Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

“The defense has a certain level of trust in defendant that the government does not.”

Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.

If a good thing happens for a bad reason, it’s still a good thing.

Trump should be leading, not lying.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

Every decision we make has lots of baggage with it, known or unknown.

The republican speaker is a slippery little devil.

Their boy Ron is an empty plastic cup that will never know pudding.

You are so fucked. Still, I wish you the best of luck.

Stop using mental illness to avoid talking about armed white supremacy.

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

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

The press swings at every pitch, we don’t have to.

Every one of the “Roberts Six” lied to get on the court.

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

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

Washington Post Catch and Kill, not noticeably better than the Enquirer’s.

Republicans in disarray!

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

There are some who say that there are too many strawmen arguments on this blog.

You are here: Home / Foreign Affairs / Thursday Morning Open Thread: Setting Forth

Thursday Morning Open Thread: Setting Forth

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… Since the G-7 last met two years ago, the coronavirus pandemic has killed more than 3.7 million people and decimated economies with lockdowns and layoffs.

So when British Prime Minister Boris Johnson welcomes U.S. President Joe Biden and the leaders of France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Canada to the cliff-ringed Carbis Bay beach resort in southwest England, pandemic recovery — “building back better,” in a phrase both Biden and Johnson like — will top the agenda…

France said President Emmanuel Macron wanted to see “results and not just announcements” on vaccines.

“We need a specific calendar — how many people worldwide and especially in Africa will be vaccinated” before a meeting of the G-20 in Rome in October, an official in the president’s office said, noting that Africa has received under 2% of the world’s coronavirus vaccine doses…

Reader Interactions

140Comments

  1. 1.

    Cermet

    Beautiful morning here (for now); saw a tiny bit of the solar eclipse thru some clouds early this morning (through binoculars with solar filters.

  2. 2.

    Baud

    Biden’s steadiness continues to be a welcome change from the usual sturm und drang.

  3. 3.

    debbie

    Just listened to a report on NPR about the 200,000 doses of J&J vaccine that will expire in 13 days. Mexico’s just next door; why not gather and transport them there? Everything I hear about Mexico speaks to how low the vaccination rate is there.

  4. 4.

    Brachiator

    @debbie:

    Just listened to a report on NPR about the 200,000 doses of J&J vaccine that will expire in 13 days. Mexico’s just next door; why not gather and transport them there?

    I have read that there are logistics issues. Also, a receiving country has to be able to store the vaccine and also be able to administer the doses to people.

  5. 5.

    OzarkHillbilly

    Skeletons of Viking men to be reunited in Danish exhibition

    The skeletons of two Viking age men who were related but died on opposite sides of the North Sea are to be reunited in an exhibition in Copenhagen this month.

    DNA tests on the ancient bones suggest the men were either half-brothers or a nephew and an uncle, according to Prof Eske Willerslev, a Danish evolutionary geneticist based at the University of Cambridge. Both of the Norsemen died following violent incidents.

    The skeleton of the first man, a farmer in his 50s, was excavated in 2005 near the town of Otterup in central Denmark. Analysis of the bones found that he was 6ft, had arthritis in most of his joints, and signs of inflammation potentially indicative of tuberculosis.

    But further markings on the bones – in particular, a violent lesion on the left of his pelvis – are believed to have come from a stab wound that may have proved fatal. “The wound from that blow may have cost him his life because it did not heal,” said Jesper Hansen, chief curator at Odense City Museums. The wound has led researchers to suspect the man took part in the kinds of raids that made the Vikings notorious.

    The second skeleton was unearthed in 2008 under the quadrangle at St John’s College, Oxford. There, archaeologists found the remains of at least 35 young men aged 16 to 25. The men are thought to have been slaughtered in the St Brice’s Day massacre more than 1,000 years ago when – on hearing of a Danish plot to assassinate him – the Saxon king Ethelred the Unready ordered the extermination of all Danes in England.

  6. 6.

    Betty Cracker

    Biden’s comment on Russia sounds to me like the right thing to say for public consumption. But my hope is that during his first week on the job, he summoned all the relevant agencies and asked for plans on how to undermine Putin and contain and counter Russia’s hyper-aggressive, intolerable, years-long meddling in the U.S. and other Western democracies.

    There’s no “if” about the Russian government’s harmful activities. They are significant, consequential and ongoing, and they have to be met with deterrent action.

  9. 9.

