A little early for an open thread, but what the hell. I realized today that I am 49 going on 80, because I went to dinner at 5 pm because there would be no one there and I don’t like to drive in the dark, had the meatloaf and mashed potatoes with gravy, stopped at a convenience store on the way for a decaf coffee so I would not be up all night, and then caught myself saying out loud “You know what give me two scratch off tickets for some excitement.”
How did I get here?
At any rate, it has been a couple days since the rollout, and I hope you all like what you see. If you did and do, make sure to hit the paypal link to the right. Next week, on Tuesday, we are going to slowly start integrating a few ads to see how they perform and how they interact with the new site.
Other than that, not much going on. I was just absolutely horrified watching the coverage of the impeachment inquiry today, and I just do not get these guys. I can not fathom a situation in which I would be so totally beholden to a scumbag and crook like Trump. I just do not get it.
Mary G
Trying again:
War crimes are now A-OK.
hells littlest angel
So Trump is now pardoning war criminals to distract from all the other horrible shit he’s doing.
debbie
@Mary G:
Maybe he’ll use up his allotment and his real friends will be stuck in jail forever. Won’t that be fun?
WaterGirl
John, several people have suggested that we add the Support Our Site links to the front page as well as having them on each individual thread. I can request that on Monday if you like.
For those who don’t know where the Support Our Site links are… on a computer or a tablet in landscape, they are right under Recent Comments on the right-hand side of each individual thread. On a phone, or on a tablet in portrait mode, there is no right-hand side, so everything that’s there on a computer shows up after all the comments and the comment box at the bottom.
Navigation tip: the quickest way to get there is to hit COMMENT from the white bar that’s always at the top. It takes you right to the comment box, and then the other stuff is right below that. If you use the down arrow, it takes you all the way to the footer, and then you would scroll back up to find the other stuff.
WaterGirl
Happy Friday, everybody! I am headed to a volleyball match.
Miss Bianca
I think the site looks great, and will kick in some $ with my next paycheck.
Jager
John, I retired last year at 73, it is depressing as hell. I spend all day with Anze the Dog, I’ve always talked to him, but now I’m trying to have conversations with him. Earlier today, during the hearings, I asked Anze what he thought of Gym Jordan. God bless him he gave one of those low, menacing German Shepherd growls. He got two Trader Joe’s doggie peanut butter cookies for doing his duty.
Mary G
CNN has cell phone photos of David Holmes’ opening statement: I’ve only looked at the beginning, but he sounds as impressive as the others who’ve come forward.
Raoul
One formatting issue for me on Chrome. The << arrow on the left with the darker blue button/box overlaps text. Not a huge thing as I can scroll to uncover the hidden few letters or short word. But hope it's fixable.
Otherwise it looks great so far.
Trump's day doesn't look quite so great.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@WaterGirl: Enjoy, you deserve a break. Hey, your nym showed up in the reply…Progress!
Raoul
Ah, well, first eaten comment already. Chomp.
cmorenc
How long before Trump pardons Roger Stone?
Also, in the terrible event Trump squeaks out re-election in 2020, Manafort’s pardon won’t be far behind.
Jay C
@Mary G:
So: being a lifelong civilian, I really can’t get a handle on military attitudes, but I really have wonder just who Trump thinks he is going to impress by (seemingly) unilaterally bypassing the military justice system, and pardoning these guys? Is this meant to shore up his “tough guy” image, somehow? I wonder what serving personnel will think of this? Or are they going to be cheered that the CinC “has their backs” when they carelessly/deliberately waste civilians??
debbie
@Raoul:
Sometimes you have to refresh for your comment to show.
ETA: Like I just had to do.
The Golux
@Raoul:
What you want is the Zoom Text Only addon for Chrome.
Mary G
@Jay C: I am not an expert, but my wild-ass guess is that he’s a tempermental sociopath who thinks the military is full of people just like him, so it’s not a crime because he thinks he’d do it himself.
Jay C
Just BTW, except for those annoying opaque side-tabs, the new site seems to working just fine for me.
It even remembers my
namenym!cmorenc
@Raoul:
I experience exactly the same bug in Chrome as Raoul reports above.
