Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

The GOP is a fucking disgrace.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

This year has been the longest three days of putin’s life.

When do the post office & the dmv weigh in on the wuhan virus?

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

You cannot shame the shameless.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

Take your GOP plan out of the witness protection program.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

After roe, women are no longer free.

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

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

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

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

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

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At least Nero allegedly fiddled…

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As noted in this space before, Biden has an excellent rapid response ad team. I am pleased they so quickly made hay of Trump’s admission Wednesday that he lolls around watching Fox News all day like the common, lazy, loud-mouthed, wingnut retiree that he is:

It’s been obvious for a few years now that Trump eschews official briefings in favor of the blathering of pro-Trump Fox News “personalities.” In this instance, he was citing “the shows” to explain how a fantastical notion — that Obama and Biden committed “the biggest political scandal in the history of our country” by spying on his 2016 campaign — became lodged in his bloated orange gourd, noting that “the crime is very obvious to everybody.”

It’s not, of course. Barr and his man Durham have been squeezing that turnip for months by re-investigating the origins of the Russia probe. So far, all they’ve got to show for it is a plea deal from one unlucky FBI lawyer nobody ever heard of connected with paperwork on a surveillance renewal for a Trump campaign flunky no one outside the cult gives a shit about.

But I digress — it was helpful for Trump to admit he watches so much TV that it amounts to a full-time job. At least Nero allegedly played the fiddle. We’ve got a lazy couch potato (of the yam variety) who sits around on his ass all day. Dude’s gotta go! Open thread.

Reader Interactions

178Comments

  1. 1.

    The Moar You Know

    I can’t watch 8 hours a day of anything even if it’s good.

    I’ll say this; the man’s claim of “good genes” is true. A diet of cheeseburgers, rage and eight hours a day of Fox would kill any normal person within months.

  2. 2.

    geg6

    I accidentally caught that in real time. I keep saying that, at this point, I would not be surprised by anything he said. But I was truly flabbergasted when he up and admitted what a lazy tv zombie he is.

    I admit that we have our tv on a lot at home. But it is often just background noise. I grew up in a house with my parents and we six kids. I can’t work or concentrate when there is no noise happening in the background. But we don’t sit around watching it except for a few minutes at a time or if we are into a show before bed. Jesus…all he watches is these shrieking assholes all day. How horrible is your life if this is what it comes down to at age 73?

  5. 5.

    zhena gogolia

    I just bought a “Dude Gotta Go” T-shirt on Amazon. It’s really pretty. V-neck and forest green.
    Since I never go anywhere, I might as well wear my political opinions on my chest around the house.

  6. 6.

    lee

    I admit I don’t watch much Trump so this might be normal but the latest news/rumors flying around about his health issues this caught my attention.

    Has his right eye always been that squinty?

  7. 7.

    piratedan

    i have serious doubts that it’s 8 hours a day, after all he lies about everything… I suspect the real number is around 10-11 hours….

  9. 9.

    zhena gogolia

    @lee:

    His right side is totally screwed up. Watch his right leg when he walks, or his spasmodically moving right arm when he has to stand still for a few minutes. In one clip from Memorial Day it’s like Dr. Strangelove.

  12. 12.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    Don’t ruin yams for me, Betty. These people have ruined so many things I have to hang on to the few meager pleasures left.

    Perhaps we can think of him as a potato with some alien orange fungus growing on it.

  13. 13.

    EmbraceYourInnerCrone

    @geg6: Same here  if it is too quiet it bothers me, I usually have on, the few days I can work from home, either the Smithsonian Channel (love the aerial american episodes) or maybe Animal Planet, or possible BBC news.  no channels where I might accidentally see the Orange Menace.

  16. 16.

    Cacti

    I have to say, I love rubbing the Trump cultists’ nose in the fact that he’s been endorsed by Osama bin Laden’s niece.

  20. 20.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @zhena gogolia: Trump doesn’t need any serious health issue for that, just sitting still for days on end watching TV will cause all kinds of problems like that from muscle spasms.

  26. 26.

