Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Hell hath no fury like a farmer bankrupted.

If you are still in the gop, you are either an extremist yourself, or in bed with those who are.

Everything is totally normal and fine!!!

They were going to turn on one another at some point. It was inevitable.

When we show up, we win.

It’s a good piece. click on over. but then come back!!

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

We’re watching the self-immolation of the leading world power on a level unprecedented in human history.

American history and black history cannot be separated.

Conservatism: there are people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

Balloon Juice, where there is always someone who will say you’re doing it wrong.

My right to basic bodily autonomy is not on the table. that’s the new deal.

“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.”

When you’re in more danger from the IDF than from Russian shelling, that’s really bad.

If ‘weird’ was the finish line, they ran through the tape and kept running.

I am pretty sure these ‘journalists’ were not always such a bootlicking sycophants.

This chaos was totally avoidable.

“Loving your country does not mean lying about its history.”

He really is that stupid.

All hail the time of the bunny!

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

Museums are not America’s attic for its racist shit.

It’s pointless to bring up problems that can only be solved with a time machine.

You are here: Home / Politics / GOP Death Cult / GOP Death Cult Open Thread: Trump Finds His Very Own Heaven’s Gate

GOP Death Cult Open Thread: Trump Finds His Very Own Heaven’s Gate

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Sliver of a silver lining: If he knows he’s got a dedicated mob of devoted cultists waiting to embrace his every hate rally and hate-tweet, the Squatter-in-Chief is a lot more likely to haul arse on January 21st… or November 4th.


If only it weren’t for the human collateral damage…

Reader Interactions

133Comments

  1. 1.

    RaflW

    Side note, but this is really important. GOP ratf*k won’t fly in WI.

    @Bencjacobs
    The Wisconsin Elections Commission just voted by a 5 to 1 margin that Kanye West did not file in time and thus that he will not appear on the ballot in Wisconsin in 2020

  2. 2.

    Doug R

    Well, trump’s* embrace of Qanon proves it’s a Russian op. Sometimes the fringe work pays off.

  3. 3.

    dlwchico

    My sister, who is 51 and an RN (though she hasn’t actually worked as one for about 15 years) has been going off the deep end. She thinks the pandemic is overblown (it’s just a flu). Won’t wear a mask.
    Wrote me an email a few months ago that railed against people trying to take our freedom.

    Today she sent an email that linked to the website for the Epoch Times. She used to be a fan of Obama and thought Trump was terrible but now I think she is probably going to vote for Trump. We don’t talk that much anymore so I’m not sure. I’m afraid to ask her if she believes this Q bullshit.

  4. 4.

    R-Jud

    A dear friend, someone who’s really cared for me these last few years, has gone full-metal QAnon/“Plandemic” nutcase recently. I don’t know how to talk to her anymore. I’m heartbroken.

    Also she’s English, and a nurse, which just makes it so weird.

  5. 5.

    Jonas

    Well, it’s 2020. A global pandemic is raging. The President of the United States is a bloviating, corrupt, ignoramus allied with Russia displaying clear signs of mental degeneration, who embraces a crazy conspiracy cult that believes he’s some kind of messianic figure fighting cannibals and pedophiles who have entrenched themselves throughout the federal government.

    This appears not to be the plot of some kind of dystopian, darkly humorous video game, but the day’s headlines. Fuck me.

  6. 6.

    PsiFighter37

    @RaflW: Good.

    I still don’t understand how Kanye went from calling out Dubya on live TV for shitting on black people to where he is now. Mental illness sucks.

  8. 8.

    Roger Moore

    @RaflW:

    I hope they can find some kind of criminal charge for the Republicans who helped him.  At the very least, there should be something for submitting obviously fraudulent signatures.

  10. 10.

    MattF

    Trump buys the all the premises– he’s a genius, he’s saving the world, he never lies, any disagreement is a hoax, any reports that differ are fake news. So… color me not surprised.

  11. 11.

    Starfish

    @dlwchico: I have a friend who passive-aggressively leaves books by liberal politicians around her wingnut parent’s home. Perhaps you can send her some magazine subscriptions?

  13. 13.

    David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch

    @MattF: Dump doesn’t buy the premise.  He knows he’s a fraud, that’s why he has so many deep insecurities.   When he’s alone with his cheeseburgers he knows he incompetently bankrupted casinos, Manhattan real estate, and a football league and squared his inheritance and no one will invest in him so he had to become a money launderer and a scam artist selling mail order bovine flesh; he knows the elite, from who he craves affirmation, view him as a dim witted scum married to an illiterate escort.  That why he openly talks about his love for the uneducated – they’re the only suckers who can’t see him for what he is.

  14. 14.

    Barbara

    @R-Jud: @dlwchico:

    Some people deal with adversity that they have no control over only through denial or by fixing blame  on someone.  Think of Jews being blamed for the plague. The world has to have order, and not just the obvious biological order as simple as, the virus wants to live and keeps reproducing, but order that makes sense to you.

  17. 17.

    Mike in NC

    Just read that Fat Bastard has called on his cult to boycott Goodyear Tires because the company doesn’t allow employees to wear politically oriented stuff to work, including MAGA hats. You can’t make up shit this crazy.

  19. 19.

    R-Jud

    @Barbara:  Right. For her specifically I think this is a reaction to the trauma of actually having treated COVID patients who died. At least the “Plandemic” shit is.

    But I don’t know how to show up for that trauma when she’s also claiming that my ordering a new bed from Wayfair contributed to child trafficking. She needs help I can’t give; her boyfriend is enabling her.