Also, if I try to use the site’s blockquote function in Chrome, the edit window won’t allow me to exit the blockquoted text, unless I first copy/paste what I want in the blockquote, then <CR> and a word or two of further text, and then go back and select the text I want blockquoted. Another site I frequent (Cloudy Nights, and astronomy forum) often exhibits the same misbehavior with its blockquote function, and the workaround is exactly the same.
Mustang Bobby
Hey, I went out for comfort food tonight, too: meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and green beans at Walter’s Diner. Skipped dessert; I still have Hershey’s left over from Halloween.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Mary G: It was more than the war crimes, there were controlled substance violations as well, these guys were bad news all around.
?BillinGlendaleCA
Hmmm, the visual editing tab disappeared, just the text mode editing buttons and no tabs at the right.
ETA: After submitting the comment, the visual and text tabs reappeared.
NotMax
Let’s fire up the WABAC machine and tune in on Nikita Khrushchev in 1956:
“It is impermissible and foreign to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism to elevate one person,” said Khrushchev, “to transform him into a superman possessing supernatural characteristics, akin to those of a god.
“Such a man supposedly knows everything, sees everything, thinks for everyone, can do anything, is infallible in his behavior. Such a belief about a man, and specifically about Stalin, was cultivated among us for years.”
Mary G
Lol Elise Stefanik’s challenger @TedraCobb has gone from a low number of followers to 23,000 at about 2 pm EST and is now 48,100 just since Elise started acting up in the hearings this morning. I got on board.
PJ
@Raoul: @cmorenc:
This is also an issue in Firefox. According to Watergirl, the blue arrows that cover the text were a feature that some (many?) commenters were adamant about having, though what they do (moving the reader to the previous or next post) is duplicated by the arrows at the top of the page.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@NotMax: That would explain his kinship with Kim Jong Un.
David ??Booooooo?? Koch
And you may find yourself
In another part of the world
And you may ask yourself, well
How did I get here?
Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again after the money’s gone
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground
Ruckus
@Mary G:
Well he does think that 5 bone spur deferments make him stronger than those that served and that he deserves unwavering adoration from every single person in uniform, after all he is the CoC. He doesn’t realize that while military people will follow the chain of command as long as it isn’t an illegal order, they may still hate every single thing about him.
Obedience and love are not the same at all.
To most everyone but staunch republicans and trump.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Mary G: Glendale used to be pretty reliably Republican, until one guy was sent to the greybar motel and his successor who didn’t seem to be crook decided that the Clinton impeachment was his path to fame, he was even one of the House managers. A young prosecutor challenged him for re-election in 2000, you saw that less young man in the chairman’s chair today. Elise seems to be taking a similar path as my former Congresscritter.
Roger Moore
@Mary G:
Which should be zero surprise for anyone who was paying attention. Trump loved to talk about how great it was when Pershing committed war crimes by summarily executing Muslims with bullets dipped in pig’s blood. Anyone who’s surprised that he’s eager to pardon war criminals today wasn’t paying attention.
Raoul
@Jay C: Saw just now that military leaders are worried about maintaining good order and discipline.
This really is how things fall apart in a teetering nation. Abu Ghraib was an absolute moral and tactical disaster. Doing new war crimes will not be, in any possible way, good for America.
WaterGirl
@?BillinGlendaleCA: DONT TELL ANYONE, but I think that’s fixed. We shall see.
Raoul
@PJ: I’m realizing that if I make my browser window much wider, the problem resolves. So, I guess I’ll chill about it. Though the button seems like it could be smaller and still do the task.
The site looks good otherwise!
Raoul
Hmm. Tried to edit a post with 4 mins remaining. Nope.
Ah, well, teething. And first world probs, etc…
Mary G
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Josh Rogan. I was gerrymandered into Glendale that year and can proudly say I voted for Schiff’s first term as well. They broke the record at the time by spending $10 million between them.
zhena gogolia
The Rethugs make me physically ill. How about the one who suggested that somebody paid George Kent to say nice things about Yovanovitch? It was “hahaha,” but not really.
Stefanik is disgusting. I am already contributing to McGrath and Sara Gideon and other people who live nowhere near me. I guess I’ll have to add Tedra.
dexwood
I like it. I liked it before, too. I appreciate the work put into making this place even better. It’s a haven for many. People gonna complain no matter what. Hell, some of the gripes are helpful. Things will shake out in time.
Elizabelle
@Raoul: Good comment.
It’s not all about Trump.