    Peale

    And if I recall, he actually wasn’t bad on the fiddle. He practiced at some point. Now, yeah, he probably wasn’t the best fiddler and used his position as Emperor to make people sit through lousy concerts and demanded praise from them. But at least he made some effort to learn to play. TV watching requires nothing like that. Yet I’m sure he’ll be getting praise from the usual defenders this afternoon about how “efficient he must be at his job if he has so much time” or how he’s “earned the right to do this after all the hard work he’s done and sacrifices he’s made”. Or how “watching 2 hours of TV at night is hard enough. Imagine the skill and endurance necessary to be a pro at it.”

  30. 30.

    Ruckus

    @Jay Noble:

    Seat belt in his chair

    Watches in bed – because he can’t get out of it

    Aides have him tied to the chair so he can’t cause any more damage.

  31. 31.

    StringOnAStick

    @geg6: That’s my dad’s life at 88: watching FOX from 4 until bedtime, maybe an hour of the History channel where he yells at them for being over dramatic.  He loves getting his daily rage dose, it gives him meaning.

  32. 32.

    Pudentilla

    OK. I know I’m being pedantic. But… Nero gets a very bad rap for his response to the great fire. In fact he was in Rome, opened palace grounds to everyone who was displaced by the fire and directed all sorts of relief to Romans who were affected. America would be lucky indeed, if  Trump were as good on Covid as Nero was on the fire. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nero#Great_Fire_of_Rome

    retired classics prof

  34. 34.

    jonas

    In this instance, he was citing “the shows” to explain how a fantastical notion — that Obama and Biden committed “the biggest political scandal in the history of our country” by spying on his 2016 campaign

    I’ve been following some of Stzrok’s book tour interviews, and it’s pretty clear that the real scandal is how relatively superficial and limited the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign actually was. They were all walking on eggshells (something that didn’t seem to concern them about Clinton, mysteriously) and then became obsessed with Carter Page for some reason, while Manafort (until he quit) and Flynn were running around gabbing with Kremlin-connected fixers, if not outright intelligence operatives, on a daily basis, and Trump himself was negotiating a Trump Tower in Moscow while publicly lying about it repeatedly. According to Strzrok’s this was setting off all sorts of alarm bells, but apparently not ones anyone at the agency really felt the need to follow up on. Then Mueller came along and scrupulously focused only on any possible criminal conspiracy involving the Russian government directly.

    I know Stzrok himself is no hero in all of this, but it’s pretty clear that the real scandal was the extent to which he, Comey, McCabe, Rosenstein, and finally Mueller bent so fucking far over backwards to *avoid* subjecting Trump to any kind of real scrutiny while having expended month after month and thousands of agent man-hours combing through every item on every grocery list in Hillary’s outbox. Once Biden has thoroughly cleaned and fumigated the DOJ, there needs to be a full accounting and CI investigation of Trump and his family to find out exactly how they were compromised and what damage they did to our nation’s security and vital interests over the past three and a half years.

  43. 43.

    taumaturgo

    Morning Musings.

    Someone defined hate as inner fears projected outwards and if we think about it usually our angry moments have little do to with the actual moment except that the moment acts as a trigger. Momentarily accepting this definition of anger we may begin to realize that the MAGA types are really full of fear which when trigger translates into hate of liberals, homophobia, xenophobia, misogynic, cruelty for cruelty’s sake. The question remains, what do they fear? What are their worst nightmares? How, if ever, will they realize the dire consequences to themselves and others? How could they – and us -see and feel the delusions, apathy, envy, greed, discouragements go round and round in an endless loop negative?  Perhaps, a better question will be, how do we manage our own fits of anger and fears, and in the answers, we may find a way to heal and show others do the same. Just saying.

  48. 48.

    mad citizen

    @oatler.: I’m not sure which is worse, but I doubt the chaos would be worse if Pence was #46 for a few months.  I think it would be greatly ignominious, so therefore funny in a historical way.  Best situation would be both of them advocating and having Pelosi take over for a short while.

