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Let’s finish the job.

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The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

Take your GOP plan out of the witness protection program.

Innocent people don’t delay justice.

The GOP couldn’t organize an orgy in a whorehouse with a fist full of 50s.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

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This really is a full service blog.

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

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

An almost top 10,000 blog!

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

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You are here: Home / Politics / Biden Administration in Action / Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Living His Best Life

Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Living His Best Life

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And the Media Mudlarks are starving, proles!

… More than most public figures, Biden has sought to keep one foot in the normal world as he has ascended the rungs of power, from commuting home to Delaware on Amtrak to phoning ordinary Americans to attending Mass. But the presidency is testing that impulse in an entirely new way.

Current and former advisers say Biden’s typical day reveals a creature of habit with well-worn routines and favorite treats, from orange Gatorade to chocolate chip cookies; a tactile politician eager to escape the Washington bubble who meets privately with people who write him letters; and the patriarch of a sprawling Irish-Catholic clan who abruptly interrupts high-level meetings to take calls from family members.

It marks a sharp contrast with former president Donald Trump, whose days often ran both early and late with tweets that were frequently angry or inflammatory, and whose time was often consumed by rambling rallies, spontaneous calls to TV hosts and random, unscripted activities. Depending on the viewpoint, Biden has restored routine and order to the White House — or removed the freewheeling passion…

We have to talk about issues, now! Sharing gossip and mean tweets was so much more fun!

Reader Interactions

170Comments

  1. 1.

    Baud

    Biden should add “Sad!” to the end of his tweets once in a while as a bone to the media.

  2. 2.

    debbie

    Good god. Freewheeling passion is not at all how I would characterize the last administration.

  7. 7.

    rikyrah

    They are missing the chaos of Dolt45.

    They despise the competence of 46 and his Administration.

    They have to actually work, because they actually have to research and understand the POLICY put forth by 46. And, if the Press Secretary doesn’t give you enough answers, she always refers them to the Department that oversees the subject area of their questions. They hate that even more, because it means more work. More research to understand the subject matter.

    They didn’t have to know shyt during Dolt45’s term.

  14. 14.

    mrmoshpotato

    We have to talk about issues, now! Sharing gossip and mean tweets was so much more fun!

    “WWWWWAAAAAAA

    HHHHHHHH?!!!!!!!!”

    Has Chuckles Toddler met the surface of the Sun yet?

  15. 15.

    OzarkHillbilly

    The Republican pariah Liz Cheney has repeatedly refused to admit a link between Donald Trump’s lies about voter fraud and restrictive voting laws being introduced in Republican states, telling an interviewer on Sunday night she will “never understand the resistance to voter ID”.

    “There’s a big difference between that and a president of the United States who loses an election after he tried to steal the election and refuses to concede,” said the Wyoming representative ejected from party leadership for opposing the former president.

    Laws tightening regulations on voter ID, voting by mail and even giving water to those waiting on line to vote have been passed or are close to passage in states from Georgia to Texas and beyond.

    Because of their disproportionate impact on minority voters – many of whom vote Democratic – Democrats including Joe Biden have compared such laws to Jim Crow segregation in southern states from the civil war to the civil rights era.

    Most in a Republican party under Trump’s grip reject such claims. Cheney has ranged herself against Trump but when pressured by Axios on HBO interviewer Jonathan Swan, she stayed in lockstep with her party.

    Say WHAT???? At heart Liz Cheney is still a Republican who sees nothing wrong with suppressing Democratic votes??? Say it ain’t so!!!

  17. 17.

    narya

    Good morning, jackals! Glad to be out here with family. Dad is somewhat shaky; both he and mom are glad to have me around. I don’t think he’s at death’s door, but he’s definitely circling the block in the neighborhood of the house, and he has enough things wrong that one of them will do him in eventually, and he and my mom are fine with that, I think. (My brother said dad wasn’t to call any emergency provider because he doesn’t want to go to the hospital.) My friend is able to take on some of the driving-around-to-do-errands duty while I work remotely, and . . . it’s just pleasant. A nice way to (most likely) say goodbye, and I’m glad we came out now.

  24. 24.

    MomSense

    @Baud:

    Every damn day MSNBC is telling my mom about the crazy horrible thing she said that day.  Of course my mom tells me and I’m trying to gently explain to my mom that “even the liberal” MSNBC is capable of manipulation for ratings.
    I think viewers have become addicted to it.

  27. 27.

    Kathleen

    @Baud: GQP Speak as dutifully repeated by Mainslime Media: MTG is “quirky” and “mavericky”. Oh  and “firebrand”, which is what they call white terrorists these days.

  29. 29.

    Baud

    @MomSense:

    Yep.  We don’t want to ignore evil, but our side goes too far in the other direction and obsesses over it.

    It’s better than obsessing over Dr. Suess, but it’s not helpful to our cause IMHO.

  32. 32.

    JMG

    Median age of viewers of MSNBC: 68. Median age of Fox News viewer: Same. Median age of CNN viewer: 64. It’d really be helpful to America if since pot is legal in many places, people of my generation returned to that habit instead of watching cable news as a habit.

  34. 34.

    rikyrah

     

    Moving the goal posts.
    Be good, but not too good ???

