Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Infrastructure week. at last.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

Second rate reporter says what?

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

Battle won, war still ongoing.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

You cannot shame the shameless.

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

I didn’t have alien invasion on my 2023 BINGO card.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

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

Today’s GOP: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

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

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

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

Fuck the extremist election deniers. What’s money for if not for keeping them out of office?

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

You are here: Home / Politics / Politicans / NANCY SMASH! / Thursday Morning Open Thread: CRONE POWER

Thursday Morning Open Thread: CRONE POWER

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Here’s what we know so far:

● The U.S. military said no Americans were killed or wounded in the Iranian missile attacks on bases in Iraq early Wednesday.

● U.S. officials said they knew Iranian missiles were coming hours before the attack.

● Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, called the attack a “slap in the face” of the United States but said more needed to be done to end the U.S. presence in the region and avenge the death of powerful Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani.

● Iraq’s acting prime minister said he was informed of the attack ahead of time.

● Lawmakers left a closed-door briefing with top national security officials divided over whether the strike that killed Soleimani was legally justified, and Pelosi said the House will vote Thursday on a measure to limit Trump’s military actions regarding Iran…

Also in the Power league, a man with professional experience of eldritch horror:

Reader Interactions

75Comments

  4. 4.

    TS (the original)

    It has been 301 days since The White House held a press briefing.

    Trump is really scared to let anyone know what he is, or is not doing. And just to mention because it rarely is said ….

    ……

    If the Obama administration had gone a week without a press conference, the GOP would be calling for impeachment

     

    Edit: I remember those videos – released every week, detailing what had happened “this week in the white house”.

  6. 6.

    OzarkHillbilly

    Nice profile: Doctor, sailor, Super Bowl contender: Laurent Duvernay-Tardif’s strange career

    As he waited for his name to be called at the 2014 draft he wasn’t at home or at a party, he was attending an emergency C-section to assist a mother giving birth to premature twins. He handed his phone to a nurse and said, “If somebody calls, just say yes”.

    As it turned out, Duvernay-Tardif needn’t have worried: he ended up being picked the next day in the sixth round. “When I got home, all my friends and the media were there, even though I didn’t get drafted and they were asking me, ‘Where were you?’ And I told them, ‘Well, I wasn’t done with my shift’”.
    ……………………….
    It was only in the run-up to college that Duvernay-Tardif started to properly embrace the game. His talent and size – he is currently listed at 6ft 5in and 321lbs – helped him stand out in the defensive line and when he was accepted to medical school at Montreal’s prestigious McGill University, he was inevitably tapped up by the coaches. But his academic commitments, particularly during a freshman year that saw him watch recordings of lectures at half-speed while furiously flipping through an English dictionary (French is his first language), ensured a breathless schedule.

    The following year, Duvernay-Tardif worked various hospital shifts, including overnights. To ensure he’d make the team’s early practices, sometimes he’d sleep in the locker room in his scrubs. But he seemed to find calm in the chaos and when he transitioned to the offensive line, he excelled. His teammates nicknamed him Dr Kill, a sort of Jekyll and Hyde character – the sweet, caring medic and his ruthless, bone-crushing, intimidating alter ego.

    By his fourth season in college, some whispered of a potential NFL career, and various teams came to see him in Montreal. But he told them all the same thing: continuing his degree was non-negotiable. “Some teams said, ‘Well, how do we know you’re fully committed to football?’ But others – like the Chiefs – told me, ‘This is amazing because it means you love the game and you’re here for the right reasons’”.

  8. 8.

    Baud

    @TS (the original):

    If the Obama administration had gone a week without a press conference, the GOP would be calling for impeachment

    You don’t remember how it was a thing in the media when candidate Hillary wasn’t holding enough press conferences as they would have liked.

  9. 9.

    JPL

    @satby: I was concerned about you and glad to see your post.   Since you called the police, you probably scared away the creep, but it’s still unsettling.

  10. 10.

    David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch

    Ann Selzer poll (Gold Standard) is currently being conducted in Iowa for the Des Moines Register.  They usually release the findings on a Saturday night.

     

    Monmouth is releasing their poll of New Hampshire this morning, around 9 AM eastern.

    I wish best of luck to your favorite candidate (as long as it isn’t Wilmer).