    I had a thought experiment for trumpovs whining about vote by mail.  How about a deal: No vote by mail but the president wins only by popular vote.  Do they take that deal?  It’s only fair.

    I’m already tired of the “Biden’s 5/6/7 point lead isn’t really that big because Electoral College”  Electoral College got to go.

  52. 52.

    Scout211

    https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/11/tech/qanon-oregon-fire-conspiracy-theory/index.html

    Speaking of Q and Qanon:

    New York (CNN Business)Authorities in Oregon are pleading with the public to only trust and share information verified by official sources about the unprecedented wildfires sweeping the state. The pleas come as law enforcement agencies described 911 dispatchers being overrun with calls about a false online rumor that “Antifa” members had been arrested for setting the fires — a claim promoted by the anonymous account behind the QAnon conspiracy theories.

    The incident highlights how online conspiracy theories, a sustained right-wing campaign to create increased fear of anti-fascist groups, and amplification of false claims by QAnon followers, have real consequences.
    “Rumors spread just like wildfire,” the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office warned in a Facebook post Thursday, adding that staff had been “overrun with requests for information and inquiries on an UNTRUE rumor that 6 Antifa members have been arrested for setting fires” in the area.
    That specific claim had been amplified by “Q” — the anonymous person or people behind QAnon — only 12 hours earlier.

  53. 53.

    The Moar You Know

     

    OK. I know I’m being pedantic. But… Nero gets a very bad rap for his response to the great fire. In fact he was in Rome, opened palace grounds to everyone who was displaced by the fire and directed all sorts of relief to Romans who were affected. America would be lucky indeed, if  Trump were as good on Covid as Nero was on the fire. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nero#Great_Fire_of_Rome

    retired classics prof

    @Pudentilla:  Just some schmuck here with no academic qualifications whatsoever but I read my Roman history.  I agree with you about Nero.  The real sack of crap, the Trump of the Roman Empire, was Elagabalus.  Or possibly Caligula.  They were both pretty much cut from the same blot of cloth.

  55. 55.

    Betty Cracker

    @jonas: Yes, and also an investigation into the DOJ response, which was clearly inadequate. Maybe an independent commission can come up with a set of rules for how to handle this shit. We’re going to need guidelines for handling a lot of previously unimaginable stuff.

  56. 56.

    Brachiator

    But I digress — it was helpful for Trump to admit he watches so much TV that it amounts to a full-time job.

    Golf, TV, Twitter. What does the Big Orange Hairball actually do, apart from moments of incompetent bumbling, and maybe writing love letters to Putin and other autocrats?

  59. 59.

    Betty Cracker

    @Scout211: There was a piece in Buzzfeed yesterday about a freelance journalist and partner who were taking photos of the fires threatening their hometown in Oregon. They were hunted by armed Q-loons who decided, apparently on the basis of the pair’s possession of gas masks, they were “antifa.” Luckily no one was hurt — the cops intervened, I think.

  61. 61.

    opiejeanne

    OT, sorry to interrupt,  but I just glanced out the front windows; the sky here is yellow and the house across the road is obscured by smoke, as if it was a slightly foggy day. Crap.

    And I keep  thinking I couldn’t despiseTrump more, but he keeps finding deeper wells of hatred in me.

  64. 64.

    mad citizen

    @Brachiator: Economic history would always define the bad years (before the Great Depression) as “Panic of 1847” etc. (lots of them listed on wiki).  As I said yesteday these years have been like the Emergency Broadcast System tone playing for 3.5 years.  This has been a national emergency.

    If I got to write the history, I would call this time “Shitshow of 2016-2021”.

  66. 66.

    germy

    Arthur and Frank explained they’re not followers of QAnon. Frank says she spends most of her free time researching child sex trafficking, while Arthur adds that she often finds this information on the Russian-owned search engine Yandex. Frank’s eyes fill with tears as she describes what she’s found: children who are being raped and tortured so that “the cabal” can “extract their blood and drink it.” She says Trump has seized the blood on the black market as part of his fight against the cabal. “I think if Biden wins, the world is over, basically,” adds Arthur. “I would honestly try to leave the country. And if that wasn’t an option, I would probably take my children and sit in the garage and turn my car on and it would be over.”

    https://time.com/5887437/conspiracy-theories-2020-election/

    Personally, I would call Child Protective Services on them.