    Never once have I ever read any piece questioning why a male athlete is excellent.

    Nor, have I ever seen something in the vein written about a White athlete.

    The New York Times (@nytimes) tweeted at 10:00 AM on Mon, May 24, 2021:
    Simone Biles executed a vault considered so dangerous that no other woman has attempted it in competition. For now, gymnastics limits the scoring rewards for trying it.

    When the Olympic medalist was asked why she does it, she answered, “Because I can.”
    https://t.co/PLp1ZWiT23
    (https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1396843472116756483?s=03)

  39. 39.

    Kathleen

    @Baud: I think it’s a Secret Decoder Ring from which they summon Seditious Siri. “Seditious Siri! Give me adjective for people smearing feces in the Capitol!”. Seditious Siri: “Freewheeling.”

  43. 43.

    Kathleen

    • @rikyrah: That ruling is outrageous. I have also thought while Mary Lou Retton dominated media landscape in 1984 Simone Biles has not enjoyed that level of attention.
  51. 51.

    Kathleen

    @Baud: I’m to the point that I think the biggest source of Rethug Rage Rethug rage is Black people voting.

  52. 52.

    Soprano2

    @rikyrah:

    They are missing the chaos of Dolt45.

    They despise the competence of 46 and his Administration.

    They have to actually work, because they actually have to research and understand the POLICY put forth by 46. And, if the Press Secretary doesn’t give you enough answers, she always refers them to the Department that oversees the subject area of their questions. They hate that even more, because it means more work. More research to understand the subject matter.

    They didn’t have to know shyt during Dolt45’s term.

    All of this, 100%. I think they really really enjoyed covering Trump, because they didn’t  have to do anything – all they had to do was wait for him to tweet something outrageous/ridiculous/illegal and then write about it, over and over again. Now they have to actually write about policy and things that matter *gasp*.

  53. 53.

    MomSense

    @Baud:

    I think he said at one point that he was going to retrieve Imm from Rice and see his FIL who is not well.

  57. 57.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Kathleen: That ruling is outrageous.

    I suspect it is the same ruling that has been applied every time an entirely new maneuver is performed. It’s just because they have no context for it. As far as Simone not getting the same level of attention as Mary Lou Retton, I have to disagree (memories are subjective so YMMV). Simone has completely dominated gymnastics and news of gymnastics for years. Everything she does is news and no reference to her is complete without the GOAT moniker.

    In my memory, there is a qualitative difference to the attention tho. MLR was America’s sweetheart, Biles not even. Why? I suspect it is mostly because of the “angry black woman” caricature, which I just don’t get because Simone has a smile that lights up the world and her joy at performing paints the floor mat in technicolor.

  58. 58.

    Soprano2

    @MomSense: I think viewers have become addicted to it.

    I think you’re right about that. Myself, I feel nothing but relief that I don’t have to look first thing in the morning to see if TFG did something horrible while I was sleeping, but I understand why the press would miss that. It made their jobs so much easier.

  59. 59.

    Baud

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    I don’t want to downplay the racism aspect, but the media environment is so different now it’s hard to compare the two. Everyone lives in their own bubble now.

  60. 60.

    Soprano2

    @Baud: I swear there’s a secret GOP thesaurus that they all use.

    Since Newt made them a list of words to use when they talk about Democrats, they’ve had their own special language. I think it hurts them, because when normal people hear them talking they don’t always make sense. Sometimes what they say doesn’t make sense to me, and I follow politics! What they say only makes sense to people who watch Fox News and hang out on right-wing web sites.

  61. 61.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Baud: And I’m missing 10 or 11 Balloon Juice days since then which makes the 7th seem like yesterday.

    ETA I am also remembering the “angry black woman” brush being applied to Michelle Obama who also had a smile that lit up the world

  63. 63.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Baud: You’re right about that.

    ETA I am also remembering the “angry black woman” brush being applied to Michelle Obama who also had a smile that lit up the world DOH! Applied to wrong comment

  64. 64.

    Kathleen

    @OzarkHillbilly: Yes. Thank you for helping me clarify my thinking. The “America’s Sweetheart” phenomenon is what I was thinking about. Simone also has endured constant social media carping and criticism about her hair. It’s disgusting.

  65. 65.

    Soprano2

    @Baud: You might be right. I think in general when you talk in code to voters, a lot of them shake their heads and say “What’s she/he talking about?” I read that WaPo article about Biden, and one of the things they said about him is that he asks his aides to explain things to him in a way that he could explain it to the average person. I think that’s smart; you talk to people in a way that they understand. Democrats do that too; for example, they talk about critical race theory without saying what it actually is most of the time. The more jargon you use, the easier it is to lose the average voter. I always had to remember that when I talked to people on the phone here; people don’t call it a rain event, they say “it rained”. LOL

  66. 66.

    emmyelle

    My perfectly brewed cup of coffee lacks the freewheeling intense heat of molten steel.

  67. 67.

    emmyelle

    An afternoon at my neighborhood playground lacks the free-wheeling terror of that waterslide that decapitated a kid.

  69. 69.

    emmyelle

    The bouquet of freshly cut wild flowers on my table lacks the freewheeling olfactory impact of a steaming pile of pig manure.

