Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

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

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

The most dangerous place for a black man in America is in a white man’s imagination.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

A last alliance of elves and men. also pet photos.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

Consistently wrong since 2002

Conservatism: there are some people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

If you are still in the GOP, you are an extremist.

Spilling the end game before they can coat it in frankl luntz-approved dogwhistles.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

I wonder if trump will be tried as an adult.

DeSantis transforms Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

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

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Open Thread: The Liberal Redneck

Open Thread: The Liberal Redneck

by | 68 Comments

This post is in: 

Listening to the liberal redneck rant is like crack for me.  (No, not the literal crack; the figurative crack.)

I don’t care if he is talking about Joe Manchin and his fairytale world, I still feel better after listening to him.

Oh, and speaking of rants, can I just say that 92 degrees is too freaking hot for 9 in the freaking morning?  We have more than a week of this.  grumble grumble

I would be up for some fun or interesting links, if you have them.

Totally open thread.

Reader Interactions

68Comments

  6. 6.

    Ken

    @WaterGirl: No, you distinctly said “like crack”, so it’s a simile

    EDIT: On reflection, “figurative crack” doesn’t appear until your parenthetical, where it is not being used as a metaphor but arguably is a metaphor, though it’s not obvious for what. Perhaps, like the Titanic, it’s a multi-purpose metaphor suitable for many situations.

  9. 9.

    WaterGirl

    @Citizen Alan: Democracy is not in jeopardy?  What a relief! //

    I said yesterday that I think Feinstein has lost the plot and that her loved ones should be having a very difficult conversation with her.

    I stand by that.

  13. 13.

    Villago Delenda Est

    I agree, WaterGirl, 92F in the morning is insane.  Let me guess you live somewhere east of the Mississippi where the humidity makes it that much worse?  Out here in Tracktown (where the NCAA championships are taking place) it’s cool and rainy.  We had one day of 90+ temp a week and a half ago, right after Memorial Day, then back to normal for an Oregon June.

    Oh, and Trey is hilarious and spot on.  Love the guy.  The accent really is what sells the bit, because it’s so counterintuitive for us Yankee dogs.

  15. 15.

    cain

    @watergirl – I can’t use the visual part of the editor using firefox – any reason for this? I have to use the text tab instead.

    Critical Race Theory is trending because the fascist gov DeSantis has banned it from schools. The man is turning into a complete dictator and represents a clear and present danger to everyone as far as I’m concerned. He’s also incompetent and a racist, so a trifecta.

  18. 18.

    Kay

    A digital marketing firm closely linked to the pro-Trump youth group Turning Point USA was responsible for a series of deceptive Facebook ads promoting Green party candidates during the 2018 US midterm elections, the Guardian can reveal.
    In an apparent attempt to split the Democratic vote in a number of close races, the ads purported to come from an organization called America Progress Now (APN) and used socialist memes and rhetoric to urge leftwing voters to support Green party candidates.
    Facebook was aware of the true identity of the advertiser – the conservative marketing firm Rally Forge – and the deceptive nature of the ads, documents seen by the Guardian show, but the company determined that they did not violate its policies.

    This has been true of the Green Party in Ohio forever- they have no other role that I have ever been able to determine other than as “slice and dice” to elect Republicans, so it’s nothing new- just more sophisticated and intended to reach voters who don’t pay attention to this stuff.

  20. 20.

    WaterGirl

    @zhena gogolia: Did someone say senile old biddy?  I must have missed that.

    It surely seems that she is having pretty serious cognitive and judgment issues, and the fact that she is a woman has nothing to do with it.  Some people get cognitive issues as they get older.

    Families have conversations with older relatives all the time when it’s time to take away the car keys because it’s not safe for them to drive anymore.

    Does any of that connect with “senile old lady”?

  22. 22.

    Mike in NC

    @cain:  DeathSantis is merely embracing the policies of a predecessor, one Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, whose biggest aims in the early 20th century were to drain the Everglades and evict all of the African-Americans then living in the state of Florida. He died before he could accomplish these mighty goals. Hell, he might have been the first politician to come up with “stand your ground” laws.

  24. 24.

    WaterGirl

    @cain: Did you, by any chance, just recently update from a version that was 84.x to anything 85.0 or higher?

    Or just start using Firefox when you typically use a different browser?

  26. 26.

    Kay

    @germy:

    Just about every cycle in Ohio there are Democrats who ask me about Green Party election litigation. I literally no longer have the will to explain it to them :)

    “just, NO, ok? Trust me”.

    It’s always like some bullshit about a “patch” on a Diebold machine. “Send money!” They have done more to discredit legitimate voting rights advocacy than any other single factor. Just poison.