  72. 72.

    zhena gogolia

    Trump was supposed to say “Michigan gave us Motown, gave us Mustang,” and he said, “Michigan gave us Motang.”

  77. 77.

    zhena gogolia

    We used to have a steadfast commenter from Oregon, and I can’t remember his nym. I don’t think I’ve seen him in a while.

  85. 85.

    Ken

    @different-church-lady: There was a theory that he never intended to win in 2016, and was just using it as a way to launch his own cable channel (and ego of course).  He didn’t have a victory speech for election night, for example.

    This time around he’s not doing any debate prep and has stopped ad buys in most markets, which could mean the same.  Against that, the one thing he’d never want to be is a loser – but perhaps claiming Biden “cheated” would let him work around that in his own mind.

  90. 90.

    Another Scott

    @Pudentilla: OTOH (repost) – https://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/gladiators/nero.html

    The fire that began in the shops at the Circus Maximus on the night of July 18, AD 64 raged for nine days, burning itself out on the sixth and then suspiciously flaring up again on the estate of Tigellinus, Nero’s praetorian prefect (Tacitus, Annals, XV.40; Suetonius, Life of Nero, XXXVIII.2). Nearly two-thirds of Rome burned, including the Palatine Hill, and countless persons died. “There was no curse that the populace did not invoke upon Nero, though they did not mention his name” (Dio, Roman History, LXII.18.2-3). Tacitus goes on to relate that innumerable buildings and temples were lost, including ancient shrines, the spoils of earlier victories, “the glories of Greek art, and yet again the primitive and uncorrupted memorials of literary genius” (XV.41); in short, adds Suetonius, destroying “whatever else interesting and noteworthy had survived from antiquity” (XXXVIII.2).

    Although many of the populace believed that Nero intentionally had started the fire (Dio, LXII.17.18.3; Pliny, Natural History, XVII.1), he himself blamed the Christians. Because of their supposed hatred of mankind, he had them thrown to dogs, nailed to crosses in his gardens, and burned alive (the traditional punishment for arson) to serve as living torches in the night (Tacitus, XV.44; this passage also contains the earliest non-Christian reference to the crucifixion). Probably taking place in the Vatican gardens, where Nero had his private racetrack, the emperor strolled among the crowd in the guise of a charioteer. It also was to Nero that Paul had appealed from the tribunal at Caesarea (Acts 25:10ff) and in whose reign Peter and Paul traditionally were thought to have been executed at Rome (e.g., Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, II.25.5-8; Tertullian, The Prescription Against Heretics, XXXVI).

    […]

    Blaming others – so Trumpian!! :-/

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  94. 94.

    germy

    @Steeplejack (phone):

    She continues:

    Former Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., made a number of bizarre claims during an interview with a religious news program last week, among them that “transgender Black Marxists” are trying to take down the U.S. government.

    “These are transgender Marxists — transgender Black Marxists — who are seeking the overthrow of the United States and the dissolution of the traditional family,” Bachmann said in the interview on The Victory Channel, televangelist Kenneth Copeland’s right-wing Christian network, while discussing the Black Lives Matter and anti-racism protests taking place around the country.

    During the lengthy interview, Bachmann, long a controversial figure, propagated various pieces of misinformation, including a skewed COVID-19 death toll and the assertion that George Floyd, who died in May in the custody of police, actually “killed himself with an overdose.” She called the Black Lives Matter protests in Portland, Oregon, a “communist takeover” and suggested that the election of Joe Biden could precipitate a “communist revolution.”

    Bachmann, who said she is a member of President Donald Trump’s “faith advisory group” (a group the White House told NBC News does not exist, even though it has been reported on extensively), shared her own protest story with the show’s hosts, Greg Stephens and Tim Fox. During a recent visit to the White House, Bachmann said, the “Holy Spirit” spoke to her just as protests were about to erupt on the streets of Washington.

