Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

An unpunished coup is a training exercise.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

Hi god, it’s us. Thanks a heap, you’re having a great week and it’s only Thursday!

Don’t expect peaches from an apple tree.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

Meanwhile over at truth Social, the former president is busy confessing to crimes.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the GOP

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

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

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

“I never thought they’d lock HIM up,” sobbed a distraught member of the Lock Her Up Party.

Bark louder, little dog.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

You cannot shame the shameless.

“And when the Committee says to “report your income,” that could mean anything!

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

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

Republicans do not pay their debts.

If you’re pissed about Biden’s speech, he was talking about you.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

White supremacy is terrorism.

You are here: Home / Past Elections / 2020 Elections / Saturday Morning Open Thread: No More Diner-Diving, Pundits

Saturday Morning Open Thread: No More Diner-Diving, Pundits

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It’s bad for your cholesterol, and your takes:

Meanwhile…


… Not surprisingly, that is also the profile of many who’d be hit by Ms. Warren’s so-called wealth tax, which has emerged as the breakout economic proposal in the Democratic presidential primary race.

Nearly a year after Ms. Warren proposed it, the wealth tax has the support of six in 10 Americans, according to a new nationwide poll conducted by the online research firm SurveyMonkey for The New York Times. That support has dipped slightly since July, but Ms. Warren’s plan remains more popular than most proposed tax increases, and its appeal across coalitions is unusual among high-profile campaign proposals…

The other policy plan dominating the primary debate so far — the conversion to a government-financed health care system known as “Medicare for all” — enjoys narrower support that breaks much more cleanly along party lines. Republicans overwhelmingly oppose it. Independents favor it two to one, and Democrats support it by an even higher ratio…

Reader Interactions

235Comments

  4. 4.

    NotMax

    Need a grin?

    Flew under the personal radar when it first showed up, which was my loss as find it keenly amusing as a vehicle to gin up business.

  5. 5.

    satby

    @JPL: Good morning ?

    @OzarkHillbilly: ?

    @mrmoshpotato: Happy Saturday to you! 

    I’m suffering my usual pre-trip anxiety about leaving the animals with another new pet-sitter, a guy I know from the market. He’s the father of seven children and has managed that, so hopefully three dogs won’t be beyond his capabilities. The cats will be incarcerated in bedrooms with provisions for the three days, so they’ll be fine.

    I love to travel, but the angst over finding pet sitters means this is my last trip for a long while.

  6. 6.

    OzarkHillbilly

    Brother of convicted terrorist faces deportation despite US citizenship

    A New Yorker who gained US citizenship as a child is suddenly facing deportation, along with several green card-holding members of his family, after apparent targeting by the Trump administration in what the family believes is a clear case of anti-Muslim bias.
    None of the individuals have a criminal record, and say the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) only raised questions about the validity of their immigration status after another relative was arrested following a terrorist incident in the city. The government’s actions have alarmed advocates and led to them accusing officials of meting out unfair “collective punishment”.
    Ahsan Ullah, 32, an electrician from Brooklyn, was placed in immigration detention in Kearny, New Jersey, on 22 October. He spent about four weeks separated from his American wife and three children before being released on bond last Tuesday pending the outcome of his case.
    Four of his relatives, who all hold green cards, are also fighting government efforts to strip them of their US residency status. Since Trump came into office, the number of such denaturalization and citizenship revocation cases filed by DHS has surged.
    …………………………
    The family and their advocates said the treatment amounts to collective punishment. “This is retribution for sharing the same DNA” as someone accused of terrorism, Ahsan said in a phone call from the Hudson county correctional facility in New Jersey, just before his release from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention.
    “I’ve been here [in the US] since I was a kid – my school is here, my college is here, my family is here, my business is here, my friends are here, my career is here,” he said . “This is where my everything is.”
    DHS declined to comment on the family’s case.

    What’s happening to the Ullah family is not an isolated case. A report by the Open Society Justice Initiative in September found that the Trump administration has filed three times more civil denaturalization cases, about 30 a year – stripping Americans of their citizenship – than the average annual number pursued under the eight preceding presidents.
    Nearly half of all persons targeted for denaturalization in 2017 and 2018 came from “special interest” countries, a label used to identify nations with presumed links to terrorism, including Bangladesh, the report said, which amounted to a policy of “collective suspicion”.
    Manar Waheed, senior legislative and advocacy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the data indicates that “the same communities that this administration has targeted over and over again” are being singled out.

  8. 8.

    NotMax

    Everyone make it through Black Friday intact?

    :)

    @satby

    I suppose claiming them as an emotional support menagerie is out of the question.

    ;)

  12. 12.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    one final thought: coastal reporters elevating the voices of lonely loudmouths at the expense of the real community-builders in small towns stokes misunderstanding/ amplifies division in a way that isn’t representative of reality

     

    That book they are going to right needs drama to make sales. Reporting that the real divisions in America are mostly a matter of economics that can be solved threw a balanced policy and not some inscrutable cultural clash were one side must win and the other perish doesn’t do that.

     

    And more proof that this is whole mess is self inflicted and Russians are only being opportunistic.

  14. 14.

    Baud

    Not that it means they’ll vote for her, but it’s a reminder of the limitations of the left-right spectrum in gauging voter preferences.

     

     

    They will not vote for her, not will they push their party to adopt her ideas. I think the left-right spectrum is holding up just fine.

  15. 15.

    evodevo

    @satby: YES!  Am going away for Xmas with the spouse and need a boarding place for out aging mixed breed who DOESN’T get along well with other dogs….I can either pay $60 a day for “premium” care at a fancy place or $20 + food for ????.  I would leave her at home, but who knows what the weather will be and we live out in the country…and the pet sitter might not be able to get through snow etc.  Haven’t used a kennel for years and vetting them is a hassle.  Glad we don’t go places often…

  18. 18.

    DonL140

    Maybe this will accidentally make it to Fox News and Trump will see the poll results and think if his base is for it, he’s for it. I can see that happening. Will he propose it in front of the helicopter, or in front of a rally crowd?

  20. 20.

    mrmoshpotato

    @NotMax: Oh yeah.  It was Trample Your Fellow Humans Day yesterday.  Why do I always forget?

     

    Train was only a half hour late getting in yesterday.  And today is the real madhouse day.

     

    Go Dawgs for Raven.

  22. 22.

    WereBear

    @OzarkHillbilly: I have friends with similar worries. Which makes them part of my worries too.

     

    They must be stopped. AND rewound. This entire administration stole it. If I robbed a bank, I would be expected to give the money back when they caught me.

  24. 24.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @DonL140:   Every Republican would suddenly find a spine and vote for impeachment and removal, secure in the knowledge of a Koch/Mercer/Walton/DeVos/Green financed retirement.

  25. 25.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @WereBear:   My wife is white and from Spain, but I take her to the polls every election because she has a name that says, “You ain’t from around here, is you girl?” and I worry when they will decide that voting in the DEM primary is a deportable offense.

    It’s all very unlikely, the poll workers are always very nice people and the chances of the local GOP sending a poll watcher to this lost in the woods volunteer fire station are just this side of nil, and yet….