  28. 28.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @billcinsd:  This isn’t a court, it is not a defamation suit, and there a metric shot tons of ways to express that sentiment without being sexist.  Unless sexism was point of the sentiment that the poster was trying to express.   No reason to be a sexist asshole, unless that who one is.  Hell, even then, striving to be better is the better choice. YMMV.

  29. 29.

    WaterGirl

    @Kay: I don’t know, this seems pretty succinct.

    Green Party

    Getting
    Republicans
    Elected
    Every
    November

    Maybe you could print that up on a business card to hand out when you are asked.

  32. 32.

    Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes

    I simply refer to people like DiFi and Leahy and Breyer and Grassley and McConnell and RBG as “old ticks who won’t stop their infestation and are sure as shit NOT indispensable”. The ones who are Democrats, in particular, need to clear the way for younger talent to come forth. They’re driving under the speed limit in the passing lane with the right blinker on. The

  36. 36.

    WaterGirl

    @zhena gogolia:

    I’m just wondering why “scold” is beyond the pale but “senile old biddy” is AOK.

    Because I actually saw the word “scold” and it pissed me off.  I obviously barely skimmed the comment about Feinstein, and didn’t actually read the words.

    They are both sexist in my book, but senile old biddy is much worse than scold, which in and of itself sucked.

  39. 39.

    bbleh

    As noted elsewhere, I was really hoping that Manchin had a plan, that he was carefully keeping the flying monkeys from launching while negotiating quietly with Biden and Schumer, that they knew all along what the Republicans would do and they were just waiting for the time when, entirely in sorrow and not at all in anger, they felt compelled by the urgent need of the American people for long-delayed improvements to their transportation and communication and utility systems blah blah, and for all the JOBS they would bring, and they reluctantly, after being opposed mindlessly by people who seem to want us all to live in a third-world country, saw no alternative but to move forward via a standard legal means, indeed one devised by the Senate long ago for precisely this sort of issue.

    Well, apparently not.

    Lucy (would that be Susan Collins or Mitt Romney? or perhaps some demonic hell-spawn of the two) has positioned the football, ol’ Joe Manchin has played Charlie Brown to perfection, and now he’s up in the air and on his way to falling flat on his ass, again, in the process kneecapping the White House, and most importantly, SCREWING OVER HIS CONSTITUENTS IN WEST VIRGINIA.

    Dude had — arguably still has — an unparalleled opportunity to bring home a truckload of bacon.  But no, he prefers to prance around from camera to camera, imagining himself to be the Second Coming of Robert Byrd, Saint of Bipartisanship, while he’s played for a fool by the Republicans.

    Against my hope, my fear was that he was out of his depth and was going to bobble the whole thing completely.  Looks like that’s how it turned out.

  42. 42.

    JimV

    My feeling is that Manchin is a spy. A Republican sent to infiltrate the Democrat caucus, report on their plans, and do his best to derail them or hamstring them. He is inside the tent, pissing in.

    That is an extreme view which normally I would reject, but it is the only explanation I can think of for why he would not support a voting rights act. He has blown his cover.

    The final indicator for me was a recent article in the New York Times stating that he is a good Democrat on some issues but just has some quirky philosophical differences on others; nothing fishy going on, move along, folks. Where have I heard something like that from the Times before?

  44. 44.

    Kay

    Last week, The New York Post published an exclusive article, by investigative reporter Dana Kennedy, about 3 groups of anonymous concerned parents who “plan to troll elite NYC schools with anti-woke billboards.” The Post named one of the groups as “Prep School Accountability” and linked to their website. Prep School Accountability, or PSA, wants to be seen as a grassroots effort of concerned parents, but appears to be anything but.

    It is just amazing how quickly Right wing political operatives weaponized “anti wokeness”. A complete takeover in 6 months.

  45. 45.

    Kay

    @JimV:

    I would think he would be humiliated by his inability to get any GOP votes for the John Lewis bill. Whatever else he is, he’s completely ineffective as a legislative leader or persuasive force.

    These people are so foreign to me just their behavior in what is a workplace. I would just never have made this giant, bragging “look at me!” stink without any ability whatsoever to deliver my own stated alternative to the For the People Act.

  46. 46.

    Ksmiami

    Fuck Joe Manchin over and over again- elect better Democratic Senators, crush Republicans and put him out to pasture

  47. 47.

    Kay

    But it’s not only civil-rights leaders who are interested in the passage of S.1, the Senate companion to H.R. 1, a sweeping piece of legislation that tackles voting rights, gerrymandering, dark money in elections, lobbying, and the Washington influence economy. It also has strong support from some of the nation’s largest labor unions, like the AFL-CIO. One of its member unions that might have some particular significance to Manchin is the United Mine Workers of America. On Monday, the day after Manchin hit the Sunday Shows to continue to lay out his case, such as it is, the UMWA issued a statement reiterating the union’s support for the bill.