    “We had our hands raised. We were worshipping the Lord on the South Lawn of the White House,” she said. “Before too long, the mob started. … All of a sudden, I sense the Holy Spirit just speaking to me. The Holy Spirit spoke to me and said, ‘It’s time to leave.'”

  97. 97.

    Kay

    @germy:

    What I love about Q is the numbers are outlandish. These people believe eight hundred thousand US children are snatched up every year and shipped off to Hillary and Obama’s trafficking operation and that has gone completely unremarked upon until they “discovered it”.

    Four million children are born in the US every year. In this theory, we lose almost a quarter of them every single year. I know why they had to amend the theory to add that the traffickers were killing them to get their blood- there would be too many. There would be tens of millions if they all survived.

    They all talk about how they “research”. They didn’t have to research past that number! That shoulda been it.

  99. 99.

    James E Powell

    @jonas:

    it’s pretty clear that the real scandal was the extent to which he, Comey, McCabe, Rosenstein, and finally Mueller bent so fucking far over backwards to *avoid* subjecting Trump to any kind of real scrutiny while having expended month after month and thousands of agent man-hours combing through every item on every grocery list in Hillary’s outbox.

    While I don’t think their actions were coordinated, it is interesting that the press/media did the exact same thing.

  101. 101.

    Gin & Tonic

    Personally, I think the Pledge of Allegiance is an empty gesture, and I choose not to recite it when I attend municipal meetings that invariably open with a recitation. That said, here’s a video of Trump and Melania at some commemoration today. She doesn’t even bother; he tries but is clearly flubbing the words. But more notable, he can’t stand still for the 15 seconds the Pledge takes.

  102. 102.

    Kay

    @Baud:

    Look at this:

    #OH01: Kate Schroder (D) 50% (+4) Steve Chabot (R-inc) 46% . Biden 48% (+1) Trump 47%

    Chabot was first elected in 2010 after he defeated then-incumbent Steve Driehaus (D) in the general election, receiving 52% of the vote to Driehaus’ 46 percent. Chabot had previously represented the district from 1995 to 2009. In 2018, Chabot defeated challenger Aftab Pureval (D), receiving 51.3 percent of the vote to Pureval’s 46.9 percent. The 4.4 point margin of victory in 2018 marked a decrease from prior elections. In 2016 and 2014, the Republican candidate—Chabot—won by margins of victory of 18.4 and 26.4 points, respectively.

    Pretty good.

  106. 106.

    Kay

    @Baud:

    I fantasize about it but honestly the thing that would kill Donald Trump would be losing Florida. He loves him some Florida. Come on. He hates Ohio. If he wasn’t conning our people he’d never set foot in this state. Kasich always hated it too. He spent the last year as governor in New Hampshire, a state he likes.

  107. 107.

    Chyron HR

    @germy:

    the dissolution of the traditional family

    The traditional family of one man, his three wives, a porn star, and the five children he didn’t pay to have aborted.

  111. 111.

    WaterGirl

    @Steeplejack (phone): @Gin & Tonic:

    That video shows that Trump can say some of the words, but not all of the words.  He’s definitely good with the one syllable words.  I wonder if he doesn’t know all the words, if he doesn’t have enough control to handle long words, or if his mouth can’t form certain sounds?

  112. 112.

    Ken

    @Gin & Tonic: [Melania] doesn’t even bother; [Trump] tries but is clearly flubbing the words.

    In a properly run absolute dictatorship, all his cultists would imitate that, and saying the pledge correctly would be called un-American.

  114. 114.

    geg6

    @Pudentilla:

    I agree.  Drives me crazy how he is portrayed.  I remember my shock upon learning in a college class on Ancient Rome that he really wasn’t as horrible as portrayed all my life up to that point.

  116. 116.

    opiejeanne

    @zhena gogolia: Thanks. I think we are. This is the result of a change in the wind direction that was warned of last night, a huge plume of smoke coming our way.