The Dangerman
@hells littlest angel:
Assuming he’s not stupid enough to start another war, he’s played the distraction game with Erdogan and now the pardons. By the time this is over, if it lasts long enough, he’ll be dropping his pants and mooning us (probably with a temporary tattoo on his ass advertising one of his properties).
Roger Moore
@Mary G:
Jim Rogan, who is now a Superior Court Judge (barf). His district covered Pasadena, too, so I was very happy to vote him out and Schiff in. I was kind of bummed when I got redistricted from the 29th to the 27th. It’s not that Judy Chu is a bad Representative, but I wish I could still say I was represented by Adam Schiff.
jeffreyw
@Raoul: Same here, Zoom Text Only works if you use Chrome browser’s own zoom function to reduce the page to 80 or 90% and bump up the text size. Downside of that is that front pager’s embedded Tweets are reduced in size so I can’t read them without clicking on them and reading them in Twitter.
My solution was to use Adguard to block the side tabs, you may have to check the box to also block similar. The arrows in the floating header make them redundant anyway though you lose the verbiage.
Bex
@Raoul: Same for me and the right-hand box has disappeared completely. Boxes are too big. Maybe just arrows?
Kelly
@The Golux:
Nice that fixed some formatting on few other sites to.
frosty
The site update is working fine for me. I particularly like it on my teeny iPhone. Kudos to all and I just pitched in a few bucks.
Mary G
Paging Mr. Sondland! Your bus is ready:
Kelly
My greatest regret about how hard it is to drive at night is no longer xc skiing until the stars are out. I could drive home in the dark if everyone properly aimed their headlights and the new garish blue headlights hadn’t been approved. Yellow glasses help. The garish blue mellows out to more tolerable green.
Mary G
@Roger Moore: Dagnabit, I even looked it up and forgot it was Jim between looking it up and typing. I am old. Thanks.
I moved to OC in 20011 and ended up with Darrell Issa a few years later.
TS (the original)
@Mary G:
From your link – Sondland really was doing trump’s will, meetings with no note takers – despite trump hardly knew him.
Raoul
@The Dangerman: Good lord. Watch out for Pompeo if he does that!
Like a Heat Seeking Missile…
chopper
@Ruckus:
hey now, he fought hard to avoid getting VD during college, that was his own personal viet nam. from what i hear the battle of poon tang hill was pretty rough on everyone who fought it.
Elizabelle
The teen shooter from this week’s attack just died. You knew that was coming. 16 years old and one day.
sukabi
That’s because you’re not a scumbag with a bunch of embarrassing and illegal dirt that drumpf is blackmailing you with.
The repub senators and reps can’t say the same.
Raoul
@TS (the original): No g.d. note takers.
Also seeing how Amb. Sondland’s non-secure phone was probably easily intercepted by the Russians while he was in Kiev.
Buttter. Emails! Our press proves nearly daily that they don’t care one iota about infosec. They just wanted a danged Hillary scandal.
Mel
Cole, you got to the early bird dinner and decaf coffee the same way that I got to insisting that every item of clothing I purchase must have pockets, and to carrying a big-ass purse with everything but the kitchen sink stuffed into it: age and (?) wisdom.
I love the look of thrilled disbelief on my niece’s face when she asks for a (paper clip/ piece of gum/ gluestick/mini Reese cup/ post-it note/kleenex/ponytail band/mini-stapler/mirror/ cat treat, whatever) and Auntie razzle-dazzles it out of the magic giant purse…
Gin & Tonic
@Raoul: Not “probably.” I can guarantee that the Ukrainians and the Russians have every word of that call.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Elizabelle: The local news said he was brain dead last night. Also, his father had a history of substance abuse and passed away a couple of years ago.
Elizabelle
@?BillinGlendaleCA: I am so glad he only took two other teenagers with him. What a tragedy. And I hear there was bullying? Of the shooter? All so sad.
Roger Moore
@sukabi:
The Republican party has been nearly unanimous in defending Trump, and it’s very hard to believe that the Russians are blackmailing them all. Hell, it would only take one of them coming forward and admitting what happened to blow the whole thing sky high.
No, what’s happened is that the Republicans are backing Trump for their own reasons. Some of them are cynical careerists who believe backing him is their best chance of advancing their own interests. Some of them are mindless partisans who will back their party’s leadership regardless of what it’s doing. Some of them see Trump as a way of achieving goals they’ve been going after for a long time. Claiming the only reason they’re backing him is because they’re being blackmailed is excusing them for their own evil decisions.
