Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Let the trolls come, and then ignore them. that’s the worst thing you can do to a troll.

Not all heroes wear capes.

This chaos was totally avoidable.

I have other things to bitch about but those will have to wait.

Stamping your little feets and demanding that they see how important you are? Not working anymore.

It is not hopeless, and we are not helpless.

The National Guard is not Batman.

This blog will pay for itself.

Sadly, media malpractice has become standard practice.

Beware of advice from anyone for whom Democrats are “they” and not “we.”

So many bastards, so little time.

Republican also-rans: four mules fighting over a turnip.

The desire to stay informed is directly at odds with the need to not be constantly enraged.

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

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

Rupert, come get your orange boy, you petrified old dinosaur turd.

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

Michigan is a great lesson for Dems everywhere: when you have power…use it!

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

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

Fear or fury? The choice is ours.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

The revolution will be supervised.

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On The Road – randy khan – Some Art to Calm the Soul

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On the Road: Week of November 9 (5 am)
Albatrossity
Jerry
?BillinGlendaleCA
Yutsano
Mary G.

In After Dark this week, we continue with a few more Election Respite posts as we detox from the stress, and toward the end of the week, we slide into Fall Colors.

On the Road  Election Respite and Fall Colors: Week of November 9 (10pm)
randy khan – Election Respite, Art to Calm the Soul Edition
way2blue – Election Respite, Late Edition
lashonharangue – Election Respite, Croatian Cascades and Waterfalls Edition
JanieM – Election Respite, The Four Seasons Edition
ema– Fall Colors

Next week, we have a full week of Fall Colors in On the Road After Dark.

?  And now, back to Election Respite

randy khan

Art is a balm in my life, and I thought I’d share some of the favorite things I’ve seen over the past few years (well, actually 15 years, but most of them are from the last 5). Oh, and I wanted things that would make people smile or made me feel calm or serene. With one exception, each of these photos is from a different trip, and they’re from six different cities.

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On The Road - randy khan - Some Art to Calm the Soul 10
Central Park, New York, New YorkFebruary 19, 2005

The first photo is from The Gates, by Christo and Jean-Claude. I’d been interested in his work since I was a kid and I read about Running Fence. We had a chance to go to New York for the day to see it, and took the opportunity.

It was great. It had snowed not too long before we got there, and the contrast of the bright orange gates with the white snow was great. And it was a little windy, so the fabric was fluttering in the breeze. It’s kind of hard to really convey the piece in one photo, but this one is close enough.

Trump Crime Cartel Death Watch Open Thread: Murdoch Has Declared Trump A Sunk Cost

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This has been brewing for some time, of course. From the Washington Post, “The long love affair between Fox News and Trump may be over”:

The last day of Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign began just after 7 a.m., as polls opened on the East Coast, with a call to “Fox & Friends,” the television morning show that had turned the reality star into a U.S. president. He got his usual hero’s welcome. But it was no longer enough…

…[H]is remarks quickly turned pointed that Tuesday morning as he boasted about how well he had done in the job of president, despite unexpected challenges — not from China or Russia or North Korea, he said, but from the United States. And he mused rhetorically about what had changed the most for him since 2016.

“Fox,” he said, answering his own question. “It’s much different now.” As the hosts sputtered, he elaborated: “In the old days, they wouldn’t put sleepy Joe Biden on every time he opened his mouth. . . . It’s a much different operation — I’m just telling you.”

It was the last day of a campaign Fox had done so much to support, but it was a preview of the war — now one week old but months in the making — that may have permanently ruptured the bond between President Trump and his once-favorite television channel. As he faces expulsion from the White House, Trump has vowed revenge on the network that propelled his political career, according to close White House aides — perhaps by publicly attacking Fox or undermining its business model by endorsing a competitor…

In recent months, he had begun to complain — on Twitter and to his aides — that Fox had turned on him. That impression was only heightened when reports emerged that Murdoch was telling associates that the president was going to lose…

Which leads to this excellent, if daintily-phrased, NYTimes article from last week — “New York Post Shifts Tone on Trump as a Top Editor Plans His Own Exit”:

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Monday Evening Open Thread: President (Elected!) Biden Steps Up

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Today’s Tantrum

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We had a whole weekend of national attention on President-Elect Joseph R. Biden and Vice-President-Elect Kamala D. Harris. He went golfing to try to ignore it, but today the neglect is setting in with full force.

So still-President Donald J. Trump fired his Secretary of Defense. That’ll show them! And you can call him Yesper, but Mark T. Esper defied The Master one too many times.

It seems pointless to fire anyone when you have only ten more weeks in the job, but as our very own Cole quoted Mary Trump,

Esper gave an interview on November 4 that he evidently asked to be held until he resigned or was fired. It’s been published. I think I would have wanted to have calmed down a bit before giving an interview and tried to avoid the whining, but you get the Secretary of Defense we just had, not the one we might want.

There’s a lot of speculation about why Esper was fired, and who’s next. The FBI’s Christopher Wray is the favorite. Also, too, someone in the White House has given instructions to agency heads to fire anyone who’s got a resume circulating.

I think Cole’s got it right. The positive side, I guess, is that as Trump eliminates people from the government, he becomes less able to do real damage, like start a war. It’s going to make the transition more difficult, but we knew that was coming.

And where are the other front-pagers? Open thread.

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Respite Thread – This Morning’s Visitor

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I have a trail cam set up in my front yard. These pics are from this morning, a half hour before the kitties went out. I need to change the time on the camera back to standard. Ric didn’t want to go out this morning. He knew something.

P,L:F,24H,2
P,L:F,24H,2
P,L:F,24H,2

Open thread!

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“Interesting” Read: If Only This *Were* Haberman’s Professional Obituary…

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To be honest, were *I* Maggie Haberman, I’d have been a lot more suspicious of ‘(No Longer) #BuzzfeedBen’, the man Dean Baquet hastily hired in the wake of Smith’s much-circulated hit piece on… Dean Baquet. But it seems they’re old friends, fellow miscreants in the newsbeat trenches, so…

Of course, Haberman — and her NYTimes bosses — couldn’t resist what must’ve seemed like a victory lap! But when you read the piece, well… those sneaky barbs:

… That was the beginning of the end of one of the most astonishing runs in the history of American journalism. Ms. Haberman has been, for the last four years, the source of a remarkably large share of what we know about Donald Trump and his White House, from the Mueller investigation to his personal battle with the coronavirus to his refusal to accept defeat. She’s done more than a story a day, on average, and stories with her byline have accounted for hundreds of millions of page views this year alone. That’s more than anyone else at The Times…

Politics used to be covered as a kind of a sport, but it doesn’t feel like that anymore. (John King of CNN was jeered for calling vote counting “fun” on election night.) And despite the television glamour and lucrative book contracts that flooded in for reporters in the Trump era, the real work of reporting is painstaking and exhausting: getting people, one by one, to tell you things they should not, and then telling your readers about them.

Ms. Haberman was particularly well-suited for this journalistic moment because of her sheer relentlessness and hunger, and her lack of smug self-satisfaction. She seems to need to prove herself every day. She texts while she drives, talks while she eats, parents while she reports, tweets and regrets it, doomscrolls. She hates Twitter so much she stepped back from the platform in 2018 and wrote an Op-Ed about it, and then started tweeting again. (Relatable!)…

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