    We need to stay inside because the air is crappy. I went out to water a couple of plants on the deck and I did not linger in the garden.

  120. 120.

    Calouste

    @germy:

    “We had our hands raised, and our arms stretched. We were worshipping the Lord Leader on the South Lawn of the White House,” she said

    Accurified.

  121. 121.

    Chyron HR

    @Ken:

    Given that Solomon only had one penis, what do they think the other 999 wives/concubines got up to while he was busy?

  122. 122.

    James E Powell

    @Chyron HR:

    Given that Solomon only had one penis, what do they think the other 999 wives/concubines got up to while he was busy?

    Exchanging hair care ideas with the eunuchs?

  126. 126.

    catclub

    @Kay: the thing that would kill Donald Trump would be losing Florida. He loves him some Florida. Come on.

     

    It would be sweet if he only loses it after changing his address to FLA.

    and no, moving from NY will not help hm there.

  130. 130.

    L85NJGT

    This (Trump) has got to be the last campaign playing classic rock, right? The terrestrial oldies stations are playing 80’s New Wave fer Christ’s sake. Great songs, great artists, but there’s an entire cohort of older white dudes that just can’t get there heads around the ephemeral nature of popular culture, or the vast expanse of music that’s not English guys regurgitating American Blues to a white audience.

  132. 132.

    tokyokie

    @germy:

    Dinesh D’souza insisted for days that the proper pronunciation was “Thigh Land”

    I’m not joking.

    I’m guessing that’s how the sex tourists among Dinesh’s acquaintances pronounce it.

  135. 135.

    Chris Johnson

    @mad citizen: I’m not sure which is worse, but I doubt the chaos would be worse if Pence was #46 for a few months.  I think it would be greatly ignominious, so therefore funny in a historical way.  Best situation would be both of them advocating and having Pelosi take over for a short while.

    Kings abdicate. Nope nope nope. Not getting out of it that easily, and I’m not at all convinced Pence wouldn’t do more damage, simply because he’s more innocent-looking but was a product of more Russian meddling.

    That man could be a Boris Johnson type: a stupid man who is able to serve his true masters and who is able to look stupider than he is. I think Pence is the real prize to the Russian operation. They could never have made that guy President directly, but they’ve gotta be salivating thinking about how Trump is so sick and screwed up and leads such an unhealthy life. I bet you someone overseas has taken at least a little interest in suggesting to Pence, “Yeah… don’t eat and act like Trump does, ok? Eat healthy, rest up: your time will come”.

  136. 136.

    Bill Arnold

    @StringOnAStick:

    He loves getting his daily rage dose, it gives him meaning.

    Rage also helps improve the blood flow to the brain. I’m certain it temporarily relieves vascular dementia and similar conditions. If Democrats had a rage channel it would IMO be easy to switch many elderly Fox viewers to it.

  137. 137.

    opiejeanne

    @?BillinGlendaleCA: According to the news here, it’s from the fires to our east. There’s a line of fires from the border with Oregon almost to Canada, so this smoke could be from almost anywhere along that line.

    Idiots listening to emergency calls with scanners are spreading nonsense about arson because they don’t know that BLM also stands for Bureau of Land Management.

  138. 138.

    LuciaMia

     Golf, TV, Twitter. What does the Big Orange Hairball actually do, apart from moments of incompetent bumbling

    Im surprised he doesnt start his own personal YouTube vlog. With riveting uploads like “What I ate today” and “Fox merchandise haul!”  Perhaps some cheeseburger mukbangs.

  140. 140.

    Kathleen

    @Kay: She’s focused on health care. She’s a cancer survivor and has devoted her career to health care initiatives through Clinton Health Access Initiatives. She has a for real MBA from Wharton. David Wasserman believes she can take down the execrable Steve Chabot who “represents ” my District. She has spent a ton of money on advertising on one of the local Black radio stations I listen to all day while I’m working. Driehaus was outstanding rep. He was one of the reps who voted for ACA though he knew it would cost him his seat. Rooting for Kate of course. If I weren’t on my phone I’d post a link to a good article about the race

  141. 141.

    sdhays

    @Ken: I don’t think he expected to win in 2016 and doesn’t really know how it happened. I think he was happy with the idea of launching his own grievance cable network after losing. I definitely don’t think he wants to lose now. If he loses this time, it’s very much a repudiation of him personally, and he has some inkling of the legal peril he now finds himself in.

