.

    My Side of Town

    Almost every bar in Lakeland will give you free beer if you bring a few non perishable items in. But since the Bahamas are not a FEMA thing, I guess we’ll have to go around them. After all, if this were Mar-A-Lootgo, we would be throwing paper towels all over the place.

  32. 32.

    satby

    @?BillinGlendaleCA: I miss seeing the stars well now that I’m back in a small city with the light pollution.
    I found out Monday that seeing the Milky Way is on my good friend’s bucket list. Now I know that one of your pictures of it will make a perfect gift. Because I’m not parting with mine ?

  34. 34.

    My Side of Town

    Last night at pool league we were all talking about this, the latino teams, the black teams and the white teams, all together about what we could do to help, and since we all missed Dorian, we were in a grateful mood. Or Dorian missed us. We were sweating that turn north, I can tell you.

  37. 37.

    debbie

    Here’s an early morning laugh.

    On Monday, Ivanka Trump touched down in Bogotá, Colombia—as did her new lob, which, as Elle quickly pointed out, sure ups her resemblance to another privileged, dynastic daughter: Succession’s Shiv Roy.

    Naturally, Trump also pulled the back-to-school style move of carrying her new look over to her wardrobe, too. While the white dress she wore upon her arrival was ordinary enough, when it came time for Trump to head to the General Santander Police Academy the next morning, the first daughter stepped things up a notch by stepping into an army green statement dress designed by Johanna Ortiz.

    Ortiz herself is from Colombia. (She was born and is still based in what’s informally known as the world’s salsa-dancing capital, Cali.) But much more relevant is the fact that Ortiz is also known for gravity-defying designs like her mega-popular Tulum top, which rely heavily on ruffles, balloon sleeves, and off-the-shoulder shapes. Even with beaded epaulettes, a wrap-around tie, and peplum waist, then, Trump’s choice of design kept the focus on her biceps and shoulders—especially when the wind got its hands on them, disrupting its intended, relatively flat silhouette.

  39. 39.

    WereBear

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    “It’s an effort to smear me,” the Kentucky Republican told Hewitt. “You know, I can laugh about things like the Grim Reaper, but calling me Moscow Mitch is over the top.”

    Because nothing hurts like the truth.

  43. 43.

    Immanentize

    @satby:
    I read yesterday that the Senate has not marked up even one appropriation bill in any committee. For the fiscal year that starts October 1. The Senate just does no work at all except to rubber stamp thoroughly unfit judges. Why do we even have a Senate?

  48. 48.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Immanentize:

    Why do we even have a Senate?

    To stop the president.
    .
    .
    .
    .
    .
    .
    BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA….. gasp…… wheeze……

  49. 49.

    Kay

    The Hill
    @thehill
    · 16h
    James Mattis: “In the old days, when the election was over we buried the hatchet and we got down to governing. It’s like today all we stay in is locked in this election cycle, and we’re constantly finding reasons not to cooperate, and no democracy can survive that style.”

    This bland blaming of “everyone” means no one is ever held specifically accountable:

    Mattis not only served on Theranos’s board during some of the years after he’d retired from military service, while it was perpetrating the scheme, but he earlier served as a key advocate of putting the company’s technology (technology that was, to be clear, fake) to use inside the military while he was still serving as a general. Holmes settled the SEC case, paying a $500,000 fee and accepting various other penalties, while Balwani is fighting it out in court. (Holmes and Balwani are both battling criminal fraud charges.)
    Nobody on the board has been directly charged with anything. But accepting six-figure checks to serve as a frontman for a con operation is the kind of thing that would normally count as a liability in American politics.

    There were some heroes though! Just not Mattis. Some of the career people in the military and HHS questioned the Theranos scam Mattis was selling because they knew the science was fake, thereby (eventually) halting its use and literally saving lives. They should get a spot on cable and a book deal.

  50. 50.

    NotMax

    @debbie

    “We in America consider it a great honor that you chose to name your capital city after a town in New Jersey, even though you pronounce it funny.”