  12. 12.

    satby

    @JPL: yeah, it’s normally a quiet neighborhood, though the sketchy factor has gone up in the last year. But I’m fine, if it was a prowler I was home and if it was a peeping Tom I probably bored him to death. It’s a sturdy brick house which would take a good deal of noise to break into and my slacker pups would at least bark then ? I think it was just an oddball incident.

  13. 13.

    satby

    @Baud: I totally remember that because I had a running fight with my former classmate the journalist about it, since he also banged that drum. And was dismissive of candidate Trump being covered with any rigor since “he’s a joke and won’t get elected”.  Joke was on all of us. I quit following my former friend immediately after the election.

  15. 15.

    TS (the original)

    @Baud:  Sure do – the media does what it takes to keep the GOP in power. They consider trump’s tweets the equivalent of an Address to the Nation.

  17. 17.

    TS (the original)

    @Baud: From your link

    Chris Cillizza in the Washington Post: “Hillary Clinton hasn’t held a press conference in 257 days. That’s ridiculous.”
    Alex Pfeiffer in the Daily Caller: “Hillary Clinton hasn’t held a press conference in 260 days”

    I hold the press more responsible than the MAGAs for electing trump.

  22. 22.

    gene108

    @Baud:

    I remember. There was a daily reminder that it’s been “161 days”, since Hillary had a press conference, with her press gaggle, therefore “what is she hiding” was the only logical conclusion.

    I think the media must’ve been popping champaign bottles, when Trump won the EC, because they finally brought the bitch down.

  24. 24.

    gene108

    @satby:

    Trump shot up to the top of the Republican primary polls immediately after his racist speech in Trump Tower announcing his candidacy.

    He never trailed in any poll from that day onward.

    Yet the media still never took him seriously as a candidate.

    Why doe media organizations bother to pay to have polls done, if the journalists, political analysts, etc. just ignore them and make candidate vetting decisions based on their “gut”, “instinct”, or whatever?

    And nothing has changed in how news rooms decide to cover presidential races, because the same goons, who were in charge 4 years ago, are still in charge.

  25. 25.

    David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch

    @TS (the original):  PBS American Experience premiered a documentary on Joe McCarthy this week.  The historians  presented it as an obvious allegory to Dump.

    At the end, Pulitzer Prize historian Sam Tanenhaus indicted the corporate media: “McCarthy brought out the complicity in American journalists, that we like the troublemaker and the rabble-rouser and the theatrical, spectacular figure who says the thing you’re not supposed to say, who breaks the rules, who disregards the facts. That makes for really good copy. And that’s what happened, that’s what kept McCarthy going for a long time until it all fell apart, and then he was just discarded.”

    In painting plain parallels and in exposing inconvenient truths, he charges today’s media with their own complicity in creating the monster.

  26. 26.

    daveNYC

    Given how much fun 2020 has been so far, I don’t think it’s smart for RBG to tempt fate like that.  Just keep her head down and hope that this year’s showrunners don’t even remember she’s around.

  28. 28.

    Soprano2

    @gene108: This a thousand times. I’ve believed for a long time that the press wanted Trump to get elected because most of them hated Hillary so much,  and the thought of covering her as president filled them with horror and dread. Also, they thought it was a lot of fun to cover Trump, and really believed that crap about how he would grow into the presidency. The way they suck up to his worshippers while mostly ignoring the “Blue Wave” voters after 2018 reinforces my belief.

  29. 29.

    OzarkHillbilly

    My journey into the dark, hypnotic world of a millennial guru

    Bentinho’s ascent as an online spiritual teacher began in 2010. The fresh-faced 21-year-old had recently returned to his native Holland after a half-year “spiritual voyage” in India. There, in an abandoned ashram on the outskirts of Rishikesh, he experienced what he would later refer to as an “awakening”, a spiritual experience where the duality between the self and the universe dissolves into cosmic oneness.

    Convinced he could guide others towards this euphoria, Bentinho was overcome by an evangelical impulse. From his parents’ house in a middle-class suburb outside Amsterdam, he began recording spiritual sermons and uploading them to YouTube. In one of these early videos, entitled “What is Bliss?”, Bentinho films himself walking down a country road, flanked by green pastures and farmyard cottages. For the first eight seconds he stares into the camera, smiling.