    It’s always working at my edges, a thing I can push to the side but never make go away.

  27. 27.

    Raven

    @mrmoshpotato: Arf! We will totally take over Bobby Dodd today. Interestingly prices for the SEC Championship game with LSU nest week have dropped below $200. I’m getting an itchy finger.

  28. 28.

    OzarkHillbilly

    I learned more about religion in Life of Brian than I did in Sunday school.

    – Jim Jefferies

  30. 30.

    Raven

    Bluebird Days For Anglers 

    Folks who like to fish use bluebird day to describe a sunny day after a storm has passed through. This definition is similar to the meaning of the term for skiers, but it’s not necessarily a good thing—for many types of fishing, bright sun and calm waters often mean the fish won’t be biting.

  36. 36.

    Jeffro

    I like Adam Jentleson’s framing…can be used on any number of policy proposals.  Dem ideas are (relatively speaking, in this 50-50 grudge match we seem to be locked in) wildly popular.

     

    Also, the ‘diner interview w/ white, rural Americans’ thing really does need to stop.  Those interviews are about as over-representative as the Electoral College.  FAN OUT, national snooze reporters, and let’s see what people thing in America’s big cities & their suburbs – you know, where most of us live?

  37. 37.

    Chris Johnson

    @Enhanced Voting Techniques: And more proof that this is whole mess is self inflicted and Russians are only being opportunistic.

    This is a good reminder that they are not some nefarious, uniquely powerful adversary. The only reason the Russians are so powerful is because our oligarchs are trying to push for that last 1% of dominance and final penny squeezed from the shriveled husk of the country. The Russians would be POWERLESS if not for greed and billionaires pursuing their would-be self-interests.

     

    We have to cut off the Russians’ collaborators.

  39. 39.

    WereBear

    @OzarkHillbilly: It’s always working at my edges, a thing I can push to the side but never make go away.

    Anyone, with any area of vulnerability, has this crap hanging over them. Mr WayofCats worked hard for the government, he earned his disability, and now they constantly threaten to take it away and plunge us into real poverty.

  40. 40.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Raven:  

    bright sun and calm waters often mean the fish won’t be biting.

    I had an experience that demonstrated that truth in the most obvious way while cat fishing on the Mississippi. A warm sunny day, no bites at all, not even a nibble. Clouds began gathering to the west, after a bit they had formed up into a thunderstorm. All of a sudden the fish started hitting. We were pulling out channel cats and blues left and right (all good eating size, 5-10 lbs). This lasted about 20 mins and 12 fish between the 2 of us, then the skies opened up. 1 or 2 more and then…

    Nothing. The only fish we caught that whole wkend.

  42. 42.

    Zzyzx

    @Enhanced Voting Techniques: I’d buy that fix the economics and everything else will follow argument more if Europe weren’t also being besieged by nationalist parties right now. They already have what we want and that just becomes a shiny new weapon to attack people who don’t look like them.

  43. 43.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    @NotMax: Funny thing. Our guide in Rio said they don’t celebrate (obviously) but they have Black Friday. We weren’t in shopping areas, but we did see huge lines of people outside McDonalds and Burger King because they were running big discounts.

    The dining room hostess tried to greet all the Americans with “Happy Thanksgiving,” but she kept forgetting the name of the holiday.

    Also, before I forget again, one odd thing on this boat is that bird song is piped into every public restroom. I have no idea why.

    And sigh, I checked my email yesterday, which I shouldn’t have done because my most recent royalty report was there and it was deeply depressing. I should have expected it because The Wind Reader has been out for over a year and sales always fall off but mine apparently went over a cliff. I like this publisher. They donate part of their profits to literacy efforts. So I’d like to make money for them and have it be enough that they’re willing to publish my next book. Boo!

  46. 46.

    CliosFanBoy

    the tweets about the people in diners reminded me on my one grandfather. He and my grandmother retired to the small Kentucky town where they grew up.  After she died he hung out in the diner with his buddies for the company.  A group of elderly widowers was not representative of the whole area, but that’s who the reporters would find if they went there.

  47. 47.

    gene108

    @OzarkHillbilly:

     

    They want to create an apartheid state, where only whites have full citizenship.

     

    It is obvious.

     

    The former fringe folks, who wanted to end birthright citizenship, are now deciding policy.

  48. 48.

    Kay

    When Congress created a student loan forgiveness program in 2007, lawmakers wanted to draw people to vital but relatively low-paid careers with a promise: after a decade, if borrowers faithfully paid their debts and pursued their work, they would have the remainder of their student loans written off.
    Since then, tens of thousands of graduates were led to believe by their student loan servicers that they would qualify for relief at the end of a decade, only to be shocked when their applications were rejected.
    The blame can be spread broadly — to loan servicers who at best failed to inform borrowers of what was needed to qualify, to the single company in charge of the program that has been repeatedly cited for shoddy service, mismanagement and poor record keeping, to lawmakers who wrote in a baffling list of requirements, and to the Education Department, which has failed to step in and correct the problem.

    The loan servicer is Nelnet and I have been hearing complaints about them from people for years. Why do they still have a federal contract? The contract is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Give it to someone else.
    I read the other day that the US Department of Education ranks second from the bottom (after ICE) in public perception of federal agencies. I personally think that’s because people think of it as a shitty, cheating collection company.

  51. 51.

    CliosFanBoy

    @Kay: I’m not fond of them but I see them as creating the bureaucracy that hinder me, and every other teacher, from doing their jobs by adding yet another group of standards to meet.

  52. 52.

    debbie

    @mrmoshpotato:
    If I cared about football, which I don’t, I’d probably be upset, but I know you know the futility of your wish. You won’t be winning today. //

  54. 54.

    zzyzx

    From the post:

    is small town america chock full of assholes? sure. there are assholes everywhere. but there are a lot of actual honest to goodness good people whose voices are perpetually drowned out by the angry racist hillbilly safari narrative

    Are there great people in small towns? Yes. Obviously. The reason why their voices are drowned out though is because these places vote for awful things by 70/30 majorities. Yes, we need to acknowledge there are good people there but pretending that they represent the true voice of the community if only the media would talk to the right people is obviously not true.

  55. 55.

    Steeplejack

    Belated report: My Thanksgiving went okay. The rib roast turned out very well. Only crisis was that my brother’s gas oven was taking forever to warm up and never got past about 425° (according to my cheapo oven thermometer). We switched over to his electric wall oven, which heated up quickly and did a good job. The sides came out well (mashed potatoes, Brussels sprouts, dressing). The mincemeat pie was a little gloppy, but that wasn’t a deal-breaker. I do think a mincemeat pie benefits from a lattice top crust (missing on this one); you need a high crust-to-filling ratio for the filling’s intense taste.

    The oven thing prompted me to make my only Black Friday purchase yesterday, a few items from ThermoWorks, including a couple of thermometers with probes you can leave in while cooking. . . . Huh, looks like the Black Friday prices are still in effect, if anyone’s interested. Lots of good stuff, including some stocking stuffers.