    I was in a really dark place a few years ago and she pulled me out, but I don’t know if I can do the same for her here.

  20. 20.

    Chris Johnson

    @Doug R: 
    No shit it is, very obviously so. Administered through 4chan and 8chan, tracked where possible through Facebook and Google, functioning as stochastic terrorism: QAnon is literally a Russian operation.

    The interesting thing is to see which Republicans aren’t on board with the full Russian warfare against America. Karl Rove apparently is not on board. I think you’ll find a lot of these guys without a bad word to say about QAnon, because they need to stay out of the way of the operation or assist it.

  22. 22.

    Kent

    CA fire update since this is an open thread.

    Currently in San Francisco with blue skies and 71 degree weather.  Drove down yesterday from the Portland area partly to do family business at the Chilean Consulate and partly to do some college visits with the 17 year old.    My wife is flying in tonight to meet us.

    Yesterday afternoon we obliviously driving down I-5 around the CA border when our scheduled hotel for last night in Vacaville called to say there were fires approaching the hotel and smoke everywhere but they were still open and not in the evacuation zone.  What?  I ask?  What fires?  So I ask daughter to get her phone off TikToc and look up CA fires.  The desk clerk at the Holiday Inn Express in Vacaville said they had lots of people in the lobby evacuated from their homes who were looking for rooms and asked if I wanted to give up the reservation.  I said sure and we found a hotel in Redding instead, well north of the fire zone.

    This morning there was ash all over the car in Redding.  Contemplated whether it was smart to continue to SF or not but my wife was flying down tonight and we had pre-paid hotel reservations in SF and google maps said the road was clear.  Figuring that no fires would jump across the bay we continued on.  We have some complicated notary business to do at the Chilean consulate related to my wife’s family estate in Chile and it would be another month to make another appointment if we skipped this one.

    Driving past Vacaville there were large sections of grassy hills that were burnt on each side of I-80 where the fire jumped the freeway and closed it yesterday. But today all was normal except for the heavy smoke.  Forest fires would be smoldering for weeks, but I guess these grass fires just come and go really quickly.

    Daughter and I were planning to continue south to visit Stanford, Santa Clara, and a few private schools in the LA area but having second thoughts now if the whole state is on fire.  We have hotel reservations in Santa Clara for tomorrow but nothing past that.  This is weird.  The whole state basically caught on fire in 24 hours.

  26. 26.

    Jeffro

    Some enterprising young reporter should ask “sir…about QAnon and their belief that you are somehow, behind the scenes, fighting satanists and pedophiles…can you at least hint at some of your tactics and victories?  We’re all dying to know more!  Please, sir!!”

    Seriously.  Just let ‘er rip there, trumpov!  the Q folks will love you!!

  27. 27.

    WereBear

    After decades of Faux News pounding the lie of the day into their heads, they can think only in the moment and so contradictions do not “take.” Which is how they fall for ALL the Q conspiracies?

  28. 28.

    Barbara

    @R-Jud: There’s no doubt that people can feed each other’s paranoia.  My dad and two of my siblings have/had paranoid tendencies but it’s usually more personal, not geopolitical in nature. Still, I really hate engaging with that kind of thinking. My response would be something like, 1, there have been diseases throughout history, and 2, nobody’s powerful enough to control a virus like this.  And that would be it.

  29. 29.

    Jay

    @Mike in NC:

    Goodyear makes the run-flat tires the Secret Service uses, even on the Presidential limos.

    and they allow LGTBQ and BLM merch to be worn at work, just not the White Supremacy stuff like MAGA hats, Blue Lives Matter, or All Lives Matter.

  30. 30.

    Alison Rose

    All these GOPers who are shocked, shocked to find Qanon lovers in their party need to have all the seats. Y’all encouraged this shit for yeeeeeeeears and now you’re going to pretend you’re offended by it? Fuck off.

  33. 33.

    Kent

    I can’t decide who are worse. The Q-idiots or the racists.  I lean towards the racists.  Either way they are all deplorables.

  34. 34.

    Eric S.

    Has Dollhands commented on QAnon before today? It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if today was the first time he’s heard of them.

  35. 35.

    Morzer

    Where Trump and the truth are concerned, I think Patrick O’Brian summed it up rather well in his novel The Thirteen Gun Salute:

    ’“Do you remember I once said of [Lord] Clonfert that for him truth was what he could make others believe?…I expressed myself badly. What I meant was that if he could induce others to believe what he said, then for him the statement acquired some degree of truth, a reflection of their belief that it was true; and this reflected truth might grow stronger with time and repetition until it became conviction, indistinguishable from ordinary factual truth, or very nearly so.”’

  36. 36.

    Martin

    @Jay: He’s said that if the 60,000 mostly Ohio Goodyear workers lose their jobs over this, its fine, they can just find other jobs.

    This is a good electoral strategy.

  37. 37.

    Martin

    @Eric S.: Oh, he’s commented on them before. He knows they are supporters, he doesn’t care that they’re dangerous to every other human on earth.

  38. 38.

    Haydnseek

    @Kent: No, the whole state isn’t on fire.  If you continue south to check out schools in the Los Angeles area it won’t be normal due to the virus, but not because of fires.  Get a grip.  I’ve lived here for 68 years, and the only fire that I ever feared was the one in the San Gabriel mountains that threatened Mt. Wilson.  I see the antennas there from my kitchen window.  Please stay safe.  As you travel south you’ll be safer.

  40. 40.

    Scout211

    @Kent:

    If you read through the California fire thread from yesterday, most of the SoCal jackals said things were much better in the southern part of the state.
    You made the right choice to stay in Redding  last night, though. I-80 was closed in both directions last night at Vacaville.

