Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

That meeting sounds like a shotgun wedding between a shitshow and a clusterfuck.

Finding joy where we can, and muddling through where we can’t.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

An almost top 10,000 blog!

Everybody saw this coming.

Dumb motherfuckers cannot understand a consequence that most 4 year olds have fully sorted out.

Find someone who loves you the way trump and maga love traitors.

Weird. Rome has an American Pope and America has a Russian President.

Let there be snark.

Decision time: keep arguing about the last election, or try to win the next one?

Not loving this new fraud based economy.

This is dead girl, live boy, a goat, two wetsuits and a dildo territory.  oh, and pink furry handcuffs.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

“A king is only a king if we bow down.” – Rev. William Barber

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

Let’s bury these fuckers at the polls 2 years from now.

“Facilitate” is an active verb, not a weasel word.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

Reality always gets a vote in the end.

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

Relentless negativity is not a sign that you are more realistic.

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On The Road – realbtl – Volcano HI

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Good morning everyone,

It’s Friday, and we should all be thankful. The next few days should be exciting – I can’t wait to see who gets through Super Tuesday and who has to fold. The field should winnow so we can focus on choosing from 2, 3 at most.

 

For the last 9 years We’ve been escaping Montana winter by going to the big island of Hawaii the first week of Feb.  Except last year so I really wanted to see the new land from the 2018 eruption.  We do 3-4 days in Volcano on the Hilo/rain forest side and the a week in the sun in Kona.  Here is a little tour of the grounds of our vrbo there.

I’ll follow this up with the lava.

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On The Road - realbtl - Volcano HI 5

Path back to our cottage.

COVID-19 Coronavirus Update – Thursday/Friday, 2/27-2/28

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*We* were following COVID-19 before it was cool… (sigh)…

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Late Night Horrorshow Open Thread: Remember When We Could LAUGH At These People?

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To be honest, we still do… before we burst out sobbing / screaming.


SRSLY!

Punchline:

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Election Year Open Thread: Joe Biden Is Having A Better-Than-Expected Week

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The professionals keep reminding us: There is no ‘national primary’, just 57 individual state & territorial contests that are supposed to eventually end with a concensus about the best candidate. Much can change over the course of those individual contests, not least when a certain candidate’s supporters decide being preemptively obnoxious is a winning stance…

Biden was not my first choice — and I still kinda expect him to drop out before the convention, frankly. But he’s a genuinely gifted politician, for all his flaws, and he never fails to surprise those who write him off prematurely.

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Remember Steven Chu?

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I’ve been busy with a project so I missed the debates, and haven’t been in the comments. So, apologies if someone else already mentioned this.

Consider this copy for a 30 second ad that I just made up:

When the Gulf of Mexico was threatened by a blowout in the Deepwater Horizon well, the Obama Administration sent in the Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize winner in Physics who played a “commanding role” in getting that disaster under control. Chu had the smarts and respect to overrule the well owners, BP, when they proposed band-aids that threatened the Gulf. The oil spill was stopped, due in part to competent oversight by Democrats in power.

Today, when the world is threatened by a pandemic, the Trump Administration repeatedly overruled experts at the Centers for Disease Control. Possibly infected patients were met by workers without protective gear or proper training. And the person sent in by Trump is Mike Pence, a man who knows nothing about public health, and who oversaw the worst HIV outbreak in Indiana history due to inaction and failure to support common-sense public health measures.

Who do you want running the country?

Here’s something Bloomberg can spend his money on if he wants to run more than a vanity campaign.

(I’m generally skeptical of the “send in a Nobel Prize winner” mentality, but the oldsters in the audience might remember Richard Feynman and the Challenger disaster commission, where he stole the spotlight in a press conference by doing an ad-hoc experiment with a piece of O-ring and a cup of ice water. The fact that I remember it, and the further fact that he was right, indicates the huge public relations impact of someone who basically has no fucks to give and tells it like it is. We sure don’t have that with the Trump Administration.)

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Coronavirus Thoughts

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As I joked on twitter, my current coronavirus prep has been to order a bunch of dog and cat food and a couple pounds of coffee, which is actually just my monthly subscription from amazon. I did stock up on the prescriptions I take, and I have a bunch of N95 masks already as well as the Breaking Bad style respirator I bought when I had to deflea the house when I bought it. Other than that, I really don’t plan on doing anything.

I wonder how this will all play out. I do think it will spread like wildfire for several reasons. The first of which is that Americans have spend 50 years convincing themselves that America has the WORLDS BEST HEALTHCARE™, so probably a lot of people won’t be as careful as they should be. A lot of people think this is something that is just happening in the backwater provinces of China, and EVERYONE KNOWS their healthcare is nothing compared to ours.

The second of which is that people don’t was their hands well enough, never have, and never will. America, fuck yeah.

The third reason is this:

Capitalism might really kill us all. That would be ironic.

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News Round-Up (Open Thread)

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The White House is making health officials run messaging about the coronavirus through…Mike Pence (TPM):

If you’ve been around for a few days watching the news you certainly know of Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He’s been at NIH since 1968 and heading NIAID since 1984. Back in the early years of the AIDS epidemic he was often the guy in terms of getting real, factual information from the federal government. He’s someone who commands immense respect within the field and has a great record of explaining things to the public in a way that is candid, factual and useful.

Now we learn that the White House has apparently instructed Fauci not to speak publicly without prior sign-off from the White House about what he will say. And the person in charge of screening information, the one in charge of what federal officials say and don’t say, is Mike Pence. In a normal administration, some effort to coordinate message and make sure everyone is speaking consistently and clearly would likely make sense. But given what we have seen from the President and the White House so far it seems like a bad sign.

Larry Kudlow, aka, The Human Sharpie, is also on the coronavirus task force, which signals that the main strategy is to tamp down stock market jitters. Speaking of which (CNBC):

US stocks faced another sharp selloff on Thursday as worries about coronavirus mounted, with the three main indexes dragged into correction territory and on track for their worst week since the financial crisis.

The Dow fell up to 960 points Thursday before bouncing back a bit and briefly re-emerging from correction territory. The index has fallen more than 10% below its most-recent peak, putting it in correction, and was down 700 points, or 2.6%, mid-afternoon.

Good thing tomorrow’s not FRIDAY. Oh wait…

Meanwhile, Pence had time today to attend the CPAC asylum and film a public health update for the Hannity show, so it sounds like everything is fine.

Open thread!

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