Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Let’s bury these fuckers at the polls 2 years from now.

Not loving this new fraud based economy.

In after Baud. Damn.

It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

We can show the world that autocracy can be defeated.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

Hey hey, RFK, how many kids did you kill today?

I swear, each month of 2025 will have its own history degree.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

Republicans do not trust women.

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

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

Welcome to day five of every-bit-as-bad-as-you-thought-it-would-be.

Since we are repeating ourselves, let me just say fuck that.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

75% of people clapping liked the show!

To the privileged, equality seems like oppression.

The revolution will be supervised.

The media handbook says “controversial” is the most negative description that can be used for a Republican.

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Archives for October 2019

How To Start A Revolution

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Remember Lauren Duca? A decade ago in Trump years (2016), she wrote a viral Teen Vogue article, “Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America”

Over a million people read the essay in under 24 hours (and one of them was Dan Rather, who shared the essay on Facebook that afternoon). As a friend put it at the time, “It’s like you decided to write about politics, and a hole opened in the center of the Earth.”

Her first post to Pancake Brains is heartwrenching. I honestly don’t know how she’s still standing, but I’m grateful she is and is still reminding us our democracy is at risk. As you can guess, she’s targeting empowering young people to stand up and take back their country and change the world.

How To Start A Revolution by Lauren Duca

Teen Vogue award-winning columnist Lauren Duca shares a smart and funny guide for challenging the status quo in a much-needed reminder that young people are the ones who will change the world.

In other news, enough tricksters stopped by that I am out of candy, but mostly because I encouraged a group of middle school boys to stop back by before they headed home and be rewarded with my leftovers as the clock struck 8. They were also rewarded with a Bixby and Scout visit. I had to work tonight while juggling Halloween, so they had to hang out in the back of the house because I could not also juggle them. I released the hounds just in time for the one last group of costumed revelers.

Open thread

 

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Excellent Read: “Gaming the Times”

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Some people say that the suits in charge of the NYTimes were not hard to persuade, of course. Todd Gitlin’s is an excellent autopsy, regardless:

Readers of the New York Times’s op-ed page October 9 were accordingly drawn to an enticing headline: “What Hunter Biden Did Was Legal — And That’s the Problem.”

The author, Peter Schweizer, began promisingly by noting an asymmetry in American law. Under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act—a product of the reformist ’70s—the children of foreign officials are prohibited from holding positions in American-run companies. But no equivalent law bars foreign companies and governments from hiring family members of American officials.

There followed five paragraphs about father Joe and son Hunter Biden, centering on Hunter’s business arrangements in Ukraine and China. No evidence has surfaced of any intervention from Joe in those arrangements. But because of the family connection between the then-vice president and his feckless, business-unqualified son, the author, along with Fox News and virtually every Republican official, considered financial payments to Hunter corrupt…

Meanwhile, Ivanka and Jared Kushner between them reported 2018 income in the range of $29 million to $135 million. How much came from licensing and other financial arrangements abroad is not clear, but the New York Times’s Jesse Drucker and Agustin Armendariz noted that “Ms. Trump earned just under $4 million from the Trump International Hotel in Washington, which has become a magnet for visiting executives and foreign officials with interests before the federal government.” But Trump family hustles are dogs biting men—they’re not “a story” because there are so many.

So it was not altogether surprising that in Schweizer’s 1,186 words about corrupt family arrangements with foreign nations, the name “Trump” appeared exactly once: strictly to introduce the family of Elaine Chao, the Secretary of Transportation in Trump’s cabinet…

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Impeachment Inquiry Open Thread: The Way We Live Now

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Because I’m old, my current earworm is Simon & Garfunkel’s Silent Night/7 O’clock News…

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It’s A Cult

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Via The Washington Post, this glimpse of the GOP id:

FORT MYERS, Fla. — When it came to impeachment, the congressman wanted “to get all the facts on the table.” He thought the ambassadors testifying in closed session were “professional diplomats” and that an apparent admission from the White House lectern of a quid pro quo with Ukraine should be taken at face value.

Not, as the Post reporter Griff White* pointed out, unreasonable views on their face.