  73. 73.

    rp

    @Baud: Not only that, Retton was (I believe) the first American woman to win the gold, and did it at the Olympics in Los Angeles. So it was a tailor made story (including the fact that she’s white).

  74. 74.

    Baud

    @Soprano2:

    As a yellow dog Democrat and a solid liberal who pays (too much) attention to politics, let me just say that a LOT of the conversations that happens in our space are way over my head or go in one ear or out the other.  I can’t stand our rhetoric, compared to what I believe it could be.

    The GOP tend to be better storytellers, in both senses of the word (i.e., style and fictional narratives).

  75. 75.

    debbie

    @Baud:

    I’ve seen Simone’s vault many, many times. She’s all over NBC, obviously because they’re promoting their Olympics broadcast. I wouldn’t be surprised if other outlets were not similarly gushing over Simone because they didn’t want to aid a competitor.

  76. 76.

    Danielx

    “Freewheeling passion”?

    Odd way to describe a mechanism designed to deliberately propel fecal material into a rotary impeller at random intervals.

  79. 79.

    Kay

    @rikyrah:

    Christopher Rufo has become one of the go-to critics of Critical Race Theory.

    They’re going all-in on this at every level. Barr promoted it with a speech and McConnell is attacking Biden on federal civics and history standards. Oh, and the DeVos family are backing a group of GOP operatives who will pretend to be “grass roots public school parents”.

    I think we have to watch it, but at the same time I’m interested because I think the switch means the anti-immigrant stuff wasn’t working. Biden has the same approval rating on immigration that Trump had. They aren’t going to move anyone on it- Trump got all the anti-immigration voters that are out there. They maxed out that voter pool. Hence, an insane, over blown moral panic over Critical Race Theory that is blatantly racist.

  80. 80.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Soprano2:

    Democrats do that too; for example, they talk about critical race theory without saying what it actually is most of the time.

    The only people I’ve ever heard talking about “critical race theory” are Republicans who were scaremongering about it, and Democrats talking about Republicans’ scaremongering. It was a kind of obscure academic thing before that–I don’t think most people of any political affiliation know what it might really have been.

  82. 82.

    Hoodie

    @Matt McIrvin: That’s why they fixate on it. The more obscure, the better it works as a totem.  It’s like Bigfoot or Antifa-  no one has actually seen one in the wild.

  83. 83.

    Lapassionara

    @OzarkHillbilly: Voters have always had to bring some form of ID to the polls. In the past, I could show a utility Bill with my address on it, or my voter registration card. What is different now is that Republicans want everyone to have a photo ID. This costs money and time. Not everyone has a drivers license. My grandmother never had one. Photo ID requirements disproportionately affect the old, the poor, and minorities. In other words, Democratic voters.

  84. 84.

    Kay

    @Matt McIrvin:

    The bad faith on the Right on “critical race theory” is entire. There’s no good faith. No Democrat should engage on it- they cannot win an argument that is being conducted completely in fantasyland.

    The claim on the Right is that K-12 public schools have been taken over by AA Marxists. They’re promoting this at the highest levels and with the biggest players- Barr, McConnell, Devos. This isn’t Trump. It’s a mainstream GOP project. They know full well that critical race theory is a specific and small academic theory. They know this. They don’t care. They think it’s politically potent and so all history or civics education that includes AA experience or events will be labeled “critical race theory”.

    Democrats can’t argue “for” or “against” critical race theory when conservatives are right now inventing it. The thing is not what they say it is.

  85. 85.

    Baud

    @Kay:

    The claim on the Right is that K-12 public schools have been taken over by AA Marxists.

    The twelfth step is seizing the means of production from the capitalists.

  86. 86.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Lapassionara: In the past it was the signature match that counted. Nowadays with electronic signatures that don’t in any way shape or form match what is on paper, the poll workers don’t even look at them.

    Just one more reason to insist on photo ID.

  87. 87.

    Kay

    @Baud:

    They worked really hard on the immigrant scare-mongering. They got off their asses and all got into boats for photo ops. Fox did it 24/7 and mainstream outlets played along to a certain extent. Even the substack crowd joined in- Andrew Sullivan writes daily about the brown invading hordes.

    But it must not have been that effective because they’re all-in on “critical race theory” – it’s a clear and defined shift. If anti-immigrant was working these lazy, low quality employees would have run on it forever.

  89. 89.

    zhena gogolia

    We just watched Shakespeare in Love, and I have to say that (as I felt when I first saw it when it came out) it is a brilliant movie, brilliantly written and acted, full of humor, charm, emotion, and love for the theater and for poetry. So there.

  91. 91.

    Hoodie

    @Kay: The use of terms like critical race theory points out an asymmetry in discourse that liberals have to deal with.  Along with being racist, misogynist or both, conservative appeals are are almost always anti-intellectual.   They’ve latched onto “critical race theory” precisely because it sounds like something conjured up by some pointy-headed communist liberal college professor to look down on salt of the earth white folks that don’t have a racist bone in their bodies.

  92. 92.