    Don’t blame the Mine Workers for Manchin. They’re on the right side of this.

    They should ask him to list the GOP votes he’s secured for his election bill. He promised there would be support for a narrower bill. Why can’t he get it done? Why is he even talking to civil rights leaders? He needs to be finding the 10 GOP Senators he promised he could deliver.

  48. 48.

    bbleh

    @JimV: @Kay:  I’ll go with Occam’s Razor and say he’s not that smart or evil; he’s just hapless and out of his depth.

    He was good at staying in office when he was a long-time pol with deep family connections in a small, quirky state that values them, and when there wasn’t really much on the line: just go with the flow, make acceptable noises, take money from the right people, etc.  And there’s no question that staying in office as a Dem has taken some careful footwork, although less so than the recent red hue of WV might suggest: this ain’t Alabama or Wyoming.

    But it apparently has turned out that he has no idea what to do with actual power, actual leverage, other than get himself on camera mumbling meaningless pieties.

    Alas, he’s not a crafty strategist, but I also don’t think he’s a cunning undercover agent.  Both would require real cleverness that, sadly, he has not shown he possesses.

  49. 49.

    cope

    Going for broke here suggesting this short video is both interesting and fun.  It’s fun to watch and if you know how video is “painted” line by line and read how the effect is done, I think it’s interesting.

    Edited to remove wrong link.

    Edited to add that I like the music, too.

  50. 50.

    gene108

    @Citizen Alan:

    As long as she can get elected and re-elected, there’s no threat to democracy.

    I think too many Democratic politicians have this view.

  52. 52.

    rikyrah

    @Kay:

    This has been true of the Green Party in Ohio forever- they have no other role that I have ever been able to determine other than as “slice and dice” to elect Republicans, so it’s nothing new- just more sophisticated and intended to reach voters who don’t pay attention to this stuff.

     

    Always felt this way about Green Party. They are nothing but spoilers.

  55. 55.

    Gravie

    I love Trae Crowder. As a liberal who grew up in the South and spent about the first 30 years of my life there, I know just where he’s coming from.

  57. 57.

    rikyrah

    @Kay:

    I would think he would be humiliated by his inability to get any GOP votes for the John Lewis bill. Whatever else he is, he’s completely ineffective as a legislative leader or persuasive force.

     

    The inability to get 10 Republicans for the John Lewis Act- he needs to sit down, STFU and get with the program.

    Nobody is going to tolerate his bi-partisan cosplay bullshyt.

  59. 59.

    gvg

    @Zelma: How does one NOT get to be a liberal anywhere?  I don’t really understand “conservatives” even thought there have always been a bunch around me. Florida.

    I feel that I just pay attention…..don’t understand fools.

  61. 61.

    the pollyanna from hell

    @Zelma: ​
      Liberals behind enemy lines often grow up more passionate and mutually supportive. Been there, done that.

  67. 67.

    J R in WV

    @bbleh:

    As noted elsewhere, I was really hoping that Manchin had a plan, that he was carefully keeping the flying monkeys from launching while negotiating quietly with Biden and Schumer, that they knew all along what the Republicans would do and they were just waiting for the time when, entirely in sorrow and not at all in anger, they felt compelled by the urgent need of the American people for long-delayed improvements to their transportation and communication and utility systems blah blah, and for all the JOBS they would bring

    No, all the evidence shows that Sin. Manchin received a huge donation from a secret super pac in order to fuck with the Biden program. Would be a BRIBE if it wasn’t for the Supreme (NOT) Court and their bribery accepting decisions — evidently it’s nearly impossible to bribe a member of congress any more, thanks to the crooked Supremes…
    Manchin sold out to the highest bidder to support the Right Wing Nut Job agenda… totally not a surprise, he’s been as crooked as a dog’s hind leg all his life….​
     

    ETA: after reading the rest of the comments, I want to point out that Manchin didn’t fail at all. He generated a huge cash payment into his superpac, where it will lay unused until he retires and runs away with the money. Nothing matters to Manchin but cash flow!

    If he can generate positive cash flow by pushing a sharp knife into Joe Biden’s legislative agenda, that’s a net VERY good thing to Joe Manchin. He’s going to retire rather than run again, so he has to enhance his retirement fund as much as possible over the next 4 years. No matter who has to die for Joe Manchin to do that.

    Am I bitter? YES, I am.

  68. 68.

    cope

    @NotMax: My college girlfriend worked as a demonstrator of various products in department stores in the Chicago area in the late ‘60s. One vendor had her wear a paper mini-dress and black boots. Imagine my disappointment that she didn’t keep her outfit and model it for me.

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