  56. 56.

    Betty Cracker

    A Bloomberg ad came on during one of the Thanksgiving Day football games, and my Trumpiest uncle asked me why I thought Bloomberg jumped in the race. I said I thought Bloomberg and other billionaires were scared shitless when they saw Warren doing well in the primary, so they were taking various actions to blunt her momentum, such as joining the race themselves (Bloomberg) or using their influence in the media to scaremonger about “radical” ideas like M4A.  My uncle then volunteered that he was all for a wealth tax and thinks it’s ridiculous that huge corporations pay zero in taxes.

     

    If my uncle bothers to vote in 2020, he’ll vote for Trump again. He didn’t say so, but that’s how he rolls. I don’t try to persuade him or the other Trumpsters in the family to support Democrats because they never will, but I do point out and cite evidence that Trump is a conman who’s ripping us all off and subverting U.S. domestic and foreign policy for his own personal gain. If they stay home on election day or vote for a third-party libertarian clown, that’s a win.

  57. 57.

    Baud

    @OzarkHillbilly:

     

    The story confuses me.  Obviously, the administration is the devil, but I don’t understand how this guy was placed in immigration detention before his citizenship was revoked.  There are a ton of stories about ICE detaining citizens who ICE claims are not citizens, but since they are seeking to revoke this guy’s citizenship, ICE obviously isn’t making the claim that he is not a citizen currently. I don’t understand how he spent four weeks in detention, especially since they seem to have had lawyers.  I tried to google, but I didn’t find other media reporting on this story.

     

    None of this detracts from what seems to be a vindictive prosecution, but the reporting leaves me scratching my head.

  58. 58.

    WereBear

    @Dorothy A. Winsor:sales always fall off but mine apparently went over a cliff

    Most likely people are anxious and are curtailing spending. Another reason I just stayed home and didn’t even shop online this Black Friday.

    If anything hurts capitalists, they do something about it.

  59. 59.

    Kay

    @CliosFanBoy:

    It seems like they should make some effort to be seen as helpful or useful, especially since conservatives have been gunning for them since the day they were created. This is the second “US Department of Education rips off lower income borrower/worker” story in the last year. In the last one the lawyer for the department was actively working against the lawyers for the students, and then USDOE lost the lawsuit and were held in contempt.

    The expanded public service program was part of the Democrats 2006 “wave year” platform- it is Pelosi’s (and to her credit she was ahead of the curve on student loans). She should personally step in and fix it.

  61. 61.

    zzyzx

    @OzarkHillbilly: yep.

     

    While conservatives definitely try to over associate the connection for political advantage, progressives do need to come to terms with the fact that social programs do frequently walk hand in hand with racism. Sanders is the one who annoys me the most with his beliefs that all of our problems can just be solved with a better income tax and safety net when there are huge recent counterexamples that would have affected him personally.

  63. 63.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Betty Cracker:   Whenever the subject of taxes come up with the trumpsters I know, it inevitably comes down to “I pay too much.” When I bring up how little the rich and corporations pay they are in agreement with me. Then they vote Republican anyway, I guess in the hope that the tax cuts will trickle down to them too.

  64. 64.

    Kay

    @Betty Cracker:

    I kind of like the Steyer ad- “Trump is a fraud and a failure”. It’s very simple!

     

    I went to Bloomberg’s site to look at his issues. It is amazingly thin on details and honestly other than foreign policy which is  “I know a lot of powerful people and trust me, they love me” it could be a mayor’s campaign site. It’s “I put 2000 people into a job training program, once”.

  65. 65.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Baud:   I don’t know enough about immigrant detention procedures to comment beyond pointing out that mere laws are no barriers to these assholes.

  66. 66.

    germy

    I never understood why the folks sitting in the diners were called economically anxious.

     

    A few years ago, when we moved to our new town, I decided to check out one of the diners downtown.  I sat at the counter, ordered eggs toast and bacon.  I noticed I was surrounded by regulars; guys who were on a first name basis with all the waitresses and even the cook in the back.

     

    My breakfast, after tip, came to $20.

     

    Now and then I’ll treat myself to a diner breakfast, but I don’t go often enough to be a regular.  I go infrequently enough that it’s different staff every time I visit.  But these regulars, the guys who were buddies with the staff, must have been dropping a hundred bucks a week for the eggs and sausage.

     

    Then they’d climb into their shiny pickup trucks, drive to a customer and make five hundred bucks installing a $150 toilet or something.

  67. 67.

    Steeplejack

    @WereBear:
    I didn’t know that about competitions. I like a high crust ratio on almost all pies—maybe not pumpkin or mousse-y pies, but definitely on fruit pies. This one was not one of my brother’s better efforts, and it’s got me thinking that I will make my own mincemeat pie to slake my lust.

  68. 68.

    debbie

    @Kay:
    I think Steyer is doing a real public service with his ad. He’s saying out loud what lots of people, including people voting for Trump, are thinking.

  69. 69.

    JMG

    You folks are my companions in the virtual diner in which I have breakfast. Today it is the special treat of the holiday weekend breakfast, a slice of apple pie with a slab of swiss cheese on top and black coffee.

  70. 70.

    Kay

    @debbie:

     

    I agree. You had mentioned the ad but I had never seen it before. It’s a weirdly humble ad, in that what sticks with you is not “Steyer is great” (he’s barely mentioned) but “Trump is bad”.

  73. 73.

    debbie

    @Kay:

    It’s a weirdly humble ad…

    Especially when contrasted with Bloomberg’s Me, Me, Me ad. Bloomberg’s just a typical 1%er parading as presidential material.

  75. 75.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @WereBear:  

    So markedly that such crusts are forbidden in baking competitions.

    That sounds pretty damned silly to me. “We don’t like superior pies, so this competition is limited to inferior pies ONLY.”

  76. 76.

    Uncle Jeffy

    @Kay: “…a shitty, cheating collection company”

     

    I never liked Amway’s business practices, either…

     

    Belated Happy Thanksgiving to all!

  77. 77.

    Immanentize

    @Raven: Doesn’t that sweet Georgia pension have an extra amount kicked in for playoffs?  It should!  Go.  Enjoy, lose your voice cheering.

  79. 79.

    Kay

    @CliosFanBoy:

     

    The US Department of Education’s central function is civil rights. That’s what the big federal laws on education are about. It was supposed to act as a check on discriminatory state and local education policy and practice- like federal laws on voting. “THIS you are guaranteed under the US Constitution, no matter what state you live in”. That’s a big enough job! They should just do that well.

    Obama’s second education secretary said it once and it’s true- “these are civil rights laws”- if you look at it like that what they should be doing comes clear.

  80. 80.

    WereBear

    @Betty Cracker:If they stay home on election day or vote for a third-party libertarian clown, that’s a win.

    Since tRump’s strength is concentrated in small towns, social shaming so they don’t show up is fine with me.

  83. 83.

    Marcopolo

    Good morning folks.  Currently experiencing a full bore thunderstorm here in StL on the last day of November.  Don’t remember this happening much, if ever, in the past but now I’m guessing it’ll be the new normal.