    Nicole

    Kid finished elementary school yesterday and to celebrate we splurged and went out to JFK airport for a day and night at the TWA hotel which, despite me having lived in NYC since the 90s, I was unaware was a thing.  It’s fun; kind of like staying in a museum devoted to TWA. I got a room overlooking the runways and have  I ever turned into a little kid, watching the planes take off and land.

    We wear masks inside the hotel common areas, although we did take them off when we got to dinner last night, and I just realized it’s the first meal I’ve had inside where I didn’t get anxious as soon as I took my mask off.

  10. 10.

    debbie

    @Betty Cracker:

    I think there needs to be a great deal of belittling to shrink Putin into what he is, a criminal and a thug. Criminality is not the way to greatness.

  11. 11.

    Spanky

    @Betty Cracker: The Deep State has been on the case for decades. Not only must these things be done delicately, but I doubt anyone is sure just how much TFG compromised our capabilities.

    Nothing will be rushed, of that I’m sure.

  12. 12.

    debbie

    @Nicole:

    Having stood in many TWA boarding lines and been herded from gate to gate, I know full well that those initials stand for Try Walking, Asshole.

  13. 13.

    MomSense

    @Betty Cracker:

    I feel like there are games afoot.  The pipeline hack was by Russia(ns) and the US was able to recover half of the ransom.  We’ll never hear from Russia if Putin or one of his oligarchs has funds removed from one of their accounts or the power is shut down in the Sochi palace.

    ETA wouldn’t you love it if Putin turned on his tv to watch hockey and all the channels were winking Joe Biden in his sports car.

  19. 19.

    Betty Cracker

    @debbie: I agree. At his core, Putin is a crook. A crook on a grand scale to be sure — there’s credible speculation that he’s become the richest man on the planet via his corrupt control of his country’s oligarchy. Maybe targeting his wealth and exposing his criminality would be effective counters. I’m just a rando former English major with no natsec expertise, but even I can see we can’t let him get away with the shit he’s been doing.

  20. 20.

    Baud

    Kyrsten Sinema gets her make-or-break moment with Republicans
     
    She’s spent years building GOP ties that rival Sen. Joe Manchin’s. The next few days will test whether that can translate to 60 votes for an infrastructure deal

  21. 21.

    Spanky

    @debbie: Iirc, one or two of the big investment houses were making noises about starting bitcoin ETFs. I can’t think of a quicker way for an investment company to lose its credibility.

  24. 24.

    OzarkHillbilly

    From Rock’n’roll and the civil rights struggle: African American life in the south – in pictures, comes this little nugget:

    Michael Willis, Harry Williams and Dwania Kyles sit in the back of a car during the first day of Memphis school integration, 1961

    When Dwania returned home disheveled, her mother Gwen asked her what happened. ‘Oh nothing,’ she said. ‘The other children just wanted to feel my hair.’ Later in the year, when the Memphis Board of Education asked for a report on how the kids were doing, one teacher wrote: ‘Dwania’s art work is unusual. She colours the faces of all characters brown.’

    Do tell.

  25. 25.

    SFAW

    @Baud

    Kyrsten Sinema gets her make-or-break moment with Republicans

    She’s spent years building GOP ties that rival Sen. Joe Manchin’s. The next few days will test whether that can translate to 60 votes for an infrastructure deal

    I thought you stopped cutting-and-pasting from The Onion?

  26. 26.

    Spanky

    @Betty Cracker: What he’s been doing is goading the US into a response. Look for Russian exploits to keep ratcheting up, and pro-Russian media (hello, Rupert!) to ratchet up pressure on Biden, hoping for an overreaction. It’s not Joe’s administration’s first time at the rodeo, though. I’m not sure Putin has thought this through.

  27. 27.

    Brachiator

    @Baud:

    I don’t understand why El Salvador would do anything so risky.

    El Salvador has become the world’s first country to adopt bitcoin as legal tender even though central banks globally have repeatedly warned that investors in the cryptocurrency must be ready to lose all their money.

    Might as well use Monopoly money.

  29. 29.

    SFAW

    @Danielx:

    Why is my asshole neighbor cutting grass at 7:45?

    Because he wants to see himself mentioned in an Almost-Top-10,000 blog?

  30. 30.

    Spanky

    I would also hope Biden’s team is firming up alliances with countries who can provide feet on Russian ground to keep discontent with Putin at worrisome (for Putin) levels.

  31. 31.