    “When the mind starts to realize that its very nature is freedom itself,” he says, voice quavering as if he is about to start laughing or crying, it’s hard to tell, “then the inevitable response of the mind, or you could say of the body, is bliss.”

    Along with YouTube videos, Bentinho launched a website and a Facebook page to connect with a community of seekers, many of whom belonged to an earlier generation of New Age spirituality. For them, Bentinho’s youthful energy was rousing – he was a “digitally native” spiritual teacher who could use social media to spread wisdom to new frontiers.
    ………………………………..
    Towards the end of 2017, Bentinho Massaro, a 29-year-old self-styled spiritual teacher with a considerable online following, chose the town of Sedona, Arizona as the location for a 12-day long spiritual bootcamp. Among the red sandstone cliffs that rise like temples from the desert floor, the blond-haired, blue-eyed Dutchman offered to guide his most dedicated adherents towards communion with a higher life force, or in his words, “the absolute truth of the one infinite creator”.

    For those who could afford the $1,199 ticket, this would be achieved through group meditation, self-inquiry and grape juice cleanse fasting. For those who couldn’t, enlightenment would be available for a reduced price online via livestream.

    Over the preceding seven years, Bentinho had built a near half-million strong following on the internet. On YouTube (86,000 subscribers), he uploaded lengthy “third eye power” meditations to help followers “activate their pineal gland”. On Facebook (300,000 followers), he offered advice on how to maintain intimate and empowering relationships. His Instagram feed (32,000 followers) rendered a “super accelerated” lifestyle of adventure sports, international travel, and cigar smoking.

    The Sedona Experiment II, as the retreat was called, was set to be an intense distillation of Bentinho’s most profound teachings.

    Many years ago I had all my feelings surgically removed (the quack missed one, I ain’t telling you guys where it is cause you’ll all start poking at it) I should’ve had her remove my conscience at the same time.

  30. 30.

    Shalimar

    @Baud: Only the one issue where they were critical of Clinton?  And it was press conferences?  Someone in the press should write an e-mail about that.

  38. 38.

    OzarkHillbilly

    Daniel Radosh‏ @danielradosh

    Hey man, I’m a Democrat who hopes the Republicans pick a candidate I can vote for, but it’s weird how only one of us gets op-ed space for our nonsense

     

    ETA:

    Daniel Radosh
    ‏ @danielradosh

    “Trump is an incredibly risky candidate who is hated by more than half the country & has proven himself a terrible president, and Republicans should nominate someone more palatable to mainstream voters” is a 100% sound argument that has somehow never once appeared in print.

    Daniel Radosh
    ‏ @danielradosh

    But sure, let’s get another Republican advising the Democrats to nominate someone they like since their own party is so completely fucked up that the idea of them nominating someone who isn’t a horror show is literally inconceivable. fuck outta here.

  40. 40.

    Alien Radio

    Someone from the press corp ask questions about Latveria and The trump administration’s position on Vladimir’s relationship to it’s ruler,  and whether the secretary of state had expects that to Improve the situation in  Trans-Carpathia, or whether he thinks de-escalating With Iran now would prevent Rohan Riding in support?

  42. 42.

    artem1s

    @gene108:

    Yet the media still never took him seriously as a candidate.

    could be argued the media were the only ones taking him seriously.  But it’s probably more realistic to say they took him seriously as far as ad revenue was concerned.  No one wanted JEB on their air – he was probably an angel of death when it came to viewer hits. The polls reflected what people saw in the media.  Sorry, but Rachel Maddow should have never given Trump or Wilmer so much free airtime.  And these debates have been a disaster. The media is only concerned about how entertaining the whole thing is, not whether any candidate is qualified or electable.  In a sane world, Harris would be at the top of the interview list, but the media are all “yawn, AA candidate, been there, done that – yuck wimmenz! – where are the yelling white menz?”

  43. 43.

    gene108

    @Soprano2:

    The way they suck up to his worshippers while mostly ignoring the “Blue Wave” voters after 2018 reinforces my belief.

    Hell with 2018.

    It’s the way they disregarded Hillary voters after 2016.

    There 3 million more of us, than Trump voters, but it’s like we didn’t exist. Democrats, for the second time in 16 years, won the popular vote, but lost the EC, by the thinnest of margins.