Could the glitterati** of the Florida Gulf Coast find anything objectionable in Congressman Francis Rooney’s pretty anodyne statements?

Oh yeah:

“I told him, ‘You’ve betrayed your country, your president and your constituents,’ ” said Doris Cortese, 80, the vice chair of the Lee County Republican Executive Committee, recounting a conversation with Rooney.

“My exact words to him were: ‘Get out.’ ”

Within hours, the longtime Republican insider had, announcing on Fox News his decision not to run again after two terms.

Griff then unfolds a serious of interviews with — and I don’t know how to put this politely — delusional white people who testify to the perfection of Trump while denouncing all those apostates and unbelievers who do not bask in his glorious orange glow.  A sample from a glitter artist specializing in Trump themed jewelry and keepsakes:

“[The impeachment inquiry is] not correct, it’s not constitutional, it’s unprecedented and it’s probably illegal,” said Marty Wisher, a 54-year-old artist and avid Republican volunteer.

Here’s another:

“I consider Trump to be our David against Goliath,” said Nancy Price, a 73-year-old retiree who spends much of her free time volunteering for Republican campaigns. “He’s doing such a phenomenal job, and look what he has to fight every day.”

The immediate implication is obvious: an overwhelmingly Republican district will elect a wholly Trumpian Republican to replace that squish, Rooney:

“They’ll all be trying to outdo each other,” said Peter Bergerson, a political scientist at Florida Gulf Coast University. “It will be the Ivory soap test. You’ve got to be 99.99 percent pure. At least.”

The point for those of us who have not huffed Trump’s can of orange spray paint?  The Biden-Buttigieg pitch that Democrats should and they can attract Republican voters to a “reasonable” centrist Democratic challenger to the corrupt and inept president is hooey. Malarky. Folderol. A nostalgic fantasy born of too many viewings of the collected works of Jimmy Stewart. This will be a brawl, to put it mildly, and the way we win is by mobilizing every last base Democrat and any actual uncommitted voter.  The Republican Party that could range from Goldwater to Brooke no longer exists, and what’s left is neither persuadable or salvageable.

But of course, we jackals know that.  It’s only the Village that needs reminding, along with some of our leaders.

Open thread!

*How is that not a Daily Planet reporter’s name?

**Wait for it.

Image: Jacques Stella, Solomon sacrificing to the idols, 1647

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Halloween Open Thread: Dancing Through the Halls

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Not sure how many kids I’ll get tonight. We will be extremely cold and there is still snow and ice everywhere.

A reminder, Speaker Nancy Pelosi will be on Colbert tonight – her only appearance in front of cameras today, or so it’s been reported.

Open thread.

Boo

ETA:

Oh, my god, I want these guys for my neighbors.

They have an entire series of videos here. 

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All our illusions were just a parade

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It’s nut-cutting time up in the hizouse today, as the House votes to formalize the impeachment process. Here are the four arguments we will hear against impeachment

1. Trump did nothing wrong, it’s a witch hunt! (Hannity)
2. Trump may have done something wrong but nothing that rises to the level of impeachment (Susan Collins, John Thune)
3. Trump have done something impeachable but derp derp the Democrats haven’t prove it at all (Jonathan Turley)
4. Trump did something impeachable and the Dems’ case is airtight but they shouldn’t impeach because Applebee’s (Bobo

Not so different than the arguments against taking action against climate change

1. Climate change isn’t happening
2. Climate change is happening but it’s not because of human activity
3. Climate change is happening because of human activity but we can’t do anything about it
4. Climate change is happening and we should do something but Dems are doing cap-and-trade and a carbon tax would be better. Or, alternately, Dems are doing a carbon tax and cap-and-trade would be better.

This is why I’m skeptical of all nonsense about civil discourse and the marketplace of ideas. It’s all based on a faulty model of the human mind. In many, maybe most, cases, people decide pick a side first and then make up reasons why that side is the right one.

Anywho, let’s raise some money for the 17 most endangered House democrats incumbents. They may not all vote for the impeachment resolution today but you can be sure if they don’t it’s because Nancy told them they didn’t have to.

Goal Thermometer

Update. Benny says Happy Halloween.

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