  41. 41.

    West of the Rockies

    Maybe this Qanon shit is a bridge too far for another 100K would-be Trump voters nationwide, enough to tip a dozen counties leftward.  That’s fine by me.

  42. 42.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Morzer: Damn, that’s perfect.

    I don’t know if Stephen Maturin is my favorite fictional character, but he’s definitely in the top five.

  43. 43.

    ?BillinGlendaleCA

    @Kent: We have 2 major fires here in LA, one between Lancaster and Frazier Park(between the 14 and 5) and the other north of Azuza in the San Gabriels.  Most of the worst of the fires are up north.

  44. 44.

    Jay

    @Martin:

    most QAnon are mostly dangerous to themselves.

    they have created/been sucked into a delusional world view, pushing “normies” out of their lives and relying on an online “support network”.

    QAnon is going to end with the bang of mass suicides, like other mass cults, not with a whimper.

  45. 45.

    laura

    @Kent: play it safe and amscray. Yesterday was a holy terror – and things can change in an instant. St. Mary’s will still be here after the fires are out ?

    Regarding this whole Q business – it is terrorism and will not be surprised that it is one of the subjects of concern that the Senate Intelligence Community has on its radar but the GOP cant be bothered to do anything about.

  46. 46.

    Chris Johnson

    @Martin: He called ’em a MOVEMENT. That is exactly the framing Russia wants them to have. They are not, they are a propaganda operation for the purpose of radicalizing and panicking Americans. It’s Putin 101, dead center in the middle of his tactics.

  50. 50.

    Bill Arnold

    @dlwchico:

    A dear friend, someone who’s really cared for me these last few years, has gone full-metal QAnon/“Plandemic” nutcase recently. I don’t know how to talk to her anymore. I’m heartbroken.

    Tell her that QAnon was originally an experimental right-wing Israeli influence operation, to raise up an easily and rapidly manipulable stochastic online and meatspace army. [of gullible nutcases but don’t say that.]
    The original (competent) talent left (got bored?) and it’s now a confused cult, the reins (disinformation feeds) being fought over by multiple actors, both state and non-state.
    This might even be true, at least until somebody convincingly takes credit.
    Adjust actors for the target person. If one is strong of mind, review Q documents to see who they don’t criticize for clues. (Sigh, I need to do that.)

    This is Jo Rae Perkins, the Republican Party’s nominee for the U.S. Senate in Oregon, taking the QAnon digital soldier oath. https://t.co/Rgtm4hWcrr
    — Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) June 27, 2020

  51. 51.

    Jay

    BTW, hellofa problem you guys are having down there with Boater Fraud just before the election,….

  52. 52.

    Kent

    @Haydnseek: @Kent: No, the whole state isn’t on fire.  If you continue south to check out schools in the Los Angeles area it won’t be normal due to the virus, but not because of fires.  Get a grip.  I’ve lived here for 68 years, and the only fire that I ever feared was the one in the San Gabriel mountains that threatened Mt. Wilson.  I see the antennas there from my kitchen window.  Please stay safe.  As you travel south you’ll be safer.

    We will probably continue south because we are this far anyway.  And distance learning HS doesn’t start until Sept 1 back in Camas.  It’s hard to get a grip on what is actually happening because nearly every damn newspaper in this state is paywalled and you can’t even get one or two free stories before they start asking you to subscribe.  And all the TV news web sites have so much pop up crap it’s hard to navigate on a phone.

    All the schools are closed, but you can still do your own walking tours and see all the same stuff you would if there was some undergrad leading you around.  This is my second child and so I’ve done a ton of these college tours.  Usually it is just a lot of walking and looking at buildings from the outside with a peek inside the library and sports facilities and a look at a sample dorm room which are mostly alike.  But they are useful to see how the school is laid out and what the surrounding neighborhoods are like since it is a place to live for four years.

    Mostly we are sick of quarantine and in need of a road trip and this is the excuse.

    San Francisco is beautiful right now, other than the pandemic.

  53. 53.

    HumboldtBlue

    @Morzer:

    That’s perfect and that is one of the best books in the whole series. His character development was top notch.

    I’m gonna come back with my Lord Liverpool from the same Napoleonic era.

     

    As described by contemporary historian Peter Brougham —

    Of views upon all things the most narrow, upon religious and even political questions the most bigoted and intolerant, his range of mental vision was confined to his proportion of ignorance on all general subjects.

    Within that sphere he saw with extreme acuteness — as the mole is supposed to be more sharp-sighted than the eagle for half a quarter of an inch before it; but as beyond the limits of his little horizon he saw no better than the mole, so like her, he firmly believed and always acted on the belief that beyond what he could descry nothing whatever existed; and he mistrusted, dreaded and even hated all who had ampler visual range than himself.

    Beside the manifest sincerity of his convictions, attested perhaps, by his violence and rancour, he possessed many qualities, both of the head and the heart, which strongly recommenAs described by contemporary historian Peter Brougham — Of views upon all things the most narrow, upon religious and even political questions the most bigoted and intolerant, his range of mental vision was confined to his proportion of ignorance on all general subjects.

    Within that sphere he saw with extreme acuteness — as the mole is supposed to be more sharp-sighted than the eagle for half a quarter of an inch before it; but as beyond the limits of his little horizon he saw no better than the mole, so like her, he firmly believed and always acted on the belief that beyond what he could descry nothing whatever existed; and he mistrusted, dreaded and even hated all who had ampler visual range than himself.