    MomSense

    @Spanky:

    I’ve been meaning to ask Adam if he has been tracking incidents at Cypriot banks which have long been havens for oligarch money.  My memory is hazy but I think there was a big hack of one in 2016 after the election.  Also haven’t kept track of ING which is another place they like to keep their loot.

  33. 33.

    Spanky

    @Danielx: Why does my neighbor’s trash company back their truck down the street (BEEP BEEP) and crash around trashcans at 5:15?

  39. 39.

    burnspbesq

    @Baud:

    Smart and predictable move.

    ”Tell me, boyo, whose full faith and credit backs that bullshit.”

  44. 44.

    Betty Cracker

    @Spanky: Has he? I don’t know about that. It looks to me like Putin has been testing the limits of what he can get away with for years and found to his delight that the sky is the limit.

    When Biden was a senator, he considered himself a foreign policy guy, and his instincts were often terrible, IMO, but not out of line with most centrist Dem senators of that era. No doubt his stint in the Obama White House reoriented him significantly. It’ll be interesting to see how that manifests during his presidency.

  45. 45.

    narya

    Good morning, everyone! I’ve been gradually lengthening my runs–these days I do 4 miles or a little more each day–but I’ve slowed, too. That may improve the longer I do it, but I’m working on Not Caring. And today was a beautiful day for it. I love this time of year, around the summer solstice. I’ve always been a morning person, and I love that early morning light and coolness. I also realized that last year I was in the midst of Kitchen Reno, so sitting quietly on the back porch after my run wasn’t an option–which means it feels extra good this year, and then I come back into a fully functional kitchen.

  46. 46.

    Cermet

    @Danielx:  Maybe because 1) its cooler 2) maybe bad weather later? 3) a special event later in the day 4) Ok, likely he is an AO

  50. 50.

    MomSense

    @rikyrah:

    I can’t get YouTube to load on the bus so I’ll have to watch later.  Did you see the close up of her leotard with the gold GOATs printed on it?  I just love her so much even though she terrifies me and I can only watch replays. I also love the friendships on the team.  They look after each other and it’s a joy to see.

  51. 51.

    germy

    I find myself wondering what Mr. Bakker thinks of the new “Eyes of Tammy Faye Bakker” movie coming out.  I wonder if he watched the trailer.

  54. 54.

    Danielx

    @Cermet:

    I go with door #4. But he’s given it up after fifteen minutes, which was predictable. Your lawn expert knows that cutting grass first thing before the dew dries, let alone after two days of rain…is a bad idea.

    Eta: drowning out the bird calls too ?

  59. 59.

    Anne Laurie

    @Brachiator: I don’t understand why El Salvador would do anything so risky.

    From what I’m reading, sheer desperation.  The Salvadorean government needs cash, much cash, the sooner the better — or they stop being ‘the government’ and become, at best, fugitives.  If that means snatching at straws, hoping to get a financial boost from bitcoin libertarians and/or money launderers… well, beats having the army turn its guns towards the palace, dunnit?

    (P.S.  Better informed people, please feel free to contradict me if I’ve been reading the wrong sources.)

  61. 61.

    Gin & Tonic

    @Betty Cracker:

     Russia’s hyper-aggressive, intolerable, years-long meddling in the U.S. and other Western democracies.

    Petty, too. Example: Euro2020, the soccer tournament has begun (delayed due to COVID.) The Ukrainian national team entered with team jerseys that include an outline map of Ukraine – with Crimea as part of Ukraine, of course – and the popular national slogan “Слава Україні! – Героям Слава!” which translates as “Glory to Ukraine! Glory to her heroes!” Russia complained to UEFA that the Ukrainian uniform was war-mongering. UEFA first said there were no issues, then Russia complained more, and UEFA ruled that the phrase “Glory to her heroes!” must be removed. They left the map, because that shows UN-recognized borders, they left “Glory to Ukraine!” because that was on the 2018 uniform, but I guess felt they needed to throw Russia a bone. So after the tournament has begun, Ukraine now has to alter its uniform.

  63. 63.

    Nicole

    @debbie: Ha!  That’s funny.

    I flew as an unaccompanied minor a few times and I still remember the panicked race across an airport (I don’t remember which one, but as I was traveling from Orlando to Harrisburg, I’m guessing it was Philly or Dulles) when the employee assigned to get me on my connecting flight forgot to come back to get me (back in the 1980s when no one thought twice about leaving a 12-year-old sitting by themself in an airport for 2 hours).  I didn’t fully appreciate how big airports were until I was in the company of a couple of very anxious other employees, trying to get me to my flight in time.