    But everyone in his campaign is a grifter moron with idea how to run a real campaign.

  142. 142.

    RobertB

    @Kay: Makes me nauseous to take up for that POS Kasich, but one of my coworkers who lives in Westerville mentioned the other day that she sees Kasich at the grocery store often enough that it isn’t noteworthy.

  143. 143.

    Hoodie

    @Ken: So, there are like 5 black transgender Marxists in the entire country, right?  Everyone knows they’re mostly Fanonists, with lesser numbers of Marcuseans and pickleball enthusiasts.  Marx was definitely uncool on gender issues.  I wish people would keep this stuff straight . . . This has been a particularly dark week.

  145. 145.

    Kay

    @Kathleen:

    Thanks. It’s so funny how Obamacare has gone from being a drag on Democrats to so valued Donald Trump and all the Republicans lie about preexisting conditions.

    I love the congressional polls because they always also poll the Presidential and it’s the closest you can get to county level polling. I don’t think Democrats can overcome Trump’s huge rural margins in Ohio. They have to hold down rural margins while dramatically increasing suburban and urban margins, and that’s just hard to do. Obama was kind of the master at it.

  149. 149.

    Kay

    Gabriel Trumbly, a Portland videographer who has spent roughly 90 of the past 100 days capturing the protests, wanted to take footage of the forest fires raging in Oregon. So on Wednesday night, the 29-year-old Army veteran set out with his partner, Jennifer Paulsen, 24, to see what was happening near her childhood home of Molalla, a town of 9,000 people known for its annual rodeo, the Buckeroo. Fires surrounding the town were so intense they had prompted a level 3 “GO NOW” warning to evacuate.
    Little did they know when they arrived that Trumbly and Paulsen’s presence would spark national rumors that far-left activists were starting fires across the West Coast.

    Republicans have driven their supporters completely insane, so much so that they threaten the well being of other people. I just don’t know how they talk millions of people off this ledge. Where does this end?

  150. 150.

    Ken

    @Elizabelle: Trump seems to have missed “Under God.”

    The words were only added in 1954, when he was 8.

    A possibly-related fact: In dementia patients, the childhood memories are often the last to vanish.

  151. 151.

    Gin & Tonic

    From the WaPo article about Rudy and Derkach: “Giuliani denied he was being used as pawn in a Russian influence campaign, saying Derkach didn’t seem pro-Russian and appeared to be “totally dedicated to a free Ukraine.” ”

    This can probably be said about nearly any country, but these idiot amateurs who parachute into Kyiv (or any other capital) without speaking a word of Ukrainian or Russian and presume to know who’s “dedicated” to what are just sheep lining up for the slaughter. Rudy’s the guy at the poker game trying to figure out who the sucker is. I wonder how many people got rich on his expenses.

  152. 152.

    Kay

    There’s a weird flag at one of the Trump display houses here. I know the “thin blue line” flag and the gross “Dear Leader” flag they fly but I haven’t see this one before. It has some kind of shitty symbol on it and my thought driving by was “dangerous cultists”. So that’s where I am.

  154. 154.

    Kay

    I love this whole thing:

    Perhaps the argument’s rarity comes from an unwillingness to acknowledge that almost nothing in American life is working as intended. Or perhaps, more charitably, it’s ignorance: Many in the political class don’t know how bad it’s gotten. (New York’s political leadership is notorious for never setting foot on the public transit system that most of New York City relies on daily.) Whatever the reason, politicians rarely appeal to the untapped need for things to function better.

    Even when pursuing old-fashioned, Good Government–style aims, Democrats tend to frame their positions in terms of values. When they won the House, they sold their voting rights bill as being about transparency and anti-corruption. That is righteous and probably even politically effective. But protecting the right to vote, like protecting the post office, could also be sold as “we will allocate enough money to make the post office work right and will administer elections competently.”

