Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

This blog will pay for itself.

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

He seems like a smart guy, but JFC, what a dick!

Republicans want to make it harder to vote and easier for them to cheat.

Michigan is a great lesson for Dems everywhere: when you have power…use it!

How can republicans represent us when they don’t trust women?

“Cheese and Kraken paired together for the appetizer trial.”

Nikki Haley, who can’t acknowledge ‘slavery’, is a pathetic shill.

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

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

Fani Willis claps back at Trump chihuahua, Jim Jordan.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

Oh FFS you might as well trust a 6-year-old with a flamethrower.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

There are more Russians standing up to Putin than Republicans.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

Let there be snark.

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

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires Republicans to act in good faith.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

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Archives for October 2019

Election 2020 Open Thread: GOOD NEWS! – Senator Sanders Survived A Myocardial Infarction

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No snark: I’m old enough to remember, which means Bernie is certainly old enough to remember, when a great many men didn’t survive sudden-onset unstable angina. Especially men of his age. No matter what my personal feelings about the Sanders candidacy, I have no interest in hearing the mainstream media spend the next year giving credence to those, shall we say, more creative Sandernistas (and the Russian bots who support them) claiming that Elizabeth Warren is the inheritor of the dreadful Hillary Clinton Death Squad machinery.

With no obituaries to write, that same mainstream media is back to skirmishing with those same supporters…

Don’t love the ‘Lady MacBeth’ memes, but Jane O’Meara Sanders grew up in a working-class Irish-American parish just a couple of years & a few miles from the one I grew up in. The (bitter) joke among my people was that they called us Harps because we could never stop playing over our grievances in public… and, all too often, this led to playing Heavenly harps of gold, because it’s a dangerous habit to get into.

Jane and Bernie seem to be, whatever their private lives, deeply committed business partners. Political observers have pointed out that this would be a very reasonable time for Bernie to nobly withdraw from the race, take his latest $25mil quarterly donation haul, and settle back to a new role as kingmaker for the remaining candidates to court. But if Jane feels like her guy is being told Go home old man, she’s only too likely to demand that he fight on, even if that should happen to kill him. I’m not proud to say this, but we Harps do love our warrior martyrs.

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Friday Night Open Thread

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There’s a shitload of breaking news about Trump and Ukraine and other shit, but it’s Friday night and it can wait until tomorrow. Not like anything is going to happen to him tonight.

The leaves are starting to change and drop here, finally, and it has been cool and overcast all day. I’ve had to start taking sinus meds again because this is the time of year I get allergies, when all the leaves drop and get wet and moldy. Time to prepare for the long dark months. Get the SAD lamp out of the closet, take the ac unit out, find the space heater, start taking vitamin D, and buying flowers once a week so I don’t get too depressed. The usual.

Anything exciting going on your ways?

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Let’s Check In With the Deliberative Body of Cooling Saucers

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This one makes me go hmmm. Is “I’m a credulous oaf” a way to pivot towards impeachment after you stuck up for Trump 24 hours ago? Perhaps someone who makes an old fashioned with brandy instead of whiskey could give me a little more insight on this dolt’s strategy in the comments:


You can always safely take the under with Marco, who’s looking like a human sweat drop in the video below:

Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida tells reporters he thinks Trump was just kidding when he publicly asked China to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden.

“I don’t think it’s a real request,” Rubio told reporters on Friday. “I think he did it to get you guys. I think he did it to provoke you to ask me and others and get outraged by it.”


Yes, Marco, we know that Daddy is always joking when he calls Mommy bad names, and she’s only wearing big sunglasses today because her eyes are sometimes sensitive to sunlight.

And, oh yeah, Mitt thinks Trump has been very, very naughty and might well not get a second slice of cake after dinner, or something. Not to piss on him too much – it’s a good statement – but he has a history of big talk and no action.