  66. 66.

    Kayla Rudbek

    I woke up early to try to see the partial solar eclipse. No luck (I think that by the time I was out of the house, it was almost over and my improvised pinhole through a leaf didn’t work). However I did notice that the cicadas got a lot louder after the eclipse was finished.

    And I also didn’t have any cicada landings or attempted landings on my body today (so far the cicadas have scored 5 landings and 12 attempted landings on me, making physical contact but not fully landing).

  67. 67.

    Ken

    @OzarkHillbilly: The skeletons of two Viking age men who were related but died on opposite sides of the North Sea are to be reunited in an exhibition in Copenhagen this month.

    Activating curse in five, four, three, ….

  73. 73.

    Kay

    @rikyrah:

    Ken Klippenstein
    @kenklippenstein
    Funny how price increases are blamed on modest wage increases instead of executive compensation

    Their executive team got 64 million in additional compensation last year. The CEO pay alone doubled to
    38 million.
    This is a real question. There should be an explanation for why the focus is on the lowest level workers every time we talk about increases. That’s insane and incredibly biased. It would be perfectly rational and reasonable to look at increases in pay across the whole company.
    We get presented with these fake, limited debate terms “THIS or ….THIS?” No. I want the whole picture presented then we can have a real discussion about “pay”.

  75. 75.

    SFAW

    @rikyrah:

    Smart from @EJDionne on how Biden can sell Manchin on voting rights at home:

    I haven’t followed Manchin enough to know, so I’ll ask what may be a stupid question:

    I’ve been assuming Manchin is naive/foolish/on an ego trip, but is it possible Manchin is racist, and using the “institutionalist” thing as a cover? I’m really hoping he’s not — I truly have no idea — but it occurred to me that he might be. Naivete/egomania can (possibly) be overcome, but …

  76. 76.

    NotMax

    Keen video: big purchases of little tech. If you’re not inclined to watch the whole thing (there’s plenty of lighthearted moments throughout), perhaps sample it by skipping ahead to take in the assortment of phones, about 9:06 to 15:11.

  78. 78.

    germy

    KEY POINTS

    • The Koch network has been actively pressuring Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin to oppose key legislative items linked to Biden’s agenda, including filibuster reform and voting rights legislation.
    • The lobbying effort appears to be paying off. Manchin, in a recent op-ed, wrote that he opposed eliminating the filibuster and that he would not vote for the For the People Act.
    • The Koch network specifically calls on its grassroots supporters to push Manchin, a conservative Democrat, to be against some of his party’s legislative priorities.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/08/joe-manchin-is-opposing-big-parts-of-bidens-agenda-as-the-koch-network-pressures-him.html

  79. 79.

    Soprano2

    @rikyrah: She and Manchin need to put up or shut up.
    Get the GQP votes, or get with the program.?

    I’ll predict right now that she can’t get the votes they need for anything substantive, especially since they want to pay for it with money that’s already budgeted for other things. It makes me so angry that no reporters will ask any Republicans who say they want to use “unspent Covid funds” what that money is budgeted for. Make them say what they don’t want to spend money on so they can use it for infrastructure instead! All the reporters act like that money is just sitting there, unbudgeted and unneeded.

    I was trying to remember – when the Republicans were working on their huge tax cut bill in 2017, that passed with only Republican votes, was the press obsessing about how it just had to be “bipartisan”? I don’t remember anything like that at all, or any handwringing over how it was going to be a partisan bill passed with only Republican votes.

  80. 80.

    SFAW

    @Kay:

    Part of the Rethug game plan for years has been creating the system where the proles fight each other over scraps. “Look! That Black person/’illegal alien’ is getting a minimum wage job and keeping YOU from supporting your family!!!!!” seems to have worked fairly well, at least for getting votes. I think that, after a while, even the Lords of Industry started believing their own bullshit (“Lucky Ducky!!!!”). Not sure whether that “training” can be overcome, nor how long it would take if it can.

  81. 81.

    Soprano2

    @rikyrah: NRCC blaming Biden and Democrats for raising Chipotle worker wages – and the 4% burrito price hike that followed.

    I think it’s amazing that the NRCC doesn’t ever mention this when the pay of executives and CEO’s goes up. Only when low wage workers make more are raises suddenly inflationary.

  84. 84.

    Soprano2

    @SFAW: Part of the Rethug game plan for years has been creating the system where the proles fight each other over scraps.