     

    Thinking about seeing Ford vs Ferrari later.  Has anyone  here seen it & have a take?

  84. 84.

    Kay

    @WereBear:

     

    I don’t think they’re going to stay home. I think they’re going to come out in droves. It doesn’t mean we should be scared but it does mean it will be hard as nails to win and I hope Democrats don’t kid themselves about that. They have to hold down Trumpist margins in rural counties in swing states AND win cities and suburbs – I know it enrages base Democrats but I didn’t invent this map and until Democrats replace some of these states with different states that they carry that’s the reality.

  86. 86.

    Immanentize

    @Baud: In Boston, a federal judge just ruled ICE’s “detain first without reason” policy unconstitutional holding that if the due process clause means anything, it means you cannot lock up people without a good reason. Whether the other case was actually a citizen or not, ICE is locking people up who they have no right to.

  87. 87.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Zzyzx: They have the expansive welfare states, but it’s also important to remember the specifics of the 2008 global recession and the response to it. In European countries, a lot of center-right parties happened to be in charge and tried to fix the recession with austerity programs that made everything worse. It actually wasn’t as bad here, in a relative sense. But when the pie shrinks people are going to get stingy about people unlike themselves getting a slice.

  90. 90.

    WereBear

    @Kay: It’s true they have no shame. We can’t let up for a minute.

    But I am working on my inheritance from my mother: a death-dealing Basilisk stare. Fortunately, MY little town went for Clinton.

  91. 91.

    Baud

    @Immanentize: 

    Right. My question isn’t about ICE’s good faith. It’s about how a citizen with a lawyer stays locked up for four weeks. The story doesn’t explain that, but it seems quite an important piece of information.

  92. 92.

    BC in Illinois

    @Steeplejack:

    Belated report: My Thanksgiving . . .

    Before I get up and going for Saturday, I want to report a little of our two-day Thanksgiving: Thursday at Daughter #1’s place; Friday at Daughter #2’s place. The centerpiece of Thursday was SIL #1’s annual turkey, cooked while covered in criss-crossed bacon, with pineapple on top. Then side-dishes from a total of five households. With 7 g’kids playing some kind of video game afterwards that can allow 5 players, I told Daughter #3 (who lives on the east coast and won’t be home until post-Christmas) that:

    We don’t have family gatherings with arguments like people talk about, but we make up for it in noise level.

    But then on Friday, people did their best to follow Daughter #2’s annual tradition of family football in Maplewood (StL County), even though

    • it was cold and damp
    • it was muddy on the field
    • the 4-year-old wanted no part of it
    • g’pa BC got out of it by walking the 4-yr-old home

    They still played the game, changed clothes and shoes (my son went to the store and bought a pair of sweatpants, so as not to spend the day in mud-soaked jeans), and then settled in to a lovely meal of left-over turkey, jello salad, kale salad, some spicy rice thing, turkey noodle soup, and ham & turkey on day-old rolls.

    The event for Friday, however was an 8-handed game of some kind of special Uno, with more and different wild cards. Age range from 13 to 78, including two 17- and 17-year-old exchange students from Hong Kong (their parents are happy to have them in High School in StL and not in the street protests of HK).  They have been trained by my son and DIL in the ways of Euchre and Pinochle (Iowa house rules), but apparently Uno is played at lunch in their high school, with more wild-cards than I am used to. Add in special house rules — (Pick up two cards, if you ever say the word “sorry”) — and you have a good, even fast moving game.

    I had only ever played Uno with elementary school kids. Adult cut-throat Uno-for-eight can actually be fun.

  94. 94.

    Immanentize

    @Marcopolo: I’m going Wednesday evening with “the guys” who are all tech nerds but me.  Should be fun!  Let me know if you liked it.  The Ford GT and J cars were my childhood favorites, perhaps because of slot cars?

  96. 96.

    Kay

    @Matt McIrvin: 

    It gets so hard to persevere in these rust belt places. I am helping these two young people, man and woman with a child together, start and run their tattoo shop. They have a Facebook page for the shop and the guy puts all this anti-Democrat shit up – which is just bad for business, for one thing, and annoying as hell to me personally for another because I know for a fact that this small business venture relies on Medicaid for the family while they get up and running. Probably food stamps too but I haven’t asked and won’t ask. I only know Medicaid because they told me. If you’re too fucking stupid to know where your health care comes from – that Democrats are what made it possible for these two to quit their jobs and go out on their own with a brand new baby- then I don’t want to help you. Bootstrap it. I don’t give a shit.
    The only reason I’m sticking with it is the gf is apolitical but IMO a non-voting liberal – I like her.

  97. 97.

    WereBear

    Pet Peeve: Those constant articles urging people to cut loose and recreate themselves and “do what you love!”

     

    Eventually you hit the crux of the matter: they got an inheritance, or had enough money to save massively for a few years, or had a partner who financed them with their own full time job with benefits.

     

    I’m pursuing my own dream partially fueled by the math of my retirement boiling down to dire poverty punctuated by a 401k that now covers “share the cat food for three years and die.”

     

    It’s like being constantly told growing up that all I had to do was write a killer novel to get it published. So I did, I got an agent and got read all over town. But they would bail when marketing would whine “we don’t know how to market this.” (It’s only their job.) Then the agent retired and I burned out halfway through my third one.

     

    I can, and will, pursue fiction again. But the truth, which I would have appreciated knowing at the time, was that I should have pursued an MFA, networked like Yeats on a cocaine binge, and gotten breast implants.

  98. 98.

    UncleEbeneezer

    @?BillinGlendaleCA: Have you gotten any pics of the snowy San Gabriel’s?  When it’s clear, they look beautiful right now.  Yesterday we drove around the Rose Bowl and up a hill to a spot that has a great overlook and view of the mountains.  Love when we get a bit of snow in the mountains!

  99. 99.

    StringOnAStick

    I made our turkey yesterday by putting a compound butter of roasted cherry tomatoes and garlic under the skin after I spatchcocked it.  1.5 hours for a 14 lb turkey and the skin roasted to a dark crispy brown thanks to the compound butter ingredients.

     

    Many thanks to Tamara for teaching how to spatchcock a turkey last year, I’ll never do it any other way!

  100. 100.

    Immanentize

    @Baud: I assumed reading it that they alleged some type of fraud in the application process, which is about the only basis for revoking citizenship once granted.  We still do that with Nazi guards if we ever find them.  But I agree I was making a big ‘assumedly’ there.

  101. 101.

    Steeplejack

    @WereBear:
    To be clear, I was talking about a lattice crust vs. no top crust. I’m fine with full top crusts, too. The more crust the better.

  102. 102.

    joel hanes

    @Raven:

    Bluebird Days For Anglers

    Duck hunters refer to any mild day with a clear blue sky as a bluebird day.   Such days are very pleasant in the field, but ducks loaf through them and there will be no movement of flocks.   Also, flocks of birds higher than a couple hundred yards are difficult to notice and see against a clear blue sky.   So one enjoys the warmth, and tells stories, and eats one’s lunch, and watches songbirds or dragonflies or the antics of coots.   Often a nap.