    Beside the manifest sincerity of his convictions, attested perhaps, by his violence and rancour, he possessed many qualities, both of the head and the heart, which strongly recommended him to the confidence of the English people.

    He never scared them with refinements, nor alarmed them their fears by any sympathy with improvement out of the old beaten track; and he shared largely in all their favourite national prejudiced him to the confidence of the English people.

    He never scared them with refinements, nor alarmed them their fears by any sympathy with improvement out of the old beaten track; and he shared laregly in all their favourite national predjudices.

  54. 54.

    mrmoshpotato

    Oh JEB!

    What a stupid, stupid man who’s paid no attention to his own party for at least 40 years.

  56. 56.

    Kent

    @HumboldtBlue:

    @Kent:

    If ya come back north on 101 let me know and I’ll stand on the corner waving a flag and dancing.

    I think that’s unlikely.  We will just want to get home.  Last time we passed through your neck of the woods I was biking down with the same daughter when she was about 10 and my 77 year old father.  We biked down 101 and CA-1 from Astoria to SF.  Me on a tandem pulling a trailer and my dad on his recumbent.  I photo blogged the whole trip

    http://kentalind.blogspot.com/

  58. 58.

    Old Dan and Little Ann

    I know one full blown Q believer.  That boy ain’t right.  My book of faces post about the chicks dying in the mail triggered him to reply with a YouTube video regarding some grand plot about a cashless society.  He’s asked me before why I always delete his replies.  Duh. The same reason I pick up dog shit in my yard. I don’t Fucking want it there and no one else needs to see it either.

  59. 59.

    Roger Moore

    @Martin:

    Anyone interested in a rundown of the Uber/Lyft thing in California?

    How much of a rundown does it need?  As far as I can see, it’s pretty simple:

    1. A couple of years ago, the California Supreme Court made ruling that strictly limited who could be counted as an independent contractor; other people who had previously been considered contractors would be reclassified as employees.
    2. Last year, the California legislature codified the ruling in AB5.
    3. Uber and Lyft have continued to violate the ruling and AB5 while sponsoring a ballot initiative (Prop 22) that would exempt them.
    4. Uber and Lyft recently lost a major court ruling that says yes indeed, the law does apply to them.
    5. Now Uber and Lyft are planning on shutting down operations in California. This is both a form of pouting over not getting their way and a way of trying to bully voters into voting for their ballot initiative.
  60. 60.

    lowtechcyclist

    So Nancy has decided for some reason to SMASH Ed Markey; she’s endorsed Kennedy’s challenge.

  61. 61.

    catclub

    @MattF: Trump buys the all the premises– he’s a genius, he’s saving the world, he never lies, any disagreement is a hoax, any reports that differ are fake news.

     

    One of the clues to Q (according to the nutters) was that if you take a random assortment of letters out of two different Trump tweets, you get ‘I am Q’.  Both times!  maybe it is Trump  and a sockpuppet.

  63. 63.

    Kent

    @Roger Moore: What’s your sense of how this is going to resolve?  I would personally be happy to see Uber and Lyft crash and burn and come limping back into CA but I don’t have a sense of the CA politics.  I’m a suburbanite who never uses them.  I was surprised at how fast the state of TX caved to their extortion and overruled Austin when I was living there.

  64. 64.

    Jeffro

    @Kent: Q nuts are worse… They are racists whose minds won’t let them accept that they have been conned, so they’re willing to believe any number of insane things

  68. 68.

    trollhattan

    @Kent:

    Yup, it’s off the charts bad because there are so many major events in widely scattered locations. They have to decide which fires to ignore for now.

    We drove the kid to her new school yesterday, down 80 and past The LNU Complex southern edge, which at the time was about 5 miles north of the freeway in a canyon. 1.5 hour drive.

    Last night it had marched to and across the by then closed I-80. Only we didn’t know that and ended driving unknown farm roads in the dark along with every truck, RV and SUV on the planet. 5.5 hours. My phone was on 4% when I got home, as I was using it for nav.

    Ugh. Air quality index is [checks] 279. And it’s snowing.

    Good luck!

  70. 70.

    Kent

    @Jeffro:@Kent: Q nuts are worse… They are racists whose minds won’t let them accept that they have been conned, so they’re willing to believe any number of insane things

    You think?  My sense is that the racist fucks in authority like say Jeff Sessions or the police union guys do more damage to our society than these Q nuts.  There are a lot of powerful people maintaining institutional racism in this country.  But maybe I’m out of touch with this Q thing.  I have a hard time really taking it seriously as a real threat.

  71. 71.

    RaflW

    @Kent: Inciweb is the public fire info site, though CalFire may be better specifically in California. No paywalls, no ads, no hype.

    I’m back in MN, but watching Colorado closely. One of the three main fires our there is now the second biggest in Colorado recorded history, and another is really just a matter of miles from our condo (which is in a decent sized town so I’m not that concerned. It could burn, but that would mean that the fire season had gone super-catastrophic, and people with far more to lose than me would be so fkkd that I’d just be a whiner by comparison).

  73. 73.

    Calouste

    @Roger Moore: That’s the conclusion in drew and led me to delete my Lyft account. I’ll see after the pandemic how I’m going to get around if I would need a service like that. There are still taxis.

  74. 74.

    Bill Arnold

    @Another Scott:
    How three conspiracy theorists took ‘Q’ and sparked Qanon
    That’s an interesting piece, yes, but the identity of Q remains a mystery publicly AFAIK. In that it resembles the origins of bitcoin. (“Satoshi Nakamoto”. Here’s a theory list from 2019)

  75. 75.