    Kay

    @Baud:

    I’ve been on a school council so long and I have had kids in public schools so long that I kind of love the Right’s INSANE depiction of public schools. Public schools, by nature of being public, and having to balance all kinds of interests and also being full of mostly earnest not-really-political people are an inherently conservative entity. They’re not just “not radical”. They’re conventional. They strive to stay firmly in the middle. It’s like there’s bumpers on the side of the road. They go too far Left or Right they correct. They’re further Right in conservative areas and further Left in liberal areas but in that sense they’re a mirror. They don’t drive what’s happening. They reflect what’s happening.

    To listen to people on the Right and have some actual experience in how they actually run and are governed  is just an amazing thing- the story on the Right has nothing to do with the real thing.

  93. 93.

    Kathleen

    @Baud: Whst Rethugs have mastered is giving people permission to feel and express anger and fear. Dems with good reason assume that their voters/supporters are solution oriented and want candidates to appeal to reason. Dems running for office know this and that’s why they are accused of bringing sporks to knife fights and exhibiting spinelessness. I don’t think Dems are spineless or cowardly at all. They’re behaving how they think their constituents want them to behave. The reps like Maxine Waters who tells truth the way she sees it is painted by media as “Angry Black Woman” while MGT is a “firebrand”. I wish more Dems would feel confident to express  anger and I think they have displayed it more since 1/6.

    I realize opinion is overly simplified and broad brush but am positing it as a loose framework for comparison with GQP.

  94. 94.

    PST

    @JMG:

    Median age of viewers of MSNBC: 68. Median age of Fox News viewer: Same. Median age of CNN viewer: 64. It’d really be helpful to America if since pot is legal in many places, people of my generation returned to that habit instead of watching cable news as a habit.

    Agreed, and I also think that much MSNBC programming is becoming increasingly unwatchable. Or at least I can’t watch it anymore, and I doubt that it is healthy for those who do. The best of the shows are either fairly straight news, mostly during daytime hours, or those with lots of guests. I can put up with almost any host as long as I’m listening to multiple views and some genuine experts. The worst feature long monologues that inevitably make me think of Fox, even if the hosts aren’t unhinged and generally share my opinions. And I think several of them drift into overstating and overdramatizing their arguments in ways that have the effect of weakening them. After all, endless rehashing is boring, leaving little choice but escalation if you want to hold onto an audience. Rachel, Joy, and Ali (we’re all on a first-name basis) especially come to mind, and the worst part is that they weren’t always that way.

  95. 95.

    Ruckus

    @debbie:

    I answer freewheeling passion with “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!”

    Freewheeling passion? How can anyone get that response to the 4 long disastrous eons of that of that inhumane mess.

  97. 97.

    Kay

    @PST:

    Rachel Maddow doesn’t trust her audience to make the simplest connections. It bothers me because the effect of not letting people do any of their own thinking is you end up manipulating them. They’ll get there. It is really controlling to not let them make the slightest veer off of where she wants them to go.

    There’s a lot of it. Glenn Greenwald does the same thing, with much more malice and dishonesty but it’s the same approach. Just let them reach their own conclusion.

  99. 99.

    sdhays

    @Soprano2: You’re definitely right about that. When I saw the tweet about the critic of Critical Race Theory, at first I got it confused with Bell Curve nonsense. And while I certainly don’t read about everything, I think I’m paying more attention than your average “normie”.

    Jargon doesn’t help when talking to a wide audience.

  100. 100.

    Geminid

    @Jeffro: The Virginia Republican candidate for governor is trying out coded  language to push these social issues. He doesn’t talk about Critical Race Theory, but he wants “schools that teach our children how to think, not what to think.” He doesn’t speak of bathrooms and background checks, but about “preserving our Bill of Rights.” I suspect that sooner or later he will have to drop the euphemisms, so that the base Republican base doesn’t mistake him for a squish.

  102. 102.

    gvg

    @Kathleen: To be fair, Mary Lou wasn’t great during a Trump administration and pandemic. That certainly competes with my attention.

    Also, I think overall attention to sports, olympic competition and gymnastics used to be higher, but that may just be my circles.  The olympics don’t seem as amazing and innocent now as I recall, but I am older and more cynical.

    I switch over to watching her routines for relief from the regular news, alternating with amusing cat videos. We live in a dangerous time, she is great, but I have a lot of worries these days.

  103. 103.

    Ruckus

    @Kay:

    The right lies for a reason. And that is that if they told the truth about what they want they really wouldn’t have much support. They have to make it about anything that distracts from their real goals. And they have to do this in a way that puts their real goals out of the limelight, they have to substitute BS for their real goal. And that BS has to be in the form of absolute misdirection, strong misdirection and they have to get people to believe that the real problem is not what they are doing but whatever they can use to blame anyone, everyone else for what is going on and what is wrong with everything that is not what they want. Because what they want and need is very compliant, willing support for their cause, which does nothing positive for anyone but the very few of those at the top of what they consider the ruling class. Modern, democratic society screws them completely, absolutely, fully. It’s misdirection of the worst kind, the kind that causes horrible lives, that causes hate, that causes blame, that misdirects attention from their crimes against humanity. I’ve said many times here what their goal is so I’ll leave that to say that for them to get what they want, everyone else has to suffer, including their own supporters.

  104. 104.

    germy

    I just finished reading “Lies My Teacher Told Me.”