    Christ on a cracker, they just ignored us for the various Cletus safaris.

  44. 44.

    Ken

    @TS (the original): It’s normalization. We saw that with the coverage of yesterday’s announcement, where the MSM ignored the 20 minute delay, the slurring, the appearance, etc.

    One of my impossible fantasies is for the next Democratic president to mimic that behavior, then call out the press when they start Seriously Asking “Is the President impaired”.

  45. 45.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Amir Khalid: Heh:

    However, he was equally notorious for not being particularly hard-working or disciplined in his personal life, as he smoked and drank large quantities of beer, once commenting:“I am an anti-athlete. I cannot deny myself certain lapses from the strict regime of a sportsman. You have to take me as I am.”

  52. 52.

    Immanentize

    @OzarkHillbilly: My theory is that they were putting Pence out so Trump wouldn’t have to do it.  But because Trump was forced to make his barstool drool yesterday, they are cancelling it because all that could happen would be that Pence would somehow contradict Trump.

    Why do I keep thinking of Woody Allen’s “Sleeper?” “Save the nose!”

  53. 53.

    germy

    The Los Angeles local TV anchor said in an interview that President Donald Trump once phoned her and called her “the hottest one at Fox News” and then allegedly said: “You should come up to my office sometime, so we can kiss.” https://t.co/vQQeck0LZ9— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) January 9, 2020

  57. 57.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Immanentize: I didn’t watch trump’s, I never do, but from what I’ve read most are like “He’s getting worse.” and thought maybe they didn’t want anybody in control of all their faculties* (limited tho they are) following so soon after.

    FTR: Now that I think about it, I’m not sure I have ever actually heard Dence speak.

  61. 61.

    Ken

    @OzarkHillbilly: I’m not sure I have ever actually heard Dence speak.

    In American Gods, there was a god of finance with the power that no one could remember his appearance.  You could look at him for a ten minute conversation, but the second you turned away you would forget his face.

    Pence may have a related ability, possibly as the god of whitebread boredom.

  70. 70.

    OzarkHillbilly

    Explain yourself, I asked readers who are indignant about President Donald Trump’s impeachment shortly before the holiday break. I wasn’t asking merely for a defense of Trump, but for an honest illumination of what defenders would think if the essential facts in the Ukraine matter were the same except for one — Hillary Clinton were president.

    Several hundred people sent emails, the majority of them thoughtfully composed and accepting the invitation in good faith. This was a vivid window into the Age of Trump.

    With sincerity, candor, and even a measure of wistful idealism, people shared their views of a political and media culture they believe is cynical at its core. If almost nothing is on the level, almost anything goes.

    For Keith Swartz, who is 66 years old and runs a recruiting firm based in Tacoma, almost anything includes a president he regards as “manic, uneducated, illogical,” and also “essentially a horrible person….vulgar, amoral, narcissistic.”

    Wait, this a defense of Trump? Yes, hang on. He’s done a fine job on the economy, in particular, in the face of a Democratic opposition that has bent rules and abused process for three years in an implacable bid to thwart him. “To those of us who support what he has accomplished,” Swartz concluded, “it feels like he is our O.J.”

    That’s right: O.J. Simpson, not previously a conservative hero. In his 2016 promises to “Make America Great Again,” Trump did not invoke the racially riven Los Angeles of the 1990s as his model. But Swartz’s admirably forthright comparison—with biased media and unscrupulous Democrats serving as proxies for racist cops—captured the spirit of many replies.

    WASF.

  71. 71.

    Gin & Tonic, Duke of Tanqueray

    @Immanentize: Mistermix bestowed the title in a thread about British royalty yesterday.

    Slavs love conspiracy theories. Some are saying they saw Russian missile fragments in some of the crash site photos (Iran uses Russian equipment). I’m traveling right now, so a bit harder to follow this than usual.

  74. 74.

    Immanentize

    @OzarkHillbilly: My great uncle who was just a few years older than my Dad was captured at the Bulge and sent to Stalag IXb.  It was hell for Bits and Americans.  Death for Russians and others.  The story of the exportation of G.I.s to a slave camp in the East is one I am still tracking down…. My Uncle may have been among those who looked Jewish or had Jewish sounding names. He drank himself dead, so I can’t ask him.

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