     

    For good duck hunting, you want raw weather: a low ceiling of slate-colored clouds, temperatures near freezing, and a wind out of the north-east.   Flocks migrate on such days, and flocks that aren’t migrating will bunch up and go out to the fields to feed right around sunrise, and come back a couple hours later.   Flocks at a great distance show up clearly against the clouds.

     

    Really the best such days are the day before the first serious winter storm, with freeze-up and significant snowfall a couple hundred miles to the northwest and due to arrive tomorrow.  On one such day, we saw probably a couple hundred thousand mallards pour into one extended wetland complex — we quit shooting by eight AM, and spent the next four hours calling flock after flock into our set, for the keen thrill of watching them respond to the calls, circle twice, set their wings, and settle in directly in front of us.

     

    I haven’t shot at a duck in thirty years, but watching wild waterfowl remains one of my great pleasures.

     

    Somewhere in his journals, Aldo Leopold remarks, “The deer hunter watches the edge of the next break in the trees.   The duck hunter watches the sky.   The pheasant hunter watches the dog.  The non-hunter does not watch.”

  103. 103.

    frosty

    @Marcopolo: F vs F? I haven’t seen it but friends and relations (and some wives who aren’t gearheads) saw it and all of them liked it. It’s on my calendar for next week.

  105. 105.

    Baud

    @Immanentize:

     

     

    Fraud is a basis for revocation, but I read the story to suggest that the revocation hadn’t been effected yet. I don’t believe ICE can so that unilaterally. They have to go to court.

  106. 106.

    Steeplejack

    @Marcopolo:

    My most reliable moviegoing friend, whose judgment I trust, said Ford vs. Ferrari was surprisingly good. And she’s in her mid-60s, not the expected demographic.

  107. 107.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Immanentize: It’s easy to just state that you suspected the person’s citizenship documents were somehow fake, and that seems to be the go-to justification for immigration authorities to imprison citizens these days.

  108. 108.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @BC in Illinois:   I first played Uno back in the mid 70s before it was Uno and played with a double deck of Bicycles. We called it “Screw your Buddy” and iirc it was a guy from Michigan who brought it to the island. 5 adults on an island in the middle of a Canadian wilderness with nothing much to do. Pretty damned cut throat.

  110. 110.

    Mike in NC

    Went to a sketchy flea market in Odessa, Florida yesterday. Not many people there on account of the Black Friday sales at the malls. There was plenty of Trump 2020 merchandise on display. Encountered only old white people, including one nice woman who appeared to have only five teeth. MAGA!

  111. 111.

    Immanentize

    @Spanky: 
    Yes. He deferred for a year. He will be an Owl in the Fall, God willing and the creek don’t rise! In fact, now is the time to get back in touch to tell them he is fit and ready…. December 15 is when he got his early decision last year.

  112. 112.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Baud: Laws and court orders are pieces of paper. Power comes out of the barrel of a gun. ICE can do anything they want as long as they have the guns and keep that in mind. It’s the basic authoritarian principle.

  113. 113.

    ?BillinGlendaleCA

    @UncleEbeneezer: I have a good number of shots from Hahn park in the Baldwin Hills from last year. I did see that Mt. Lowe was fully covered in snow on my drive to PV. I was thinking of going to Hahn yesterday, but the clouds were still hugging the mountains.

  117. 117.

    Baud

    @Matt McIrvin:

     

    Right. That I would understand. But that’s not what happened here. The authorities aren’t claiming this guy had fake citizenship documents. They’re claiming he was wrongfully made a citizen because of his fraudulent conduct. But until a court signs off on that, he’s a citizen and can’t be detained as an immigrant.

  119. 119.

    Immanentize

    @Baud: I agree they ought to, but sometimes lawyering up takes time.  I remember another case recently? in Texas where they stopped two people near the border, one a US citizen and his relative not. Locked them both up because, even though the citizen has a passport! they said they couldn’t verify his citizenship. ICE is out of control. Entirely.

    And hey. Didn’t you ever see “Born in East L.A.?”

  120. 120.

    Kay

    My mother in law is well off and she lives in a fancy retirement facility. She refused to go anywhere for Thanksgiving because she dislikes…most of us. She likes my daughter and that may be it. Anyway. They gave the wait staff Thanksgiving off and had a buffet. So I called her to check in – and she told me she had a “handful of Cheezits” for Thanksgiving. She’s perfectly spry and has no difficulty with buffet-navigating or anything else. This is so perfectly “her”, this exaggeration, I guffawed and she got the joke. She knows how bad she is :)

     

    I told her she should have had more than a handful. It is Thanksgiving after all. Have a whole bowl!

  121. 121.

    Baud

    @Matt McIrvin:

     

    I guess what I want to know is what actually happened during those four weeks. Did the guy just not have lawyer during that time? What was the government’s justification? It’s confusing.

  123. 123.

    Yarrow

    @Immanentize:  I saw you mentioned in a previous thread that you were looking into medicinal marijuana for Imp. That’s not really an option in Texas except for epilepsy patients, I think. Laws are fairly strict. Something to keep in mind before he heads to Rice.

  124. 124.

    Baud

    @Immanentize:

     

    As awful as ICE is, to my knowledge, this would be the first time ICE has locked up a citizen that ICE itself acknowledged was a citizen at the time of imprisonment (since it appears the revocation hadn’t occurred yet). That would be a big story, if those are the facts. But this article doesn’t go into it.

  126. 126.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Baud:   My take on ICE tactics these days is first they grab folks and put them in jail. Then they have to prove their innocence. That is my take because I have read way too many stories that follow along just those lines.

  127. 127.

    Spanky

    I can’t see the Mr. Rogers movie. I grew up in Pittsburgh watching the Josie Carey show, which pre-dated Mr. Rogers, but had him doing Daniel Tiger, Lady Elaine, and the rest of the puppets.

     

    But the reason it’s ruined for me is that I’ve seen the trailer, and when Tom Hanks slows his speech down to Mr. Rogers’ style, I hear Forrest Gump. No can do.

  128. 128.

    Steeplejack

    @BC in Illinois:
    Sounds like a good time. My brother and I mostly watched National Geographic docs in between him taking occasional calls from the clinic. (He was the ophthalmologist on call for the day.)

    One of the NatGeo docs was particularly good, about the ancient Greek Antikythera mechanism. It was the most complete I have seen and included this guy’s reconstruction (although not this video, which is kind of lame). Worth watching if you happen to see it on the schedule.

  130. 130.

    Baud

    @OzarkHillbilly: Agreed. See my #124.  Typically, ICE at least pretends that the people it is locking up are not citizens (or at a minimum, that it doesn’t know their citizenship status).  If that were the case here, I wouldn’t give a second’s thought, because that is how ICE operates.  But the apparent facts of this story are something different.

  131. 131.

    mrmoshpotato

    @WereBear: Pet Peeve: Those constant articles urging people to cut loose and recreate themselves and “do what you love!”

    Universal healthcare would make that more economically feasible.