    An unfortunate title, because the author isn’t anti-teacher.  Instead he criticizes high school and middle school textbooks.  It’s a fascinating book.

    I recognized lots of the stuff from my own textbooks (1968-1976) and the narrative I was taught.  Especially about the Civil War.

  105. 105.

    Kay

    @schrodingers_cat:

    I recognize it because I sometimes do it. My youngest son criticized me for it once and he was right. I DO lead him along, because I can, and he’s an easy going person and he’ll allow it. But he’s also smart and he has his own opinions and he just got tired of it- recognized it as lawyerly manipulation leading him to a “result”. Which is what it is. I didn’t trust him to get to the “right” answer.

  107. 107.

    schrodingers_cat

    @rikyrah: Also they love centering white whine, hence all the focus what Rs did or did not do. The endless diner stories. The focus on BS and the Orange Clown. The rest of us don’t even exist to the MSM.

  108. 108.

    germy

    @Kathleen: I have also thought while Mary Lou Retton dominated media landscape in 1984 Simone Biles has not enjoyed that level of attention.

    I wasn’t really following the Olympics when Retton was competing, but I remember seeing her all over TV.  All the morning news shows, the infotainment stuff, etc.  One thing I remember particularly:  One of the shows had her on, and seemed to be trying her out to be a regular commentator.  They apparently gave her a script to read, and she struggled to do it.  The other hosts looked embarrassed while she read what was supposed to be a regular promo, because she did it in a monotone, halting and stumbling over words, and mispronouncing some.  She (and they) looked relieved when it was over.

    I don’t know if she suffered from a reading disability, but I’d never seen anything like it on TV

  109. 109.

    germy

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    Shitty textbooks written by design departments and underpaid editorial assistants, with famous historians’ names listed as the authors.

    When he contacted some of the famous historian “authors” some of them confessed they had nothing to do with the creation of the books.

  110. 110.

    MomSense

    @zhena gogolia:

    I adore Joe Fiennes.  He’s one of those actors who pulls you into his world.  Very enjoyable in Shakespeare in Love and The Very Thought of You but terrifying in A Handmaid’s Tale.

  111. 111.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @germy: Shitty textbooks written by design departments and underpaid editorial assistants, with famous historians’ names listed as the authors.

    And approved by medieval Evangelical Texas conservatives Luddites.

  112. 112.

    Feathers

    @rikyrah: The men are generally in their 20s. The women are under 18. Gymnastics has a real problem with abusive coaches that they have only begun to deal with. Gymnastics and figure skating must both deal with the issue that when talking about highly trained athletes, pound for pound, the strongest human in the world is a girl in the months before she hits puberty and has her growth spurt. She is also extremely coachable at this stage. So what happens is that the Olympics becomes a lottery of what athlete shows up in that age window. Biles is showing that there is possibility for competitors to get older and better, but the rest of the sport isn’t there. You aren’t talking about Biles attempting these maneuvers at the Olympics, you are talking about some 14 or 15 year old with a horrible coach in a gym somewhere. It won’t even make the news if she ends up paralyzed.

    Figure skating is actually talking about raising the age limit beyond 16. Why? The Russians, led by coach Eteri Tutberidze, have started a program explicitly training large numbers of younger skaters, so as to always have several in the optimal age window. They will probably sweep the ladies podium in Beijing. A problem? Eteri has openly said that she does not like to work with skaters over 17, because they require too much personal attention. She has deliberately sabotaged over 17 skaters, telling one world champion who complained that she was too old to compete and should go have babies.

    So, yeah, Simone Biles is getting robbed, but this is the state of women’s sports that don’t actually want women competing. What they should be doing is adding the difficulty for Simone and then lowering it as soon as she retires. And actually getting rid of abusive coaches.

    @Kathleen: While not denying the racist garbage that Biles has put up with, the media landscape is very different. Also, the US had always kind of sucked at gymnastics, despite the sport becoming very popular on TV. Mary Lou won at the 1984 Olympics, which was boycotted by the Russians, who would have absolutely crushed the Americans. So, Mary Lou got heavily, heavily promoted in the jingoistic America first drama of the Reagan years. Part of the reason for the marketing frenzy was advertisers and brands didn’t know when they would ever get another American gymnastics champion again. Of course, the USSR collapsed before the end of the decade, and the sport took off in America to the point where we don’t even bother noticing which one of our gymnasts took home the gold this games. I would look at the difference between Simone and the last white woman to win the all around gold. Do you even know her name? (Nastia Lukin)

  114. 114.

    zhena gogolia

    @MomSense:

    I have to admit this is the only thing I’ve seen him in. He’s very good. So different from Ralph

    ETA: It helped that we recently watched the Zeffirelli R&J. Fun to see the parodic version with (at least most of) the play still in mind.

  115. 115.

    Miss Bianca

    @zhena gogolia:

    I just watched Shakespeare in Love again for the first time since seeing it in the theater and I have to say that it held up even better than I thought it would. That Tom Stoppard may be no Shakespeare, but he’s a damn good writer nonetheless.

    Still giggling quietly over the prospect of the lost masterpiece, Romeo and Ethel the Pirate’s Daughter.

  116. 116.