  52. 52.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    Speaking of disasters, this article helped me some in seeing what Brexit is all about. It’s anti Brexit and I can’t judge the details, but at least it was clear.

    First, because the key arguments for Britain leaving the EU are false —

    The EU doesn’t threaten British sovereignty, nor is it run by “unelected bureaucrats”.
    The UK doesn’t need to leave the EU in order to control its own borders or make its own laws.
    The UK won’t be economically better off outside the EU — far from it.

    Second, because it’s become much clearer what Brexit was really about all along —

    Many who voted “Leave” in the 2016 referendum did so as a protest against the years of relentless austerity deliberately inflicted on the less well-off.[1] Many also simply bought into misinformation perpetrated by the Leave campaigns.[2][3] [4]

    Behind the scenes, Brexit was and still is primarily driven by wealthy businessmen — tax-dodging tycoons, foreign oligarchs and unscrupulous investors.[5] They are collaborating with certain politicians in the Conservative Party (currently also in the Cabinet) to bring about a no-deal Brexit for their own advantage, while cynically claiming it is “best for Britain”.[6][7]

    For some, there is also an ideological drive “to finish what Margaret Thatcher started” — dismantling the welfare state and ensuring that the UK is run for private profit, only this time without any EU tax regulations or human rights laws to contend with.[8][9]
    Now for the details…

  59. 59.

    Baud

    @Kay:

    This bland blaming of “everyone” means no one is ever held specifically accountable:

    Not true. Dems will be held accountable for Republican behavior.

  62. 62.

    Kay

    @Gin & Tonic:

    One of the Theranos defendants is going to trial. If it isn’t settled, maybe Mattis will finally have to explain his role in it. Emails he wrote are central to the case.

    They never deployed the fake technology in the military, because there were two brave military physicians who stopped Mattis and also an HHS inspector in San Francisco who made a lot of noise, but they did “deploy” it in Arizona – tested it on ordinary people who had no idea it was a scam. They rolled it out in Arizona because of that state’s incredibly lax regulations.

    How can he be selling his book and not get asked about this? He didn’t resign from the board until 2017.

  64. 64.

    Baud

    @Kay:

    Emails he wroteare central to the case.
    ….
    How can he be selling his book and not get asked about this?

    No one really cares about emails, Kay. I mean, what a snooze fest it would be to obsess over emails.

  65. 65.

    germy

    Weirdest video of the day:

    Paul Manafort and his wife, Kathleen, appeared on the 90s Nickelodeon show 'What Would You Do?'

    During a segment for "heaviest purse," Marc Summers has Manafort's wallet and pulls out 3 AmEx cards, 9 VISA cards, and another credit card. (via Reddit) pic.twitter.com/J0M41YxbBA

    — Scott Gustin (@ScottGustin) September 3, 2019

  66. 66.

    schrodingers_cat

    @Kay: I never understood the hype surrounding him, give me someone who stands up to T like Sally Yates. Not someone who stands by for photo-ops while T signs an EO banning all Muslims even the ones with valid visas from entering the United States. And the whole Theranos episode shows that he brought into this hype himself. One who knows not and knows not that he knows not is a fool, as my sixth grade English teacher used to say.

  69. 69.

    Kay

    @Baud:

    Wouldn’t you know that as a military commander? I mean this is like “leadership 101”. Vaguely blaming “everyone” means no one is held accountable. Individuals did things! Who are they and what did they do?

    Mattis, for example, took pay from Theranos and then worked very hard to sell their bullshit and have it tested on soldiers “in theatre” according to the emails Mattis wrote. That’s what he did. Luckily, there are a set of laws that were in place that bar scammers and crooks from doing product testing on members of the military, and those are strong laws. They’re there because we’ve done that before- we’ve tested product on those people with disastrous results.

    I hope the one Theranos crook insists on a trial and doesn’t plead. Force them to go to trial. They have to call Mattis as a witness. Public trials. Remember those?