  158. 158.

    zhena gogolia

    @Gin & Tonic:

    Back in 1991 I was on a plane to Moscow and the guy next to me asked if he could get up to make sure his drum was okay in the overhead bin. He explained that he was going to Russia to bring them shamanism as a treatment for alcoholism.

  159. 159.

    Bill Arnold

    @bemused:

    It would have to be a very, very large pterodactyl to carry lardass away.

    Pterodactyl young must be fed. (Chicks?)
    Some years ago I was puzzled by some loud and scary noises at night nearby. Turned out to be a pair of Great Horned owls feeding young at night about 150 feet away. The young were quite excited.

  160. 160.

    evodevo

    @Ceci n est pas mon nym: Look up cedar apple rust…it fits the bill perfectly…orange with tentacles, and nasty infection for apple trees. It’s endemic in our cedars, and comes out with the ugly disfiguring orange spore-bearing structures every spring and then spreads infective spores to our apple trees…

  162. 162.

    Gravenstone

    @Scout211: Russian disinformation campaigns become trivial when we show how gullible large swathes of our populace really are. As long as it remotely touches on a personal bias, it quickly becomes the gospel.

  165. 165.

    bemused

    @Bill Arnold:

    Maybe ma and pa pterodactyls would have to team up to haul trump to nest for chicks to feed on. Although, considering his diet and whatever unknown things he puts in his body, they might want to skip feeding him to their babies.

  167. 167.

    Captain C

    @germy:

    These are transgender Marxists — transgender Black Marxists — who are seeking the overthrow of the United States and the dissolution of the traditional family

    Well, I’m sure there are one or two, anyway.  It’s a big country, after all.

  168. 168.

    Betty Cracker

    @Kay: Parked near this Q-loon van this weekend when I was picking up groceries for my MIL near The Villages.

    It’s not uncommon at all these days to see a car with a Q sticker, and it unnerves me to live among so many crazy people, but I guess I have all my life! I preferred NOT knowing that.

  169. 169.

    Barbara

    @Jay Noble: He doesn’t do anything seriously strenuous and he receives excellent, attentive medical care.  My mother in law lived for nearly 8 years after having a catastrophic stroke.  Other people looked after her welfare better than she ever did for herself.

  170. 170.

    Captain C

    @Kay:

    They all talk about how they “research”.

    By that they mean “uncritically watched a lot of YouTube videos that confirmed my existing biases and ideas.”

  171. 171.

    Barbara

    @germy: The obvious thing for Trump to do would be for Trump to wait for Flynn to get sentenced and then commute the sentence, or pardon Flynn.  The problem with those options is that means Flynn no longer faces jeopardy for the underlying offenses, or lesser included offenses. Hence, no bar to testifying in any action that might end up being brought against Trump himself, or others he is trying to protect (my money being most on DJT Jr. and Jared Kushner, maybe even Ivanka).  This is why they are choosing this crazy way of proceeding, to make sure Flynn could still be in jeopardy, less likely to cooperate.

  174. 174.

    Lofgren

    @The Moar You Know: I played Skyrim for six hours straight earlier this summer, and I felt like a fat zombie afterwards. I’m about the laziest person I know, and Trump’s laziness is impressive. Game recognizes game.

  175. 175.

    Geminid

    Roman Forum Times Pitchbot:      Zero, or Hero? The Emperor Nero’s unorthodox governing style has dismayed some. Others think there may be method in his madness.

  176. 176.

    Kathleen

    @catclub: I think it’s interesting that she used Marxist as pejorative. I thought Rethugs were down with all things Russian. Too hard to keep up.

  177. 177.

    Kathleen

    @Kay: Hamilton County is very blue but we’re surrounded by the excreable exurbs. I’m hoping we can turn some of the women in West Chester and Mason though I’m not sure if they’re in OH1. Rethugs have gerrymandered the crap out of OH1.

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