    NoraLenderbee

    Northern CA isn’t all on fire either. Most of the fires in the Bay Area are in fairly remote or limited-access areas with relatively low potential for property damage or loss of life. We stood on a mountain south of SF yesterday watching the smoke clouds. It looks like hell, and it’s shocking the way they all started at once. But for most of us, life will be back to normal soon*.

    *For some definition of normal.

  77. 77.

    Roger Moore

    @Jay: 

    most QAnon are mostly dangerous to themselves.

    I wish I had your confidence. There have been numerous incidents of QAnon followers engaging in violence against people they believed were part of the conspiracy, and that’s likely to intensify if they think they’re losing. The group is a ticking time bomb.

  79. 79.

    dmsilev

    @Kent: It really depends on the ballot initiative the companies are pushing (and spending lots of money advertising for). If that passes, it carves a big loophole in the law which, more or less, let’s the companies continue business-as-usual. I don’t have a good sense as to how likely it is that it will pass; I haven’t seen any polling, but there are so many initiatives here that a lot of people default to voting no on anything even vaguely controversial, so they start out with a high hill to climb. But again, big ad budget.

  80. 80.

    Jay

    @trollhattan:

    a big problem limiting which fires they can tackle, is that CA relies on indentured servitude from prisoners for the majority of ground crews,

    and SARS-Covid-19 is tearing through the Base Camps/Prison Camps.

  81. 81.

    NoraLenderbee

    “these are people that love our country.”

    And some of them, I assume, are good people.

  82. 82.

    RaflW

    @Roger Moore: Uber reported a larger than expected loss last quarter, and total trips were down 13%, mostly attributed to Covid.

    I don’t know how much that all plays into the CA fight, but probably at least a contributing factor to it all.

    My sense is, from the biz press I’ve bothered with, they don’t really have a workable business model except to smash taxis and transit and hope for duopoly pricing afterwards? (IDK – I’ve used Lyft a little, and Uber on one Lyft-less trip, so I’m not that into the whole ‘ride-share’ thing much). We’ve continued to use taxis some with the view that if no one rides taxis, they won’t be around if/when Uber-Lyft fails.

  84. 84.

    HumboldtBlue

    @lowtechcyclist:

    And according to the progressives she just opened up the door for challenges to sitting Democrats after she warned that any businesses who worked with challengers would be black-balled by the DCCC so that’s going to be interesting.

  85. 85.

    trollhattan

    @Jay:

    It gets complicated which fires fall under what jurisdiction. NFS gets control of and prime responsibility for those that start on federal land and Cal Fire leads others. Mutual aid brings in firefighters from all over, and the prison crews are part of that. Yesterday PG&E lost somebody who was part of a response.

    Evacuation centers are being sited in hotels due to COVID, but IDK what rural areas do since they won’t have adequate rooms.

  86. 86.

    Jay

    @Roger Moore:

    since Q first appeared in 2017 there have been a handful of violent acts by QAnon “believers”.

    Nazi’s have killed far, far more in the same timeframe.

    And QAnon-ists sadly, number in the millions.

  87. 87.

    Roger Moore

    @Kent:

    What’s your sense of how this is going to resolve?

    I don’t think the state legislature is going to back down.  They had every chance to exempt companies like Uber and Lyft when they wrote AB5 and decided not to.  There’s no way they’re going to spend the very limited time left in the legislative session giving in to blackmail.

    I don’t have a very good idea of how popular Prop 22 is or how voters will react to the companies’ actions.  I’m personally mad as hell about it.  It makes me want to vote no even more than I already did, but I have no idea if I’m typical or not.

  91. 91.

    Calouste

    @RaflW: Their business model sucks, because drive share is a pretty easy market to get into, so they won’t get a duopoly. And any new entrant to that market won’t have the billions of debt that Uber has, and says thank you very much for familiarizing the public with the concept of ride share.

  93. 93.

    HumboldtBlue

    @Kathleen:

    I was under that assumption, but folks took a look and said, “cool, challenges are coming.”

    AOC was one of the first comment and it’s going to be interesting going forward how that plays out. They argue if she’s going to take a role opposing an incumbent they will as well.

  94. 94.

    mrmoshpotato

    @Baud: I could go for all these morons cannibalizing each other the basement of an abandoned house in the middle of nowhere.

  95. 95.

    ?BillinGlendaleCA

    @Kathleen: I’d think so, and folk have to remember the DCCC is  composed of incumbent Democratic House members so their primary goal is retaining their seats.  Their secondary goal is electing more Democrats.

  97. 97.

    Roger Moore

    @RaflW:

    My sense is, from the biz press I’ve bothered with, they don’t really have a workable business model except to smash taxis and transit and hope for duopoly pricing afterwards?

    My sense is that Uber and Lyft- and some of the other gig-work companies involved in this, like DoorDash- are basically long cons.  During the height of the dot com bubble, I asked a friend who knew more about this stuff than me what was going on with all these companies.  It seemed obvious to me that they didn’t have a viable business model, so I didn’t understand why smart venture capitalists were putting money into them.  He explained their business model was to sell stock to greater fools and get out before the house of cards collapsed.

    Investors obviously learned a lesson when the bubble collapsed, and you couldn’t make enough money just by slapping “dot com” onto the end of a random business anymore.  But Uber, Lyft, et. al. have added a little spin to the basic concept.  Instead of just going for a quick IPO and sell off, they’re trying to pretend to be viable businesses and future reapers of monopoly rent once they’ve crushed the competition.  They’re willing to lose money subsidizing their customers for years to convince people they’re going to be profitable in the future.  But the same basic idea holds: they’re hoping to make it big selling stock, even if the company itself isn’t viable.