  70. 70.

    germy

    Will this be featured on all the evening network news broadcasts? I remember CBS, NBC and ABC running with breathless stories over multiple nights on Omar’s comments. For some reason, I think this Labor Dept. guy will fall down the memory hole…

    SCOOP: Trump Labor Department's new sr adviser Leif Olson posted on Facebook that Jewish media "protect their own." In response to my request for comment on Olson's anti-Semitic post, @USDOL says they've accepted his resignation. https://t.co/68kDvaFn0h— Ben Penn (@benjaminpenn) September 3, 2019

  84. 84.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @?BillinGlendaleCA:

    Just took a peek outside and see an old friend in the sky, Orion.

    When I was a little girl, my father would make me giggle by teaching me to identify “O’Brien and his little dog Syracuse.”

    :-)

  85. 85.

    Baud

    I didn’t realize it was so recent.

    For nearly a century, tennis balls were white or black. It wasn’t until 1972 that tennis balls took on their bright neon hue. At the time, Attenborough was working as a studio controller for the BBC. In the late 1960s he had led the charge for the BBC to broadcast Wimbledon, perhaps the most iconic of tennis tournaments, in color for the first time ever.

    Broadcasting tennis in color brought the matches to life, but it made tracking the ball on screen difficult — especially when it fell near the white courtlines. So the International Tennis Federation (ITF) undertook a study that found that yellow tennis balls were easier for home viewers to see on their screens.

  87. 87.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @germy:

    On Tuesday, a bizarre thing happened in Washington: The Trump administration accepted the resignation of an executive branch official after a charge of bigotry that was both unfair and misleading.

    Leif Olson, a senior adviser at the Department of Labor, resigned after Bloomberg Law highlighted what it described in a headline as “Anti-Semitic Facebook Posts.”

    But if you read the posts — which Olson himself has posted screenshots of in a Facebook album titled, “Welcome Bloomberg Readers”; he says he deleted the original post to prevent harassment of commenters — it’s clear that Olson is mocking, not defending anti-Semitism.

    The posts date from August 2016, when Paul Nehlen was challenging then-Speaker Paul Ryan in the Republican primary for Ryan’s House seat. In subsequent years, Nehlen has revealed himself to be a hardcore anti-Semite, but at the time he was championed by pro-Trump conservative sites and writers like Breitbart and Ann Coulter. He wasn’t a vocal anti-Semite yet, but he was a vocal anti-Muslim bigot.

    Olson’s post sought to parody Nehlen and his allies, including by attributing anti-Semitic tropes to them:

    ………………………………….

    Written in the voice of a Breitbartist conservative who hates Paul Ryan, the post assails Ryan for his “emasculating 70-point victory” after Ryan defeated Nehlen by that overwhelming margin. The comments are what got Olson in (undeserved) trouble: “Neo-cons are all Upper East Side Zionists who don’t golf on Saturday if you know what I mean,” and, after a friend joked about Ryan being Jewish, Olson added, “It must be true because I’ve never seen the Lamestream Media report it, and you know they protect their own.”

    You do not need a PhD in linguistics to correctly identify this as obvious sarcasm — another commenter on the thread praised the post’s “epic sarcasm.” Conservatives, especially ones of a neoconservative bent on foreign policy, have made sarcastic jokes like this about what they perceive as (and what sometimes, as in the case of Nehlen, is) anti-Semitic criticism of neoconservatism, a movement primarily founded by Jewish intellectuals.

    But if that post was not clear enough on its own, Olson added an additional post making his point extremely, extremely clear:

    So the story isn’t that he got fired for being an anti Semite, but for making fun of anti Semites.

    No doubt he is plenty loathsome, just not anti Semitic too.

  91. 91.

    topclimber

    @WereBear: Grim Reaper is the nickname he gave himself. Moscow Mitch came from someone else and caught on way faster. True, he has earned both monikers, but the one he did not invent stings more because he lost the message control war.