    Yep, and blaming the outsiders for the fights. It’s funny how construction people are complaining about not being able to find any workers, and how no young people are going into the industry (which is probably not actually true), but when they place blame it’s always on the pandemic unemployment. The ones I know don’t mention the over 4 year crackdown on all kinds of immigration. They aren’t asking “where are all those people I used to be able to hire”, they seem to assume they’re all collecting unemployment. I talked to a man who knows the owner of a local Mexican restaurant (they have two locations). He said they had a bunch of legal workers from Mexico who cycled in and out of employment there, working part of the year then going home part of the year. Now those people are mostly in Mexico, and can’t get into the U.S., probably because of Covid restrictions. This has to be happening all over the U.S., yet you never hear about it from those employers who are complaining about the unemployment benefits keeping people from working.

  85. 85.

    Soprano2

    @SFAW: Yeah, they exaggerate for effect how much prices will actually go up. Prices need to go up anyway because of increases in food prices. Everything like that is weird and unpredictable right now. We’re getting ready to raise our prices – we would have anyway, but it’s absolutely necessary at this point. You have no idea what will be short and high-priced next week. I think it’ll be like that until the fall.

  88. 88.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Soprano2: Remember, in 2012 they bashed Obama for making gasoline prices go up from where they were when he was inaugurated–a temporary dip below $2 a gallon because the entire global economy had collapsed.

  89. 89.

    Matt McIrvin

    @SFAW: During Reconstruction, there were political cartoons about how the Freedmen’s Bureau was giving handouts to the lazy mooching black people. This strategy goes back a LONG way, though in those days it was mostly the Democrats doing it.

  90. 90.

    SFAW

    @Soprano2:

    Curious how they seem to have forgotten that, considering all the stories about producer prices going up because demand outstrips current supply and production. Why, it’s almost as if they’re not being honest.

  93. 93.

    H.E.Wolf

    @Ken: ​
    @OzarkHillbilly: The skeletons of two Viking age men who were related but died on opposite sides of the North Sea are to be reunited in an exhibition in Copenhagen this month.
    Activating curse in five, four, three, ….

     Or maybe it’ll remove a curse. :)​

  94. 94.

    Cameron

    @rikyrah: One of the reasons I’m hoping the President focuses on security issues in his meeting with Putin and doesn’t indulge in finger-wagging moralizing about how Russians are treated in their own country.  It’s not arguing from a position of strength when states are passing voter-suppression laws here at home and the US has some pretty dubious allies like Saudi Arabia.

  95. 95.

    debbie

    @Nicole: 

    I once had to run through O’Hare to catch a connecting flight. It was painfully obvious that I was no OJ!

  96. 96.

    Amir Khalid

    @SFAW:
    If Abe came back today, I don’t know that he could still call himself a Republican. In fact, many of today’s Republicans would probably call him a RINO.

  97. 97.

    Kay

    @SFAW:

    Part of the Rethug game plan

    But how we talk about compensation doesn’t need to be bound by any game plan.

    “Compensation at Chipotle” – that’s the issue. Excluding top tier compensation when talking about pressure to raise prices is inaccurate because it’s an omission.
    It’s a real question- if wage increases at the bottom “cause” higher prices than why don’t salary increases at the top?
    These are choices. They’re limiting the debate on wages to one group of workers and excluding another. I would prefer to discuss everything that goes out to compensation at Chipotle and mine is a better approach because it’s complete.

  98. 98.

    TheflipPsyD

    SInce it is an OT, my 10-year old son shared two great Youtubers and I have been really enjoying them. The first is Chris Hobbs, who does educational videos about history. They are so well done and so enjoyable to watch. They are called History Bombs (in one take) and cover a variety of historical events including WWI, WWII, the Cold War, the Vikings, etc.

    The second is Mark Rober who was a NASA scientist for 9 years and does some really cool engineering videos. My favorite one so far is about squirrels and bird feeders. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFZFjoX2cGg

  99. 99.

    Kay

    @SFAW:

    The whole wage debate has been a real revelation to me because you really see in stark terms how deeply 1980’s and 1990’s economic conservatism became the status quo. The whole debate is conducted on those terms, as if they are “truths” that no one may ever examine again.

    They’ll tie themselves up in knots to remain in this safe space, too. Laffer was all over cable saying lower level workers were “not worth” 15 an hour. What? is he proposing a maximum wage? He’s setting wages and prices now? It’s like they cannot admit there might have been errors in the dogma even when it’s right in front of them.