  132. 132.

    CliosFanBoy

    @Kay: Fair point, and I certainly have no fault with it…  But I hate things like “No Child Left Behind.”  By the time students get to me for their freshman college history classes, they’re so used to taking standardized tests they can’t do anything else.

  133. 133.

    Kay

    @mrmoshpotato:

     

    I’d love to see a count of how many small business/self-employed rely upon a spouses employer-provided health insurance. See if that’s even a predictor of starting a small business. Makes it more likely. It certainly seems to be true in my practice. Behind every independent contractor with a truck is a spouse who is a teacher or a nurse.

  136. 136.

    CliosFanBoy

    @Kay: Behind every independent contractor with a truck is a spouse who is a teacher or a nurse.

    Or a mid-level government worker in the parks department or such.

  138. 138.

    Steeplejack

    @Dorothy A. Winsor:
    Probably a good fit. It can be hard to find “superfan” movies that the accompanying non-superfan can also like. I took a non-driving friend on knee rehab to see Captain Marvel and was pleasantly surprised to like it a lot.

  139. 139.

    mrmoshpotato

    @Kay: Exactly!  My dad’s self-employed and relied on my mom for her insurance.  They’re both eligible for Medicare now, but it was Mom’s insurance we were all on growing up.

  142. 142.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    @Baud: My sister told us a story of being detained by ICE on the way home from the grocery store. For some reason she says she carries her passport with her everywhere, so when they demanded proof of citizenship she actually had it. And when they demanded she step out of the car she had the presence of mind to ask if they had a search warrant. They backed down on that.

     

    They let her go eventually but with dark warnings that “we have our eye on you”. For what exactly? We were all born here, our parents were born here.

  144. 144.

    Kay

    @CliosFanBoy:

     

    Oh, I know. My kids have taken a ton- more every year. My youngest seems to get “evaluated” every 5 minutes. I took one a year in public school and our teachers downplayed it. Now they have rallies prior to test day(s) – pull for the team and bring up the score! I always feel sorry for the school administrators because the newspaper goes to them and demands they explain these score increases or decreases, and it’s complicated and no one is really interested in how it works and any explanation is framed as an “excuse”. People WANT it reduced to a number and they don’t care whether the number is valid or not. It’s frustrating to me because it doesn’t make practical sense to view these scores like this- the school population doesn’t change that much year to year. If there’s a big jump or drop it’s probably because they changed the measure. This same group of kids and teachers didn’t become dramatically less proficient over one year. It’s a different test.

  145. 145.

    WereBear

    @Kay:Behind every independent contractor with a truck is a spouse who is a teacher or a nurse.

    Yet they really hate to acknowledge that, they’ve had bootstrap propaganda beaten into their heads. toxicmasculinity

  149. 149.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Baud:   A guy I know has a saying: “Easier to beg forgiveness than to ask permission.” I’m pretty sure there is a cop version and given the deference they are shown by the courts I suspect most times there is very little if any penalty. Considering the immigration courts are less concerned with the rights of citizens then they are with expediting deportations I would bet ICE is immune to sanctions just now.

  152. 152.

    WereBear

    @Kay: In a somewhat related problem, there’s an attitude about performance metrics which has gone too far, in that some so-called scientists regard anything that cannot be measured precisely as somehow not existing.

     

    Like evaluating a drug on how it changes a lab report, no matter how that drug makes the patient feel. Or telling them they “should” feel better, because “look, this number changed” and ignoring the fact the patient still feels very sick.

  153. 153.

    gene108

    @Baud:

    Right. My question isn’t about ICE’s good faith. It’s about how a citizen with a lawyer stays locked up for four weeks. The story doesn’t explain that, but it seems quite an important piece of information

    Without a layer he’d still be locked up, and/or deported already.

  154. 154.

    Just One More Canuck

    @Spanky:

    Fred Rogers came up to Canada for a few years to work for the CBC before he did Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. When he came up here, he brought along a friend to be one of the puppeteers, Ernie Coombs. Rogers decided to go back home, so he recommended Coombs to replace him. His show eventually became Mr. Dressup, which ran on the CBC for almost 30 years and that every kid in Canada grew up with.  When I worked for Giant Evil (but no longer existing) Accounting Firm, I was doing some work for him and he came into the office to meet with me. He told me some great stories about himself and Rogers (they stayed lifelong friends) and that Rogers had a great and surprisingly salty sense of humour. People kept peeking into the meeting room, and I was inundated with questions about him for weeks afterwards

  155. 155.

    Steeplejack

    @zhena gogolia:
    I have not seen that. Looks like it could go either way. And I am leery about trailers that may or may not accurately reflect the movie.

    I’m currently girding my loins for The Irishman, to be streamed when I go over to Sighthound Hall tonight for leftovers.

  160. 160.

    mrmoshpotato

    @Steeplejack:

    I’m currently girding my loins for The Irishman, to be streamed when I go over to Sighthound Hall tonight for leftovers. 

    You ready for a good sit?

  161. 161.

    Yarrow

    Missed this yesterday:

    "Lack of Civility" is America's biggest problem, Mitch McConnell says: "The country needs to "learn how to behave better, how to be able to disagree without anger." "You've just got a lot of people engaging in bad behavior."https://t.co/nx1qAiPWOk— EssenViews (@essenviews) November 29, 2019

    Hilarious. Is Mitch feeling the heat? All those uncivil people telling him how they feel about his policies and decisions?

  162. 162.

    kindness

    Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax is .02 cents on every dollar over $50 M right?  Seems to me that data alone could make some very provocative charts.  Like putting most our holdings vs theirs and who paid what amount.   For whatever reason I feel charts leave a bigger impression than plain graphs.

  163. 163.

    debbie

    @Yarrow:
    If he’s man enough, he should look in the mirror, whisper the words “Tea” and “Party,” and acknowledge the true origins of incivility. Asshole.

  166. 166.

    comrade scotts agenda of rage

    @Betty Cracker:

    If they stay home on election day or vote for a third-party libertarian clown, that’s a win.

    Libertarian clown is redundant.  But yeah, I have a ton of friends in a hobby, every damn one would never be caught dead voting for a Democrat.  I know many of them now vote glibertarian and I consider that a win.

  168. 168.

    jonas

    @OzarkHillbilly:Then they vote Republican anyway, I guess in the hope that the tax cuts will trickle down to them too.

    That seems to have been the rationale of non-wealthy Republican voters since at least the 80’s: “Someday, when I become a multi-millionaire — which will be any day now, according to the motivational seminar I just attended — I don’t want to pay a lot of taxes!”

  169. 169.

    Peale

    @Baud: yep. It needs to be fought because this appears to be a gross and unjust expansion of those powers. It’s bad enough that the GOP wants to make local police into adjuncts of ICE, but now it appears that ICE wants authority to detain and regulate naturalized citizens in ways that others are not.

  170. 170.

    Yarrow

    @debbie: @mrmoshpotato:
    He’s just scared because his own actions are coming back to bite him. The same old tactic of blaming the left isn’t working as well as it used to. Everyone, even Republican voters, likes the idea of the wealth tax. He’s hoping that telling people to shut up (“be civil”) might stop them talking about all this stuff. LOLOLOLOL. Fuck you, Mitch.