  100. 100.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Immanentize: FFS stop bitching – every time I fire up this site I get a Quisli Gabbard ad in the sidebar. If this shit keeps up I may be forced to arrange an ad blocker if I want to keep my last meal down.

  101. 101.

    Kay

    @JPL:

    Trump has gotten worse- he gets worse every week- but I don’t know that it’s due to any of these people not being there.

    Bad hires always get worse. That’s sort of their defining characteristic. If they got better they wouldn’t be bad hires. Two weeks into this I knew he wasn’t going to get better. He can only stay the same or get worse.

  102. 102.

    WereBear

    @Kay: Bad hires always get worse.

    QFFT. Were this situation framed as a toxic boss and a spineless HR department, I think a lot more people could figure out this particular toxic-orange puzzle.

  103. 103.

    Kay

    Felicia Sonmez
    @feliciasonmez
    Trump said he granted a disaster declaration at the request of North Carolina’s Republican senator. It came from the state’s Democratic governor.

    We’re three years into Trump and the low quality hires lying daily to the public. It doesn’t take that long to check out their lies- what would be the harm in verifying what they say before spreading the lie? It seems clear to me that the lying is a campaign strategy and it’s increasing as the election gets closer. If you’re actively misinforming people with your reporting don’t you have some obligation to grapple with that and perhaps change your approach?

    This approach doesn’t work. Can they try something (anything) else?

  104. 104.

    Kay

    @WereBear:

    It’s that horrible sinking feeling- “oh, no. End this as quickly and politely as possible” :)

    You know in 2 weeks. Mediocre can improve. Bad cannot and will not.

  106. 106.

    WereBear

    @Spanky: Because the Senate is where legislation goes to die.

    If we have Congress as the rowdy voice of the people and the Senate where cool heads are supposed to take it to a higher level. Competence in the Executive is acting like a drop of water in a hot pan.

    I keep thinking of that sailing maxim, “Disasters happen because a whole lot of bad things decide to occur at the same time.”

  107. 107.

    Spanky

    @Kay:
    I don’t know why you’re still going on about the media “failure”, Kay. They are doing the job they intended to do.

    A better question might be how to stop or neutralize the misinformation.

  112. 112.

    Uncle Cosmo

    In Trumpworld, ‘Tis the Seizin’ – every day, all day. Continual smash&grab of the US Treasury for the benefit of Cheeto Benito immediately & the Global Oligarchy Plutocrats down the line.

  113. 113.

    Gin & Tonic

    @Raven:

    Now, I don’t. HAVE to do anything so what’s it gonna be???

    You tell me. I’m still in this gig for about a year and a half, I think.

  120. 120.

    catclub

    @Uncle Cosmo: I thought this was something grabbed from DOD for illegal wall building:

    DONCEAP: Disruption of Services

    We have been informed that as of Sunday, 1 September 2019 at 12:01 am (EST), the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has disrupted services for the Department of the Navy Civilian Employee Assistance Program (DONCEAP). While there is still funding available, HHS has directed Federal Occupational Health (FOH), the provider of Employee Assistance Program (EAP) services and Civilian Health Promotion Services (CHPS), to suspend services to all Department of Defense (DoD) components.

    The Office of Civilian Human Resources Head Quarters (OCHR-HQ) Workforce Relations Office is doing everything they can to get the services restored as quickly as possible. In the interim, they have placed notifications on all DONCEAP links that state they are expecting a temporary disruption but are actively working to get the program back on line. Calls to the DONCEAP hotline will still be answered. However, unfortunately, no other services will be provided until contract concerns are resolved.

  121. 121.

    J R in WV

    @bemused:

    Her clothing style is ridiculous, imo.

    And all the work she has had done on her face and forehead makes her look so vacant…

  124. 124.

    TenguPhule

    @Kay:

    Public trials. Remember those?

    Abandoned in favor of public lynching for presumed guilt upon accusation if you’re a Democrat and lengthy appeals followed by a slap on the wrist if you’re a Republican.

Comments are closed.