  101. 101.

    Kay

    @SFAW:

    “I am entitled to an endless supply of workers at 9 dollars an hour!”

    No, you’re really not. We were engineering to produce that- when we stopped it ended.

  102. 102.

    Soprano2

    @Matt McIrvin: It makes me nuts when people blame the president for gas prices, because the president has nothing to do with the price of gasoline! I was arguing with a man earlier this week who insisted that since we now produced so much oil in the U.S. we could set our own price for oil and not worry about Saudi Arabia and the rest of the oil-producing world! I argued, evidently to a brick wall, that since the price of oil is a world-wide price, it didn’t matter what we did as long as Saudi can ratchet their production up or down to manipulate that price. Ugh, people are so uninformed about how these things work.

  103. 103.

    Soprano2

    @SFAW: Curious how they seem to have forgotten that, considering all the stories about producer prices going up because demand outstrips current supply and production. Why, it’s almost as if they’re not being honest.

    I see threads on FB where people complain that their favorite restaurant can’t make something they like because they can’t get certain products, and they’re mad about it. They don’t understand it’s not our fault, it’s the supply chain trying to switch back around after a year of being oriented away from restaurants toward grocery stories. I swear, some people pay no attention at all to what’s happening around them.

  104. 104.

    Tazj

    @Baud: With the Problem Solvers and Susan Collins involved I can’t hold out much hope for this working but both she and Manchin shouldn’t complain that bipartisanship wasn’t given a chance.

  105. 105.

    Soprano2

    @Kay:“I am entitled to an endless supply of workers at 9 dollars an hour!”

    You don’t know how many business owners really, really believe this. They’re the same ones who will holler about “illegals” out of the other side of their mouth. LOL They hire a contractor to do work for them and look the other way at who’s doing the work.

  107. 107.

    rikyrah

    Piece of garbage better keep Forever FLOTUS’ name out her mouth.

     

    ………………………………………………

     

     

    “…Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy on Thursday suggested that former first lady Michelle Obama was responsible for identity politics infiltrating an increasingly “woke” U.S. military.

    “The left’s dangerous ideology continues its slow creep into all facets of Amerian life,” Campos-Duffy said on “Fox News Primetime.” “Critical race theory and gender ideology have infected nearly every institution in America.”

    “The last vestige of the pro-American meritocracy still standing was the U.S. military,” she continued. “From the progressive perspective, the military was too masculine, had way too many Republicans and a dangerous nack of turning minorities into patriotic, self-reliant conservatives. This could not stand.”

    From there, Campos-Duffy suggested that Michelle Obama put into motion “a stealth takeover” of the armed services after she made military families a top priority. Obama is a private citizen, and her husband no longer holds elected office.

    “Michelle Obama’s decision to make military spouses her top initiative as first lady was the first clue that they had their sights set on the U.S. armed forces,” Campos-Duffy said. “By Obama’s second term, a stealth takeover of top military brass was underway. Officers who were aligned were promoted.

    “Now this isn’t a Silicon Valley book club — this is our military,” she said. “But if our leaders in the Department of Defense don’t stand up and stop this rising tide of wokeness, before long, we won’t be able to tell the difference.”

    Campos-Duffy previously suggested in February that Michelle Obama had the power to reopen Chicago schools “with one little tweet” but had “done nothing”.

    https://www.salon.com/2021/04/02/fox-news-host-suggests-michelle-obama-is-responsible-for-identity-politics-infiltrating-the-military/

  108. 108.

    MontyTheClipArtMongoose

    @Brachiator: ms13 taking over bitcoin markets might be the best way to get cryptoracist glibertarian cryptocurrency fetishists to renounce bitcoin.

  109. 109.

    SFAW

    @Amir Khalid:

    In fact, many of today’s Republicans would probably call him a RINO.

    Don’t be ridiculous. They’d call him an ultra-left-wing socialist Demon-rat. For starters.

  110. 110.

    Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes

    @Baud:

    “But Bitcoin is the future because computers, and disrupted paradigms!”

  112. 112.

    Kay

    @Soprano2:

    I agree. Amusing too, because weren’t these same business owners threatening to replace all these lower level employees with robots ten years ago?

    Now they’re indispensable, but only at the maximum rate of 9 dollars an hour, forever, guaranteed by the State.

  113. 113.

    VOR

    @debbie: IIRC the geniuses in TFG’s administration negotiated contracts which do not allow such redistribution of vaccine. In some cases, not all.