    Feathers

    @germy: Another problem for Olympics sports is that the fucking corrupt ISU screwed the individual sports over when they gave a long term contract to NBC to air the Olympics in the US. It used to be that all the networks were competing to air future Olympics, so it made sense for them to promote the athletes and not really compete with the Games when they were broadcast. Now, the Games are seen as an NBC thing, so other networks don’t want to promote Olympic sports. Apparently NBC isn’t terribly happy when athletes go on other network’s shows either.

    So, again, a very different media landscape. Social media does make up for some of it, but also has its own agenda. Would we even be hearing about Biles’ complaints in the pre-social media days?

  117. 117.

    zhena gogolia

    @Miss Bianca:

    Yes, there are so many hilarious bits by Geoffrey Rush that kind of whiz by.

    This was my first view of Colin Firth, and I didn’t like him at all — a testament to his acting. Soon after that I saw Pride and Prejudice and Bridget Jones and had to change my view of him entirely.

  118. 118.

    PST

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    In my memory, there is a qualitative difference to the attention tho. MLR was America’s sweetheart, Biles not even.

    I don’t want to discount race, but I think age and other factors play a role too. Retton was 16 when she won gold, and it was the age of the pixies, when female gymnasts the world over seemed to be getting younger and younger. The gymnasts seem like women now, and we aren’t as likely to think of them as “sweethearts,” just as we don’t view basketball or volleyball stars that way. Probably for the good. In addition, Biles was celebrated everywhere in 2016, at a time when we were all highly into the Olympics. There is a cloud over them this year, with still a level of doubt that they will even happen. No one seems very interested yet. Biles seems like literally the only Olympian anyone is paying attention to.

  120. 120.

    Just One More Canuck

    @schrodingers_cat: Don’t know about that, but per Wiki, she has lived most of her life in Bethesda, went to Penn, and worked for the NYT before Wapo.  Make of that what you will

  121. 121.

    Ruckus

    @germy: 
    Not everyone can read a raw script and sound engaging or informed. Especially if you are being filmed. I’d bet that most people can’t. My first week on the job in pro sports, I was asked to give an interview, by a broadcaster that I knew. It was terrifying, I was so afraid I’d sound stupid that it’s very, very likely that I actually did. Even someone used to being filmed at their job can be easily tongue tied. For some it never goes away, for others it’s just stage freight that goes away with experience.

  122. 122.

    Miss Bianca

    @zhena gogolia: Right? I almost didn’t recognize CF!

    And the director got a great performance out of Gwyneth Paltrow – even in the days before she made herself a joke, I always thought of her as a pretty face with minimal talent (tho’ she seems to do better in period pieces – her take on Emma Woodhouse was quite appealing too, as I recall).

    And I’ve always done the Geoffrey Rush fey-voiced “It’s a mystery!” when I get flummoxed, so it was great to go back to the well for the original!

  123. 123.

    WaterGirl

    @rikyrah: Oh, thank god.  It’s a travesty that it has taken this long, but I’m so glad that it’s a go.

    These fuckers would deliberately slow down women and children from getting to the lifeboats on the titanic, in the hopes that maybe one of their people could score their spot instead.

  127. 127.

    Feathers

    @PST: Also Biles is in the impossible position of competing in a sport entirely broadcast on NBC, after speaking out about the abuse she suffered at the Karolyi ranch. Abuse which NBC not only ignored, but actively celebrated for over three decades. Would Nassar have gotten away with what he did if Karolyi hadn’t been the face of US gymnastics, plastered on TV every four years? They got rid of Matt Lauer, but the misogynist rot at NBC has effected their coverage of women’s sports and we haven’t begun to look into it.

  129. 129.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    @Geminid: He doesn’t talk about Critical Race Theory, but he wants “schools that teach our children how to think, not what to think.” He doesn’t speak of bathrooms and background checks, but about “preserving our Bill of Rights.” I suspect that sooner or later he will have to drop the euphemisms

    Oh I hope he doesn’t figure out that he’s advocating the teaching of critical thinking, and the separation of Church and State.

  130. 130.

    Feathers

    @Ruckus: Do you know anything about the Karolyi’s training methods? It would not surprise me at all if Retton reached 16 unable to read. It could have been that she had dyslexia, diagnosed or not, and actively avoided school, but there would have been enormous pressures on her to put aside schoolwork for more training.

    I follow figure skating more closely than gymnastics, but the problem of skaters who focus entirely on skating and end up at the end of their competitive careers without enough education to be able to find work in any other field is real. And it’s not only that they haven’t been to college, but that going to college would involve a huge amount of remedial work. Plus they are deeply in debt from the costs of skating.

    Gymnastics at least has the fallback of a collegiate career, so there is an incentive to do well enough in school to be eligible for a scholarship. But many Olympic level gymnasts quit the sport rather than go down a level to collegiate.

  131. 131.

    Jeffro

    @Geminid:I suspect that sooner or later [the GOP candidate for VA Gov] will have to drop the euphemisms, so that the base Republican base doesn’t mistake him for a squish.

    Oh, absolutely.  I can’t see how he’ll be able to avoid it if he wants to fire up the GQP base, and the moment he does, he’s toast with a majority of VA voters.

  133. 133.