  98. 98.

    trollhattan

    @?BillinGlendaleCA:

    IDK. Earlier this year I’ve seen a DC-10 and a 747. I can hear some of the fleet today but seeing them is out of the question. They fly out of McClellan and Mather fields.

  100. 100.

    Chyron HR

    @HumboldtBlue:

    And according to the progressives she just opened up the door for challenges to sitting Democrats

    Yeah, just today she really opened up the door to the thing they’ve been doing for the past several election cycles.  Let me guess, she also just retroactively justified the “Biden’s a senile rapist” line they’ve been pushing since March?

  102. 102.

    Bill Arnold

    @Roger Moore:

    They’re willing to lose money subsidizing their customers for years to convince people they’re going to be profitable in the future. But the same basic idea holds: they’re hoping to make it big selling stock, even if the company itself isn’t viable.

    This is my impression too. Uber has some extra sauce – asshole libertarianism often with fuck-yous to the controlling governments. Sometimes it works.

  103. 103.

    HumboldtBlue

    @Chyron HR:

    You’re going to have to ask them.

    @?BillinGlendaleCA:

    I’m not sure and too lazy to go searching at this point, what with the convention coming on and it’s also nearly DAME TIME! (Damian Lillard is an extraordinary basketball player who led his Portland Trailblazers to an upset win in game one over the fucking Lakers.)

  104. 104.

    Dan B

    @Jay: A reminder:  Tuesday is when Steve Bannon is on the schedule at the RNC!

    Speculation as to who else might be arrested before their speaking slot?  Asking for some very best, bigly best, very disturbed Qanon “friends”.

  105. 105.

    Morzer

    I have a great deal of respect for Pelosi as a manager and vote counter, but I think she should have stayed out of Markey/Kennedy.

  106. 106.

    Roger Moore

    @Bill Arnold:

    The one I’m really on the fence about is AirBNB.  I think the original concept- people renting out space in their homes when they aren’t going to be using it- is reasonable.  And I honestly think they’ve found a real need in the temporary housing market: sometimes it’s much better to rent a house rather than some hotel rooms.  But they’re incredibly destructive in areas suffering housing crunches.  Houses are being converted into de facto hotels, and it’s meaningfully contributing to homelessness.  They seem like a business that could be really valuable if they were better regulated.

  107. 107.

    Kent

    @Roger Moore:My sense is that Uber and Lyft- and some of the other gig-work companies involved in this, like DoorDash- are basically long cons.  During the height of the dot com bubble, I asked a friend who knew more about this stuff than me what was going on with all these companies.  It seemed obvious to me that they didn’t have a viable business model, so I didn’t understand why smart venture capitalists were putting money into them.  He explained their business model was to sell stock to greater fools and get out before the house of cards collapsed.

    Of course they are a long con.  The most insanely stupid part of it is the self-driving part.  I can’t conceive of what Uber is thinking to dump billions into self-driving Taxis.   Right now they complain about labor costs, but their drivers do 100% of their vehicle maintenance, storage during off hours, insurance, liability, etc. etc..   If Uber gets rid of the drivers and owns its own fleet of self driving cars they are going to need immense infrastructure to charge, maintain, clean, service, and store them.  And they will have immense capital and liability costs.

    Anyone who thinks self-driving Taxis are a good idea only has to walk out into an ordinary San Francisco street with all the construction, homeless, bikers, scooters, jaywalkers, double-parked vehicles, and such and try to imagine how computers are going to navigate that.

  108. 108.

    Kent

    @Calouste:@RaflW: Their business model sucks, because drive share is a pretty easy market to get into, so they won’t get a duopoly. And any new entrant to that market won’t have the billions of debt that Uber has, and says thank you very much for familiarizing the public with the concept of ride share.

    Exactly.  It’s not at all like Facebook which holds a monopoly because everyone you know is already there and no one would be on some new startup.  All an uber competitor would need to do in any random city is some clever marketing and they would be in the door.  Especially if they had a clever niche like driver-owned co-op or something that would make people pick them.

    Taxi companies should have done this long ago.  They were too ossified to respond.  It’s not that people didn’t like taxis.  They didn’t like having to make a voice call and not know when some taxi would show up.

  109. 109.

    Kent

    @Roger Moore:The one I’m really on the fence about is AirBNB.  I think the original concept- people renting out space in their homes when they aren’t going to be using it- is reasonable.  And I honestly think they’ve found a real need in the temporary housing market: sometimes it’s much better to rent a house rather than some hotel rooms.  But they’re incredibly destructive in areas suffering housing crunches.  Houses are being converted into de facto hotels, and it’s meaningfully contributing to homelessness.  They seem like a business that could be really valuable if they were better regulated.

    AirB&B should be the easiest to regulate.   Because you can’t hide the houses or rentals.  They are stuck in place and any diligent city regulatory agency can just pull up AirB&B app and go find them all on foot and issue them citations or licenses or inspections or whatever.  I can see all the AirB&B rentals for a give city in an instant.  I can’t find all the Uber drivers.  I can only hail one of them at a time.

  110. 110.

    Ken

    If as seems likely a couple of QAnon-ists are elected to the House, does anyone think the House might use its Article I Section 5 powers to expel them? It requires a two-thirds vote, but it has happened a few times.

  111. 111.

    Dan B

    @Kathleen: My grandmother was a good friend of Mrs. F.A. Seiberling (Gertrude).  F. A. Founded Goodyear.  My grandmother Anna Jones and Gertrude were both trained operatic singers.  They collaborated on bringing musicians and orchestras to Akron.  They often stayed at Stan Hywet, the 100 room home on 3,000 acres.  I have some paintings from Gertrude to this day.