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Election 2020 Open Thread: Kamala Harris Gets Her TIME Cover

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Molly Ball is always worth reading, even when her editors have saddled her with a blatantly biased pre-take. “Kamala Harris Is Making Her Case… “:

… Harris is here, in Iowa, trying to regain her footing in the race. After a promising start in January, her campaign has stalled. While she is in the competition for the nomination, she’s stuck in the mid–single digits in most national and early-state polls and draws modest crowds. Perhaps three dozen people showed up to see her in Waterloo, where they were packed into a few rows in front of the stage so that the large room–an ornate century-old former department store–wouldn’t look so empty.

In mid-September, Harris said she’d be focusing on the first-to-vote caucus state. It was something of an unwitting announcement: she was overheard in Washington joking to a colleague, “I’m f-cking moving to Iowa.” (At least, a staffer quipped, “she didn’t say, ‘I’m moving to f-cking Iowa.’”) Her campaign is doubling its staff in the state, to more than 130 people, and she has pledged to visit every week for the foreseeable future. “I’m really excited about it,” she tells me, saying the opportunity to engage in “old-school retail politics” reminds her of her San Francisco political roots. “I like people.”

People like Harris too; they just can’t quite place her. Like the acquaintance you recognize but can’t recall how you met, she seems both familiar and yet mysterious. Is she a liberal or a moderate, establishment or populist, reformer or radical? Critics point out that she has flip-flopped or obfuscated her positions on important policy issues, like health care and immigration, and the speeches she could use to define herself often devolve into paeans to unity.

For all that, however, Harris remains in the hunt. She consistently polls among the top five candidates in the jumbled Democratic field, and she has the financial resources to remain viable. Her campaign raised $11.6 million in the quarter ending Sept. 30–a respectable haul, although far short of what some other front runners pulled in. As more long-shot candidates bow out of the race, campaign officials expect Harris to benefit from voters’ renewed focus. With a little luck, they say, she still has a fairly clear path to the nomination…

Meanwhile, as the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives moves toward impeachment, another piece of Harris’ record may supercharge her candidacy in the coming months: her background in law enforcement. At a time when liberals are clamoring to make the criminal-justice system less punitive, her record as a district attorney and state attorney general has been a liability. But in this new political climate, voters may relish the idea of seeing Harris–with her icy prosecutor’s glare–square off against President Trump on the national stage.

“This guy has completely trampled on the rule of law, avoided consequence and accountability under law,” she says of the President. “For all the sh-t people give me for being a prosecutor, listen. I believe there should be accountability and consequence.”…

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Election 2020 Open Thread: Warren Moves Fast , Wins (Some) Hearts

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… Hunter Walk, a former product director at Google who is now a venture capitalist, calls it his “evolution.”

“To find her right on everything else and then disqualifying when it’s about my industry? Maybe that’s a little bit too precious,” said Walk. “I’m willing to say, ‘Yes, change all the other things! Uproot all these other assumptions!’ But then, oh my goodness, when she said something about tech, that’s disqualifying? Come on.”

Walk isn’t alone. Recode’s canvass of a group of major Democratic donors and fundraisers in Silicon Valley shows Warren is making significant inroads with some of tech’s wealthiest Democrats. That progress would have been unthinkable just six months ago after she called for the industry’s iconic companies to be split asunder.

Warren has not moderated her at times vitriolic rhetoric toward Silicon Valley. But tech elites are not, as often caricatured, single-issue voters driven by tech policy. And the two dozen tech executives, investors, and veteran fundraisers who spoke with Recode outlined three key reasons why their industry is making this unexpected shift toward Warren: They say they respect her policy rigor. They see her as less radical than once imagined (and especially when compared to Bernie Sanders). And perhaps most importantly, she has a reasonable path to winning the nomination, and there’s nothing Silicon Valley loves more than a winner.

What’s even more unusual is that Warren is gaining traction with these elites by doing barely any of the traditional coaxing and coddling that is a mainstay of today’s big-money era. While some of her 2020 competitors are returning to Silicon Valley multiple times within a single month, Warren is, by at least one measure, doing the best in the tech industry while also doing the least — sometimes with glee…

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