    WaterGirl

    @Baud:

    I would be tempted to crack down on immigration if we could start with Andrew Sullivan.

    If you can shorten that, even a little bit, that’s rotating tag material.

    How about:

    …tempting to crack down on immigration if we could start and end with Andrew Sullivan

    It’s not shorter, but it does address SC’s point.

  136. 136.

    PST

    @Matt McIrvin:

    The only people I’ve ever heard talking about “critical race theory” are Republicans who were scaremongering about it, and Democrats talking about Republicans’ scaremongering. It was a kind of obscure academic thing before that–I don’t think most people of any political affiliation know what it might really have been.

    Although I agree with the observation that all current republican discussion of CRT is utterly in bad faith and unworthy of engaging with, I don’t think of it as obscure. It underlies ideas and phenomena that we talk about constantly. In particular, our understanding of institutional racism emerged from CRT. I can remember as an undergraduate and law student the controversy over the work of Derrick Bell, in particular, and others applying critical legal theory to race to show how economic interest creates and perpetuates racist structures that exist outside the racial animus of individuals. It was upsetting to everyone who wanted to think of legal theory as neutral instead of largely created to perpetuate privilege, including racial privilege. It gives an answer to those who say, dismissively, “Don’t blame me, I don’t hate Black people.” Diversity training isn’t inculcation in CRT, but it would be hard to imagine it without the work of CRT scholars. We’d be back at a National Brotherhood Week level of teaching.

  137. 137.

    cain

    @Hoodie:

    My girlfriend, is a kindergarten teacher is totally teaching critical race theory to her class. She’s already won a runner up award for best educator in Oregon.

    The knives were out earlier when Fox News covered a seminar she did in February – got everyone all hot and bothered. The proud boys showed up at her school with guns demanding that she get fired.

    I’m still trying to figure out how someone can trespass with guns and then just have the cops just show up and just watch instead of getting them out of there.

  138. 138.

    Feathers

    @Heidi Mom: That was a robbery.

    @Miss Bianca: Gwyneth is an actress who is as good as her director. She’s (was) also surprisingly good playing bad characters. I first saw her in FLESH AND BONE, a Meg Ryan/Dennis Quaid neo-noir where she played a grifter who dressed up in outrageously skimpy outfits and showed up at funeral home viewings to throw herself on the corpse and steal any available jewelry. She was also very good in Paul Thomas Anderson’s first film HARD EIGHT, another neo-noir. Rewatched EMMA after seeing the Anna Taylor Joy version, and it didn’t hold up for me.

  139. 139.

    PST

    @Heidi Mom:

    But I would have given the Best Actress Oscar to Cate Blanchett for Elizabeth.

    Absolutely. By the end she had transformed into something terrifying.

  141. 141.

    Origuy

    Here’s more about the ultramarathon in China where the weather turned bad and 21 runners died.

    Another first person account, published on Chinese social-media platform Sina Weibo, is from runner Xiao-Tao Zhang, who reports he was running among the top-six men when the weather turned. In summary, he encountered the storm between checkpoints two and three, which for him was rain, hail, very high winds, and cold temperatures. When the weather became unbearable, he says he hit the SOS button on his GPS tracker. Soon he passed out, and woke some hours later in a cave where he’d been carried by a local sheep herder. The herder had made a fire and wrapped him in a quilt. Other runners had also taken refuge there. Zhang believes he is the only survivor among the top-six men with whom he’d been running near when the storm began.

    The organizers had unusually lax requirements for equipment, and apparently didn’t enforce what requirements they had.

  143. 143.

    Feathers

    @PST: Yes. Marx was brilliant at analyzing the problems of the world, terrible at coming up with solutions. If Plato’s Republic had ever been implemented, his philosophical works would not be treated so positively.

    CRT is essential, but still faces the problem that tools of analysis are not revealers of truth. You need CRT to see what is happening, but it may not be the best framework for finding a solution. Why? Because racism both creates and exploits weaknesses in the system. Once you’ve found the weaknesses, it will take a different set of tools to fix them.

  144. 144.

    Kay

    @germy:

    “Lies My Teacher Told Me.”

    I remember finding out Helen Keller was a socialist and being a little miffed that I wasn’t told that. We could have handled it. They should have told us.
    It’s like how they take all the parts about rights for working people out of MLK jr
    As if public schools were teaching some completely unbiased version of history anyway. They edited out all the interesting parts.

  145. 145.

    catclub

    @Kathleen: ​
     

    and “firebrand”, which is what they call white terrorists these days.

    which is actually surprisingly accurate. literally!

  146. 146.

    catclub

    @Kay: ​
     

    They edited out all the interesting parts.

    They did not actually edit out the interesting parts of the Bible. But they sure don’t bring them up. “How many foreskins?”

  150. 150.

    Kathleen

    @germy: Oh my gosh. I don’t recall that. What I most remember are the cereal commercials. They were ubiquitous in 1984.

  151. 151.

    cain

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: @cain: Holy cow. If I was the parent of kid at that grade school, I’d be screaming about the people with guns

    I’m still wondering why there was no media coverage about that. Even more stupid the police told her and others that they can “slip out the back” – what the fuck? The teachers aren’t the one that were trespassing and being threatening.