    My father was a chief chemist for the company F.A. founded after the NY bankers took control of Goodyear.  F.A. spent a lot of time on the factiry floor talking to the workers and knew most by name.  It was a management style the NY bankers did not like.

  112. 112.

    Eunicecycle

    @Dan B: we love Stan Hywet! Beautiful old house, with gorgeous gardens in the spring and summer and thousands of lights and decorations in December.

  113. 113.

    Ken

    @Kent: all the construction, homeless, bikers, scooters, jaywalkers, double-parked vehicles, and such and try to imagine how computers are going to navigate that.

    10 SOUND HORN
    20 ACCELERATE
    30 GOTO 10

  115. 115.

    Martin

    @Kent:

    Daughter and I were planning to continue south to visit Stanford, Santa Clara, and a few private schools in the LA area but having second thoughts now if the whole state is on fire.  We have hotel reservations in Santa Clara for tomorrow but nothing past that.  This is weird.  The whole state basically caught on fire in 24 hours.

    Things are generally fine here in SoCal, and are fine in almost all parts of NorCal that you will drive through.

    In a way, this isn’t terribly uncommon. Every few  years we’ll have widespread outbreaks  due to storms or winds or whatever. What’s unusual now is that while the fires aren’t threatening people broadly, we’re being told that much of the firefighting infrastructure isn’t functioning due to Covid. So what would otherwise be difficult and unfortunate, would at least be manageable, and right now CalFire is kind of shrugging and saying ‘we don’t know if we can handle it or not’, and that takes us to  places that we don’t know what they look like. At least I don’t know – maybe folks who have been in the state longer have seen it. Generally speaking things on the ground aren’t bad apart from Vacaville area – not a great time for a scenic Napa drive, but we’re alarmed because we don’t know how it’ll look next week because things have changed. Odds are it’ll be fine. At least the feds are giving us resources this time, unlike last summer.

    Generally speaking when traveling during fires, try and route around the major ones, and pay attention to your traffic app (Google or whatever) for any minor ones that pop up. I’ve driven through small fires that were burning up against the side of the freeway a number of times (once in Saskatchewan) and it gets your attention, but most fires are quite small and low to the ground. I assume most people here have dealt with that. Driving into LA from out of state on 4th of July night will pretty much guarantee you see plenty of that.

    Steer around the large ones particularly if they’re below 50% containment. They really do a good job of closing roads and rerouting, but firefighters are trying to get in, residents evacuating – they don’t need you there. Over 50%, they’ve got a handle on it, it’s just burning wilderness, and things are getting back to normal.

    There aren’t fires too close to anything in Santa Clara or around Stanford, though you will be very aware of large fires some dozens of miles away. It’s safe, but it’ll be an experience. I’ve spoken to prospective students and parents with a pumpkin orange sky and continual ash falling, and you can immediately tell who is from CA and who is not. The CA folks are concerned of the overall state of affairs, but pretty much just shake it off. The out of state folks are full ‘what the fuck is going on’.

    And a tip – don’t brush ash off of the paint on your car – it’ll scratch. Clear your windshield so you have visibility and just let it blow off.

  116. 116.

    trollhattan

    @Kent:

    Anyone who thinks self-driving Taxis are a good idea only has to walk out into an ordinary San Francisco street with all the construction, homeless, bikers, scooters, jaywalkers, double-parked vehicles, and such and try to imagine how computers are going to navigate that.

    The left turn will remain the Friedman Unit of self-driving cars until such time as we capitulate. They do not have an adequate solution.

    My fear is self-driving semis will be given free reign of the interstates, maybe Mitch and Missus Mitch will throw the trucking industry a bone on their way out and compel states to allow it, lest they lose federal funding. IMO we’ll see self-driving trucks long before passenger vehicles.

  117. 117.

    The Pale Scot

    @dlwchico:

    Today she sent an email that linked to the website for the Epoch Times.

    The Epoch Times. That smarmy fuck that interrupts my concerts on uTube, that guy will be sent to the Siberian salt mines when the revolution comes

  118. 118.

    Dan B

    @Eunicecycle:  My grandmother stayed at Stan Hywet with my twin red-headed aunts and my father and would perform for the Tuesday Musical Club and other guests.  My father loved all the servants’ secret passageways.

    We were offered to stay in the carriagehouse but my mother was afraid my brother and I would griw up with only Firestone and Goodrich kids as playmates.

  119. 119.

    joel hanes

    @Martin:

    things on the ground aren’t bad apart from Vacaville area

    The Santa Cruz mountain fire around Felton, Boulder Creek, etc.  seems me to be just as bad or worse in terms of damage to structures — a _lot_ of people live in those hills, among the redwoods, wherever the ground is flat enough.  Big Basin State Park is burned; Butano State Park too, I think.   The coastal town of Davenport lost some structures … I don’t know the extent of the damage.

    One bad windy day and things could get very ugly.

  122. 122.

    The Pale Scot

    @R-Jud:

    Also she’s English, and a nurse, which just makes it so weird.

    Have you noticed whats going on in England for the last four years. Boris gave his brother a peerage, multiple instances of incompetent but loyal people being hired and placed in positions that require expertise and experience. Multiple instances of corporations given contracts that they are completely incapable of executing. The government in response to the coming Brexit clusterfuck hired a newly formed corp to provide extra ferries. the corp has no ferries, there are no ferries available worldwide to buy or lease, etc.

     

    Sound familiar?

    Boris is Trump’s mini-me

  123. 123.