NotMax
Just wrapped up watching a nice documentary about the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, The World’s Greatest Fair, on Prime.
Going in, was skeptical about its just shy of two hours length but was kept drawn in by nearly every minute. Would also note it contains an informative (and lengthy) segment on the subjects of race and contemporaneous racism.
Raoul
@Gin & Tonic: Yeah. And from what Adam has said around here, it seems like other countries might have done intercepts as well.
It really is just mind boggling how stupid and venal the GOP has become. I am not sure there’s as many kompromat-levered Repubs as gets tossed around (some, yes).
It’s just that any of the decent and/or smart GOPs retired over the last several cycles, and we have only trashheap members left. Cynical, bought by RNC cash cowards. Who don’t give a rat’s ass about our country.
JPL
@WaterGirl: I noticed.
zzyzx
If you want to watch a musician who is both a great guy and is extremely talented who is having a huge rise, Billy Strings has a free webcast in 10 minutes:
relix.com/live/livestream-20191115-billy-strings/
He’s bluegrass adjacent so if you’re allergic to twang, maybe not, but he does insane things on an acoustic guitar with some pedals.
Mary G
Nancy SMASH continues her master class in trolling Twitler:
TS (the original)
@Raoul:
I have little doubt that the CIA (among others) also listened in on the call
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Raoul: The Russians were probably listening to both phones on the conversation.
Raoul
@Roger Moore: I’d say the monetary coercion of some percentage of the politicians is not so much Russian as it is a combination of RNC and McConnell having such tight leashes on funds, combined with soft and/or dark money from a small group of American oligarchs.
It doesn’t have to be kompromat. It can be the absurdly expensive and soul-destroying way money operates in our insane politics.
Martin
Another small victory. Also local news.
PPCLI
@Raoul: I do hope that when we get the testimony about the Trump-Sondland phone call someone will make sure to give this little fact prominence.
And hopefully someone will say “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you will release the recording of the Trump-Sondland phone call. I think you’ll be rewarded mightily by our press.”
HumboldtBlue
Yovonavitch got a standing ovation after 5-plus hours of testimony much to the chagrin of some.
rikyrah
1. Really like the new site.
2. My co-workers and I had a conversation the other day about all the things we understand from our parents.
3. Would appreciate animal pictures.
4. I realized that I just want a hamburger and French fries for dinner tomorrow.
Counterfactual
@Roger Moore: the bit about Pershing and the bullets never happened, it’s another RWNJ myth.
[first comment on new site with my iPhone]
bk
Living as I do in Las Vegas, I can’t buy lottery tickets of any kind, cause reasons. But my girlfriend lives in a state where she can, and she buys us Mega Millions and Powerball tickets every week. I have my eye on homes in Santa Monica and the Caribbean. Have done research.
Jager
@chopper:
The Battle of Poontang Hill was a piece of…
Ruckus
@Roger Moore:
This
How many of the old guard republican party are we seeing? Most of the loudmouths are the younger brand of republican malfeasance. They are all in and looking for a piece of the action. They see, like the white supremacists that they have to strike when given a chance and trump is their chance, because he’s one of them. They are backing his play because they agree with it. That’s not to say that some might not be involved deeper, just they don’t have to be to be all in.
Ruckus
@chopper:
How do you know he didn’t get VD and how do you know that’s not what is rotting his brain now?
We know that he has no morals because morals are a learned idea and learning and trump go together like broccoli and peanut butter.
terben
@Mary G:
Surely that will depend on the superior officers of these men. Will they want these people serving under them? ‘The standard you walk past, is the standard you accept.‘
sukabi
@Roger Moore: not Russians blackmailing…drumpf. He’s a sin collector, so was Roger Stone.
Jay
Frank McCormick
“I can not fathom a situation in which I would be so totally beholden to a scumbag and crook like Trump. I just do not get it.”
John, I feel exactly the same way. I keep wondering why so many Republicans are almost over the top in defending someone who is so obviously not worthy of defense. Their behavior suggests much more than a fear of being primaried from the right.
Dennis
New site design looks great and performs well. But are you ever going to get a threaded comment system? Not be able to see replies in context makes it very hard to follow back and forth debate.