  114. 114.

    MontyTheClipArtMongoose

    @rikyrah: as an early season real world on mtv alumna, rachel should know that kevin powell (“angry black” on season 1) & pedro zamora (gay cuban on her own season 3) are at least as responsible for woke madness as the first lady a decade and a half after.

  115. 115.

    VOR

    @Soprano2:   it’s the supply chain trying to switch back around after a year of being oriented away from restaurants toward grocery stories.

    Yes. This was a big deal around March or April last year. There was plenty of supply, but it was packaged for commercial use, like restaurants buying in bulk, rather than consumers buying smaller supplies in grocery stores. The supply chain switched to consumer-grade packaging and now it has to switch back.

  116. 116.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Betty Cracker: At his core, Putin is a crook. A crook on a grand scale to be sure — there’s credible speculation that he’s become the richest man on the planet via his corrupt control of his country’s oligarchy.

    IOW, a card-carrying member of the putative Global Oligarchy. I keep tellin’ yinz, the reason our bazillionaires have no beef with Vlad the Paler is he’s one of them and he’s doing the work they want done: the final undermining of liberal democracy and the installation of plutocrats as the permanent ruling class. They keep forgetting he commands death squads and nuclear weapons and would be only too ready to turn the former (if not the latter, one hopes) against them if he succeeds.

  117. 117.

    Kay

    @Soprano2:

    My son is living and working in Denmark for a time and obviously they have a completely different system than we do and it has downsides that I wouldn’t want, but one thing he said was interesting to me- he hires his “team” and Denmark has many more protections for workers so they’re harder to fire. But he’s an engineer so he looks at it as a systems process and he says it forces the manager to put more into “the front end” – he does a better and more thorough hiring analysis because he can’t churn thru employees to find 5. So to him it’s just a different selection process. He manages the front end more because he can’t rely on churn and attrition to get the people he needs. So, you know, actually earning his pay as a manager :)

    My maternal grandmother was a “practical nurse”. How they ran that training was they let just about anyone in and then brutally cut the lower performers every quarter. They’d have 100 enter and 25 complete. Now they do it differently- they do the selection on the front end, with courses completed and GPA and standardized tests. He’s doing his selection more on the front end.

    I just don’t think we need to be bound by Ronald Reagan anymore. Open it up. Examine the whole thing and let’s see how ended up here, because stagnant wages and yawning income inequality isn’t a good result. We can do better.

  118. 118.

    SFAW

    @Kay:

    Now they’re indispensable,

    Roche Bros., a small grocery chain in MA, has provided home delivery for a number of years. During COVID, their drivers were praised as heroes (or whatever). In the last few days, a number of those drivers have been terminated, replaced with (as the news report(s) characterizes them) “gig workers.”

    Yeah, I’m crying big tears for the employers. As I’ve said more than once: whenever the business cycle pendulum swings to where it becomes a “sellers’ market,” vis-a-vis employees, and employers start whining about how tough things are, I note that when things swing back the other way, they’ll fuck over the employees eight ways from Sunday.

  119. 119.

    catclub

    @Spanky: Iirc, one or two of the big investment houses were making noises about starting bitcoin ETFs. I can’t think of a quicker way for an investment company to lose its credibility.

     

    The amusing thing about these funds:  They are all (all the smart ones) dealing in contracts (like bitcoin futures)  that are settled in dollars. So much for ending fiat currency.

  120. 120.

    Soprano2

    @Kay: I agree. Amusing too, because weren’t these same business owners threatening to replace all these lower level employees with robots ten years ago?

    Yes, they are. I think they found out there are a lot of things that robots aren’t that good at, and robots are expensive pieces of equipment that have to be serviced and sometimes break down. No one wants a robot bartender!

  121. 121.

    Geminid

    Building materials have jumped in price over the last year. But this is a sign of a strong economy causing a lot of demand. A lot of people have had static incomes since the Great Recession, but quite a few have done well the last decade, and they are spending accumulated wealth on nice houses. The inflation in materials costs doesn’t seem to stop them.

  122. 122.

    Ruckus

    @germy:

    Sure he can be fixed.

    It won’t be pretty, but it’s not impossible. Messy – yes, illegal – highly, possible – absolutely. Now it is a completely other question if it’s reasonable, legal, desirable, worth the effort in the least. He proves who he is every single time he opens his mouth.

    Does he continue to get elected? Then the problem is not him.

  123. 123.

    Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes

    @debbie:

    Been there, done that. My inbound was in one concourse and my outbound to LA (in order to connect to a Sydney flight) was in H or K. Barely made it.

  124. 124.

    Woodrow/asim

    @SFAW: is it possible Manchin is racist

    I’ve really avoided this whole-assed Blue Dog reply because I have a memory that recalls the same “I hate Conservative Dems THE MOST” business during the ACA debates, among many other points. The calls to actually get moving and work on this stuff on the ground game level are the right ones, IMHO, and I’m glad to see them, here and elsewhere.

    To the question: “racist” isn’t a binary state. A lot — and I mean tons upon metric fucktons — of the problem with how we talk about Racism in America, is predicated on that binary. Specifically: people fucking over actual anti-racism work by playing to the urge to “not be racist”.

    That’s how you get crap ideas like “race cards” and “reverse racism” — or the co-opting in many circles of decades of phrases, from “political correct” to “woke”.

    What is a racist? LBJ was racist, in the sense that he certainly used the N-word, and likely would not have been happy to see his kids dating someone who Looked Like Me. But he sacrificed enormous political capital to improve, racially, the lot of my Parents, and made it possible for me to be born into a much different society.

    George Wallace wasn’t a Racist “in his heart.” Yet his political decisions made a lot of Black folx live under even more misery and pain, and held back needed change.

    And that’s the thing. I can’t spend energy guessing who’s racist, or who’s not. I have to focus on “are they helping, or hindering, the anti-racism work? Are they helping other forms of oppression that are connected, like reducing the impact of sexism, or class issues, with minimal harm to race issues?”

     

    Judge Manchin — and Sinema, and All Other Pols — on those metrics, and you’ll find a much easier and more sustainable model than trying to look into their hearts.

    As we should all know by now, Hearts Don’t Vote.

  127. 127.

    debbie

    @Betty Cracker:

    The GOP has certainly dismissed Reagan. Remember when Nancy invoked his name in the House and got zero reaction from them? She even said she was shocked at that.

  129. 129.

    Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes

    @NotMax:

    That voiceover made me want to murder the announcer with a meat mallet, particularly with the claim of “equivalent to what you would get at a bar”.

  130. 130.

    Soprano2

    @NotMax: They might want that thing at home, but they don’t want it at the neighborhood bar. Plus, how would it handle a busy Saturday night?

  131. 131.

    Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes

    @Soprano2:

    It would probably make about 5 drinks before taking a giant shit and collapsing in a heap of plastic and metal bits.

  134. 134.

    Chris Johnson

    @Betty Cracker: The sky is the limit, until it isn’t.

    This is a pretty normal human frailty. I’m pretty sure this is what lost Trump the Presidency in the face of everything Russians and Republicans could do to cheat.

    Same sort of thing can lose Putin his control of the USA, and his life. He’s going to be very sure the sky is the limit, and it is… until it isn’t.

  135. 135.

    SFAW

    @laura:

     Hey now – he was also a shitty Governor and a so-so actor.

    And a shitty person (as HUAC’s Hollywood victims could tell you).

  136. 136.

    Villago Delenda Est

    So please, let’s default to having grace for each other.

    Sorry, Megan.  No can do for MAGAts, for anti-vaxxers, for mask dipshits.  They’re going to have to demonstrate grace first, and often, before I cut them the slightest slack.  One does not negotiate with fascists OR terrorists.

  137. 137.

    James E Powell

    @Tazj:

    With the Problem Solvers and Susan Collins involved I can’t hold out much hope for this working but both she and Manchin shouldn’t complain that bipartisanship wasn’t given a chance.

    They don’t want bipartisanship to be given a chance. They just want to use that as the excuse for doing nothing because it lets them blame others. The press/media insist that Democrats must always do it, Republicans never.

    A process argument that is grounded on a bullshit rule like the filibuster is not one that we have any reason to respect.

  139. 139.

    Matt

    [Biden said] United States was not seeking conflict with Russia

    Can’t wait till he repeats this at the summit while Putin is literally pissing in his face.

    Unilateral disarmament doesn’t work when the other side IS “seeking conflict”, but centrists will never admit that.

  140. 140.

    Elie

    @Betty Cracker:

    I sometimes wish that we had some sort of retaliation for Russia’s many foul deeds that Biden wouldn’t say a word about but announce that X had happened in Putin’s face.  I find beyond anything but complete disgust.  He deserves many bad and irritating things to descent on him…

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