  174. 174.

    Amir Khalid

    English Premier League bulletin: League leaders Liverpool lead visitors Brighton & Hove Albion 2-0 at halftime with headed goals from defender Virgil “Big Virg” van Dijk. Defending champions Manchester City could only draw 2-2 in the lunchtime kickoff match at Newcastle United and are 11 points behind as things stand. Still no score in the London derby between third-place Chelsea and West Ham United, and second-place Leicester City play Everton (the other Liverpool club) tomorrow. Crystal Palace lead hosts Burnley 0-1, Jose Mourinho’s revitalised Tottenham Hotspur lead Bournemouth 1-0. Still to come in the 5pm kickoff: the Southampton-Watford relegation six-pointer, between the EPL’s bottom teams.

  175. 175.

    Immanentize

    @mrmoshpotato: I watched it straight through.  I thought I would split it into 2 or even 3 evenings.  I am not a big watcher of TV.  But I couldn’t quit it.  Ended up staying awake way past my bedtime.  It’s a great story but I have some gripes.  First among them, Harvey Keitel (who I love) had only a small part, and unlike so many other of his movies, he did not show his penis.

  176. 176.

    jonas

    @Amir Khalid: People think The Life of Brian is an irreverent send-up of Christianity, but it’s really not. It’s a satire of religious thinking more generally: the need to belong, to follow, to be led; the need for a “Messiah” figure. Yes, it’s set in Bible times, but it applies to a lot of traditions and a lot of social movements more generally. It’s a cynical take on protest politics, too, of course (“Splitter!”). I recall seeing one of the Pythons in an old 80’s interview talking about how they started out wanting to do a satire of Christianity and the Gospels, but there really wasn’t a whole lot about Jesus’ life and his teaching you could honestly mock. So they turned to looking at religion and ideologies more generally, and this is what we got. Plus the greatest parody of a grammar school Latin lesson ever filmed.

  177. 177.

    J R in WV

    @?BillinGlendaleCA:

     

    I used a Kodachrome color lookup table for that and went a bit crazy with the saturation. Thanks.

     

     

    I had a tiny teeny inkling that there was a itsy bitsy smattering of Kodachrome tweaking on that color.

     

    Well done Photoshop Pro !! Seriously!

  178. 178.

    Redshift

    The polling info up top is very interesting, because I’ve been seeing a lot of hot takes lately that Warren’s rise has stagnated (or “crashed”, according to the most shameless) because of her “ill-advised” strong embrace of Medicare for All. I was pretty sure that was all motivated reasoning from people who didn’t learn that correlation does not equal causation and were looking for what they wanted to see, but this confirms it.

  179. 179.

    Amir Khalid

    Flipping Heck! Frank Lampard’s revitalised Chelsea fall behind to visitors West Ham 0-1. (Fun fact: Lampard started his playing career at West Ham, where his uncle Harry Redknapp was manager; when West Ham sacked Redknapp and assistant manager Frank Lampard Sr, Frank Jr moved to Chelsea and became a legend there.)

  180. 180.

    jonas

    weird that reporters take the temp of america at the sad sack hangouts.

    The headline we never see for some reason: “Female, African-American women dining at Atlanta supper club still hate Trump, don’t regret Clinton vote.” Yet editors will still assign these Cletus safaris…

  182. 182.

    Kay

    @Redshift:

    I’m a Warren supporter and I do think she’s kind of stalled. I align with her perfectly which is why I’m supporting her but I think she’s probably too liberal for a big chunk of the Party, who are centrists. IMO.

    People who support a Medicare buy-in or a public option are kidding themselves though- there’s a big lobbying push to kill M4A and all of the alternatives. The industry actors don’t want M4A. They also don’t want a Medicare buy-in or a public option. They like the status quo and hope to keep it.

    The enemy of your enemy is not your friend, example number 5,398.

  183. 183.

    J R in WV

    @WereBear:

     

    The secret is that ALL pies work better with a lattice top crust. So markedly that such crusts are forbidden in baking competitions.

     

    Not Maple Pecan Pie~!!!~

     

    Now, sour cherry, sure. But nothing beats those crunchy baked pecans floating on top of the maple innards.

  185. 185.

    Amir Khalid

    Liverpool’s defence are really feeling the absence of the injured centre-back Jöel Matip and defensive midfielder Fabinho. They are leading a team who haven’t won at Anfield since 1983, but still …

  186. 186.

    Kay

    @Redshift:

    Out of their pact grew an influence operation known today as the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future, a multimillion-dollar cooperative designed to overwhelm not just the swelling Medicare for All movement, but every single Democratic proposal that would significantly expand the government’s role in health care.

    The coalition’s ambitions grew with its membership. Initially focused on beating back the Medicare for All movement, the Partnership has since expanded its efforts to oppose all major expansions of government-financed health care.

    People in the expansion states really like Medicaid. If you’re over 150% of poverty in Ohio you pay about 80 bucks a month to cover a kid with no copays or out of pocket. They think it’s a good deal and it is a good deal. Once you have it you don’t want to lose it.

  187. 187.

    J R in WV

    @Marcopolo:

     

    Thinking about seeing Ford vs Ferrari later. Has anyone here seen it & have a take?

     

    We went to a theater complex to see it, only to be told it had started 30 minutes ago — we messed up on the timing badly, so went on out  to dinner before coming back home. I hear it’s good, and of course everyone likes an underdog beating the world champ.

     

    Hard to see Ford as a massive underdog, but the prancing stallion was World Champs for a long time at Le Mans. Will get out to see it soon!

  191. 191.

    West of the Rockies

    Reporters trying to take the pulse of America should talk way less to fat asses on tractors and under a dryer at a hair salon.  Go visit a college-crowd coffee house, a women’s shelter, a library or bookstore.

  195. 195.

    Amir Khalid

    Liverpool keeper Alisson Becker red-carded for handball outside the area. Adrian San Miguel is a very safe pair of hands, but we didn’t need to be down a man today.

    ETA: And Brighton score from the free-kick. 2-1. So much for the clean sheet.

  196. 196.

    jonas

    @Kay: I think the next Dem president will, particularly if we also flip the Senate, have a mandate to get a public option done. Where I think Dem candidates, including Warren, have fallen out of step with the broader electorate is replacing our current insurance system entirely with something like the Canadian or British system, and arguing for essentially open borders (which is what most people believe decriminalizing unauthorized crossing amounts to). Most non-deplorables hate what ICE and CBP are doing, especially to refugees, but pulling back any serious enforcement of border crossing is deeply unpopular across the spectrum.

  199. 199.

    NotMax

    @WereBear

    Was initially anticipating this series coming to Prime in December (Pacino’s inconsistent generic accent and all) but the more that dribbles out about it the more that curiosity has cooled, to the point where I’m expecting it to (unfortunately) degenerate over ten episodes into The A Aleph Team.

  200. 200.