  154. 154.

    Kay

    Zaid Jilani
    @ZaidJilani
    Over the past week, major media outlets have reported that Texas is trying to ban schools from teaching students about slavery and racism. This is completely false, but why it’s false is also interesting.

    If anyone was wondering whether the cancel culture warriors were actually about free speech and debate, they can stop wondering.
    This Tweet is just wrong. The Texas law is incredibly broad. It bans teaching any “divisive” concepts. It’s INSANELY restrictive. Another one just dropped in Idaho that is worse.
    Free speech supporters should be opposed to these laws, but they’re not. Why is that? Weren’t we told they opposed “cancel culture” and speech restrictions?

  155. 155.

    Ken

    @catclub: Bible trivia:  In the Revised Common Lectionary everything from Genesis 1:1 to 2:24 is read at some point in the three-year cycle (including the special readings for various holy days), and all of Genesis 3 is also read.  But for some reason the single verse Genesis 2:25 is skipped.

  156. 156.

    artem1s

    @rikyrah:

    if the Press Secretary doesn’t give you enough answers, she always refers them to the Department that oversees the subject area of their questions. They hate that even more, because it means more work. More research to understand the subject matter.

    it also means they have to lower themselves and talk to one of the little people.  Access is everything to them and they hate having to access the WH thru the Unter Menschen most of all.

  157. 157.

    Miss Bianca

    @Kay:

    The whole family became crazy, bitter wingnuts who ranted against FDR and threatened to shoot federal agriculture agents, although they had benefited hugely from federal agriculture giveaways.

    So freaking true. And ain’t it always the way? Self-styled Libertarians never seem willing to either acknowledge or even recognize that they owe their present fortune to a creamy and delicious blend of individual merit, luck, social standing, and government largesse – they prefer to focus on the first and mistake it for the whole.

  158. 158.

    Kay

    @Miss Bianca:

    One of the books is basically Right wing anti-government propaganda! Taught in every public elementary school.
    The daughter was penning ad copy for Hoover while they were marketing the books. They had to edit out the part where in one of the books where they said ” no one” lived on the land when the government gave it to them. Except the native Americans, who are in the book.
    I got your cancel culture right here. They canceled a whole people.

  160. 160.

    Ruckus

    @Feathers:

    I’d say that pretty much any sport one is good at, that is physical over critical thinking is going to be done at a relatively young age and is going to require such a level of effort and practice that for most people, something is going to have to give, for most people to do extremely well at it. There will always be exceptions but I say, in general this is how it goes. And considering the time involved on the physical side, it is the intellectual side that gives way.

  161. 161.

    J R in WV

    @narya: ​So back in the mid 1990s my mom was bed-fast with COPD. One day she wasn’t very responsive, so dad called 911 and they got her to the ER where she responded well to treatment.
    We went up to be with them, and when I walked up to her hospital room there was PT happening. Mom looked over at me and rolled her eyes — she was a realistic person and knew doing PT in her hospital room wasn’t going to extend her life to amount to anything.
    After just a couple of days she came home and told dad that if he could not stand to be with her when something like that happened, he should just go to the other end of the house. But do not call 911 for me again, she said.
    Just a couple of weeks later she died in his arms, almost certainly a heart attack, about 5 am. I was standing in our kitchen almost out the door for work when our phone rang — I knew before I touched it what had happened.
    It was a release for her — she was ready to go on, and for him too. He kept her well for several years longer than the doctors believed she could possibly last. Now, 25-odd years later, we still miss her, she was a fine person.​​​​​

    ETA… this was surprisingly easy to write, but also surprisingly difficult to read. I hope it doesn’t upset anyone, it is pretty much exactly what happened. Dad was there for her to the very end. They were quite a love story.

  162. 162.

    J R in WV

    @Kathleen:

    I can’t think of anything at all negative to say about Ms Biles. She is a phenom, almost unbelievable in her ability. I do hope she doesn’t hurt herself exploring the outer limits of her abilities. Without a doubt the greatest athlete ever!

  163. 163.

    J R in WV

    @Lapassionara:

    Voters have always had to bring some form of ID to the polls.

    How about my Voter’s Registration card?

    It even has my precinct number on it, which is important when I go to an early voting center, as opposed to the middle school gym on election day.

    I guess that’s too easy, everyone who intends to vote gets one of those. Free, also too~!!~

  164. 164.

    tam1MI

    Dead thread, but I must say that I agree with everything said above about Shakespeare in Love. It still had no business winning the Best Picture Oscar over Saving Private Ryan.

  165. 165.

    J R in WV

    @Geminid:

    The Virginia Republican candidate for governor is trying out coded  language to push these social issues. He doesn’t talk about Critical Race Theory, but he wants “schools that teach our children how to think, not what to think.”

    Actually, in many states the GQP politicians in charge have made teaching critical thought illegal~!!~ So the VA GQP candidate will have to drop that part of his platform!

  166. 166.

    J R in WV

    @Ken:

    for some reason the single verse Genesis 2:25 is skipped.

    OK, that’s really funny, I thought it would be a long complicated verse, but not. Just stuff the SBC doesn’t want to have to say out loud!

    Really funny, Thanks for sharing.

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