    Fair Economist

    @Kent:If you’re looking for a road trip, the 101 is a more interesting way to get south than the 5, although it takes about 2 hours longer IIRC. The 5 is really boring through the Central Valley, and there’s relatively little to do. The 101 goes through a lot of towns, including the major destination areas around Monterey and Santa Barbara, and there’s generally more scenery to see. (The Sierras are great to look at, but due to air pollution you can rarely see them from the 5.)

  124. 124.

    Fair Economist

    @dlwchico: I would swamp her with stories about COVID deaths and long COVID. There are literally thousands of stories at this point.

  125. 125.

    Martin

    @Roger Moore: Yep, that’s pretty much it. I’ll add  that they did get a stay of 2 weeks, at which  point they need to show the state a plan to convert contractors to employees, and if they can’t the state can  remove the stay and enforce the law. So, they’ll shut down in 2 weeks instead of tonight.

    As you note AB5 codified the court ruling but also made it easier to comply with, so AB5 helps a number of categories of contractors that wouldn’t have been able to avoid employee status. AB5 is not the cause of this – it’s the labor law written more than 30 years ago that the courts have clarified interpretation of – mostly because gig companies distorted it so badly.

    People outside of CA need to understand just how worker-favored CA labor law is. Part of that is there is a social contract focus there.  I believe this is part of a longer, slow, and probably irregular process to address the social program problem in CA. California spends a wild amount of money on Medicaid – roughly as much as the Texas govt spends on everything in their state – Medicaid, roads, schools, universities, etc.

    The public contract had been that employers, prohibited from increasing wages during WWII and other times, would take responsibility for health insurance and retirement and other benefits as as way to attract workers. That’s where Kaiser Permanente came from. But over time they’ve shifted those costs back to the taxpayer, with gig employers being the most egregious examples. This was a way to pay no payroll taxes (the contractor pays all of those) and provide no benefits, dumping everyone on either Covered California, which the state has not treated like garbage like most other states, or on MediCal.

    It is unsustainable for corporations to simultaneously argue that taxation is killing them and that the cost of basic services for their employees are also not their problem. So California has to shift that back into balance somehow. I think we’re back in wait-and-see mode on single payer, but the economics of it are difficult when so much payroll tax revenue is being shoveled through the feds.

    Clearly the national GOP has no interest in solving this, and Dems can’t get enough of a hold to solve it either, so I think the state has decided to start to crank the problem back via labor laws. Will it hurt to lose Uber/Lyft from the state? Near term, possibly, but two results may come from this:

    1. The public may turn back toward funding of mass transit.  We were making some headway on that recently.
    2. Someone else will step into the vacuum with a car hailing service that has drivers as employees.

    Uber/Lyft are proposing providing some fractional credits for employee benefits, which is fine, but that’s just a payroll tax which they thus far have steadfastly avoided and now want to redefine in their terms. I’m not sure how this will shake out, but I don’t hear very many people in favor of the initiative.

  127. 127.

    Bill Arnold

    @Fair Economist:

    I would swamp her with stories about COVID deaths and long COVID. There are literally thousands of stories at this point.

    That’d work, and is generally useful. Do you have a collection of links to share? (I have some but they’re haphazard.)

  128. 128.

    The Moar You Know

    At least I don’t know – maybe folks who have been in the state longer have seen it.

    @Martin: My whole life, 54 years. I’ve seen two things with regards to fires; one is it comes in cycles, and two is that CalFire, with regards to “saving metropolitan areas” has a great success rate, but they also have lost entire small towns and not infrequently either. It would help if they had ever been adequately funded or staffed, but that’s never been the case in my entire life.

  129. 129.

    KithKanan

    @Fair Economist: Not right now it isn’t. Massive fire in the Salinas area and other areas so the first several hours of that drive would be through smoke. I’m hunkered down here in SLO 100+ miles from the fires and I can barely see the hills a mile or so away.

  131. 131.

    Sloane Ranger

    @The Pale Scot: In all fairness, almost all of the reasonably smart, competent Tory politicians were Remainers. They’ve been frozen out of active politics and those that haven’t have been passed over for senior Ministerial roles. True believers in Brexit only required.

  132. 132.

    The Pale Scot

    @Sloane Ranger: I think the problem in the US and the England comes down to 30%-40% of their populations are bent because they get the feeling that being English speaking and white isn’t as special as it use to be. In the US it’s loss of internal racial dominance, in the England it’s loss  of external racial dominance. In England specifically, the core is mostly retired defined pension own their own house types. In the US the it’s high school educated business owners upset that being white and moderately successful didn’t get them where they think they should be, mostly because asset inflation still puts them in the precariat.  They see of themselves not being taken seriously by the “elites”, which is Dump’s eternal gripe.

     

    Rupert’s focus on enhancing that gripe and other MSM’s clickbait is a problem that’s not going away.

  133. 133.

    J R in WV

    @Kent:

    Taxi companies should have done this long ago. They were too ossified to respond. It’s not that people didn’t like taxis. They didn’t like having to make a voice call and not know when some taxi would show up.

    In Firenze (aka Florence) Italy, you can ask any business to call a cab, and the guarantee is that one will arrive in 3 minutes. It never took us that long, either. Really well done for a giant tourist center.

    Tho one guy was kind of a prick, pulled in really close to big  concrete pots of plants, then gave Ruth a hairy eyeball when the door touched the planter. He took us back to the hotel, tho…

    People running the Palace we toured were rude, also… probably lots of ugly tourists to deal with all day long. Rural Tuscany was wonderful, small town folks were sweet and helpful. Mostly.

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