    Amir Khalid

    Liverpool hang on for the three points. Whew! With Man City drawing, Chelsea losing, and Leicester still to play, it’s actually been a good day for the Reds.

  201. 201.

    J R in WV

     

    Some of us take advantage of the culinary holiday to talk about pie; you gotta problem wit’ dat?

     

    ;-)

  203. 203.

    Bill Arnold

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    Brother of convicted terrorist faces deportation despite US citizenship

    That story is seriously chilling, even assuming that there is a probable backstory.

    This keeps coming up, might as well bring it up again, re visas and what should be forgivable lapses:
    I knew someone who obtained a deserved EB-1 (“Einstein”) visa. He was(is) wicked smart, and accomplished (published high-quality papers, patents), and it was still a bit dicey. (Probably know some others as well.)
    It’s said that the only way to reach selfish Republicans is to make it personal, so:

    Of course Melania Trump deserved the Einstein visa – she’s the one who’s going to save us all – Deep down, I believe the First Lady is just biding her time until the point when The Donald pushes it one step too far (Jenny Eclair, Monday 5 March 2018)

    But I refuse to believe that there isn’t more to Melania than all this. Deep down, I believe that she has other talents and that at the moment she’s just biding her time, watching and waiting until the day Donald Trump pushes it too far. Then we will see Melania, the silent assassin, turn.
    In my head, the day the hot-dog-limbed Slovenian beauty cracks, she will wrap those endless pins around Donald’s big fat sweaty neck and just keep wrapping them.

    or, she lied on her EB-1 application, and her citizenship should be revoked. Her parents obtained US citizenship based on her status, so their citizenship is tainted as well.
    Melania’s ‘Einstein Visa’ Was Based on Her Having a College Degree — Which She Lied About Having (Andrea Jefferson, September 3, 2019)

  211. 211.

    Miss Bianca

    @Spanky: Good thing for me I’ve never seen Forrest Gump, then, because I really want to see the Mr. Rogers movie! It’s coming to my theater just before Xmas. Going to see Harriet this weekend.

  213. 213.

    Miss Bianca

    @Just One More Canuck: Oh, I loved “Mr. Dress-Up”! Grew up in Detroit, so I had a steady diet of Canadian television piped in from Windsor, ON, just across the river.

     

    Another big fave rave was “The Friendly Giant”. Pretty sure that was a Canadian show, too.

  214. 214.

    Kay

    @jonas:

    Well, if you look at that lobbying campaign they think the health care system is just fine the way it is. 9 out of 10 people have health insurance, etc.

    The problem with a public option or a Medicare buy in is it’s too small a group to be politically powerful. Medicare has survived because it’s 1. HUGE and 2. not means tested. A public option will be 10 million people scattered over 50 states. It just isn’t enough to people to do the heavy political lift that will be required. Obamacare survived because of two things – Medicaid expansion (single payer) and 2. preexisting coverage that applied to everyone.

    Universality is political armor. Fragment and it’s much easier to block and then attack.

  217. 217.

    Brachiator

    Cold cereal is the #1 breakfast in America by a wide margin but every single one of this genre of lazy reportage has as its star attraction a dude with his daily dozen eggs.

     

    Interview some people eating Capn Crunch FFS

     

    Most kids don’t want to be bothered by reporters while they are eating their Capn Crunch.

  218. 218.

    J R in WV

    @WereBear:

     

    @J R in WV: Pies which traditionally lack a top crust, like my specialty, the meringues, excepted of course.

    I have made some wonderful lemon meringue pies in my time. Let me tell you of a different story, tho, for your entertainment!

     

    We were still living in the little old farmhouse and keeping livestock, including yard birds which provided the best fresh eggs in known history.

     

    I planned and executed a great stir fry dinner when wife got home, and that afternoon had baked the best looking lemon meringue pie in modern history, thanks to the eggs, which provided golden lemon filling and a perfect egg white meringue swirled smoothly and browned perfectly.

     

    So after eating the great stir fry with ice cold beer, we paused while I went to the kitchen to slice and serve the unbelievably beautiful pie. Together we each sliced off a tip of our generous slice and raised it to our mouths.

     

    Together we both made a face, as the pie was flavorless sweetness but for a tiny hint of lemon zest in the meringue. I rushed to the kitchen, where the fresh squeezed lemon juice remained, resting in the measuring cup I squeezed the lemons into. It was nothing pie, tasteless sweet beautiful golden filling with really good looking meringue topping.

     

    The chickens loved it!!

     

    On the other hand, when I included all the ingredients, I did win pie baking contests at summertime parties. Other bakers (most all women) would whine, “But I used whole wheat flour in MY crust!” and I would reply, “Me too.”

     

    But you can’t leave out the main flavoring ingredient and have any success with any type of pie. Long time ago, now. Hostess of the pie baking contests now lives in Maine, or perhaps New Hampster.

  219. 219.

    Marcopolo

    Thanks for the feedback on Ford vs Ferrari.  Couldn’t fit it in today but looking at early next week since your comments were positive.

  220. 220.

    Brachiator

    @Kay:

     

    I’m a Warren supporter and I do think she’s kind of stalled.

    I’m a Harris supporter, and her campaign may have crashed and wrecked.  However, ultimately even though I don’t feel a lot of enthusiasm for any of the candidates, they are all acceptable to me.  I want to see Trump taken down.

     

    I also note that even though it seems as though this election campaign has been going on for decades, it is still early.  I don’t care that much about the pundit ranking, the polls, the post-debate commentary.

     

    I will be looking at the actual primary voting, the decisions of actual voters.  Warren is a good candidate.  She has plenty of time to make her case.

    I align with her perfectly which is why I’m supporting her but I think she’s probably too liberal for a big chunk of the Party, who are centrists. IMO.

    I don’t think that Warren is too liberal; but I do think that her M4A plan is a hard sell.  And many countries with universal health care do not base it primarily on a government funded single payer model.  But this seems to be an obsession of American progressives.

  221. 221.

    Ruckus

    @NotMax:

    I actually went shopping yesterday.

    Didn’t really want to but there are some things one actually needs.

    Of course I forgot one thing, which is the thing I needed most…..

    Walked in the store, more people in the checkout lines than still shopping. By the time I was done shopping all the lines were gone. Walked up paid, walked out. Not bad at all.

  223. 223.

    schrodingers_cat

    @Kay: Warren is not too liberal but I do think that she lacks good political instincts. I am reconsidering Amy K. I love the way she twists the knife with a smile on her face! I like Harris too. But both she and Warren fell for the M4A trap that BS of Vt had laid for them.

  235. 235.

    Sab

    @J R in WV: Argh! Dead thread. I saw it last week and liked it a lot. I am not a racing fan, but it was actually exciting to watch the racing. It was, as it should be, focused as much on the team of engineers as a team, and their battle with corporate management.

    I am a huge fan of Caitriona Balfe, who played Ken Miles’ wife. The kid who played their kid was also really really good.

    I spent elementary school in Daytona Beach in the sixties. Many of my childhood friends were NASA engineers. My family wasn’t into racing, but it was always there in the background around town.

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