Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

Republicans got rid of McCarthy. Democrats chose not to save him.

The low info voters probably won’t even notice or remember by their next lap around the goldfish bowl.

Republicans choose power over democracy, every day.

Stand up, dammit!

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

How stupid are these people?

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

A fool as well as an oath-breaker.

This must be what justice looks like, not vengeful, just peaceful exuberance.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

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

The Giant Orange Man Baby is having a bad day.

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

To the privileged, equality seems like oppression.

With all due respect and assumptions of good faith, please fuck off into the sun.

The real work of an opposition party is to hold the people in power accountable.

Oh FFS you might as well trust a 6-year-old with a flamethrower.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

If you thought you’d already seen people saying the stupidest things possible on the internet, prepare yourselves.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

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Monday Evening Open Thread: Good Numbers

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  3. 3.

    lowtechcyclist

    Are the mainstream media the way they are because they’re continually terrified of being called the “liberal media” by pols and organizations that have gone off the deep end to the right. or are they just assholes?

  5. 5.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @lowtechcyclist:

    Are the mainstream media the way they are because they’re continually terrified of being called the “liberal media” by pols and organizations that have gone off the deep end to the right. or are they just assholes?

    This.

  9. 9.

    bbleh

    I swear, come 9/11/21, Biden is gonna be able to stand up and say “Obama got Bin Laden and I got us out,” and pretty much all the Republicans and half the pundits in the mediaverse are either gonna run from the cameras or look like fish gasping for breath.

  10. 10.

    trollhattan

    As it turns out my buddy’s daughter in New Orleans for grad school wanted to “experience a hurricane” so rode it out in her 3rd story attic French Quarter apartment. She’s fine. No power, no cell, but the toilet flushes so there’s that.

    Kids.

  11. 11.

    bbleh

    @lowtechcyclist: @SiubhanDuinne: I think some of it is indeed fear of being called wimps by the jocks, but a lot more of it is business incentive (can’t lose a single pair of eyeballs, not even rightwing nutjobs) and personal/social incentive (they, and especially their editors and publishers, travel in mixed-to-heavily-Republican circles and they don’t want to lose their places in the pecking orders that matter so very much to them).

  12. 12.

    Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony

    Since at least the 90s the mainstream media have been pro-war. I don’t think it is a response to being called ‘liberal’.

  14. 14.

    Splitting Image

    Biden and his team did a great job and the people who managed the airlifts under the threat of fire and then under actual fire deserve a lot of credit.

    I’d say “I can’t believe that the news media spun from bashing Biden for the disastrous withdrawal to taking credit for the miraculous withdrawal in the course of a week”, but I’ve been around for awhile. Scum is too kind a word.

  15. 15.

    trollhattan

    News you can use.

    What We Do in the Shadows Season 3 returns with two new episodes Thursday, September 2nd on FX, and will stream the following day on Hulu.

  19. 19.

    Another Scott

    Good for Biden, State and Defense.  Well done.

    Meanwhile, …

    Like @mattgaetz, America hastily withdraws from a poorly chosen 20-year-old and starts talking itself into the next one.

    — OneHitPopehat (@Popehat) August 30, 2021

    Ooof.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  27. 27.

    Ken

    @Another Scott: America … starts talking itself into the next one.

    Who was that Bush administration asshole who said something like “Every twenty years the US has to invade some country, just to show the rest of the world that we can”?

    It’s really quite flattering to the rest of the world when you think about it — the assumption that they’ll learn a lesson from the invasion, when the US is clearly incapable of the same.

  28. 28.

    NotMax

    @trollhattan

    Glanced at the “What’s coming in September” lists for both Prime and Netflix.

    Another meh month for li’l old me. One single item which piqued my interest , and another which half-piqued (as in I’ll check it out but got the feeling last season it shot its wad and the new one will end up being a disappointment). A third which, if it happens to fall into the section of available this month only, holds initial promise.

    Those lists are never all-encompassing, so can usually ferret out more obscure things not included. Otherwise, a month to catch up an documentaries already queued up.

  29. 29.

    WaterGirl

    So the high school kid who is mowing my lawn this year who was mowing my lawn this year bullied me one too many times today.  I finally fired him and told him “you are a fucking bully!”  I wrote the final check to Zach F. Beckler, and yes, the “F” was for fucking bully.  He’s lucky I paid him at all.

    Now I have to find someone to mow for me, which sucks, but life is too short to put up with bullies.

  30. 30.

    EmbraceYourInnerCrone

    Something good: My niece and her boyfriend , who are up here(Central NY state) for my daughter’s wedding, received word that their house is mostly OK. His mom’s house is gone but his mom is OK as is the rest of his family.  A tree fell on his truck but that was insured.  Now they have to get a flight back to NOLA once the airports open and Lafourche/Terrebonne parishes open up again.

    My daughter and her husband closed on their house. So that’s something good too!

  32. 32.

    Cermet

    @Splitting Image: And don’t forget that the taliban both allowed our peaceful withdraw, and help protected our troops. It was no accident it ran smoothly thanks to their cooperation – through, their stemming the mass flow of Afghans prevented many who should have gotten out from getting out, it also prevent chaos, mass death from bombers getting in and made our operation more efficient.

  33. 33.

    Dan B

    @NotMax: Friends recommended a 6 episode series, The Chair, with Sandra Oh in the lead.  We watched two episodes last night and it’s great at portraying complex and deeply / hilariously / embarrassingly flawed characters and the complex interactions that result.

  35. 35.

    Ken

    @Cermet: And don’t forget that the taliban both allowed our peaceful withdraw, and help protected our troops. It was no accident it ran smoothly thanks to their cooperation

    I’m anticipating DougJ’s pitchbot tweet.  “Why Trump and the Taliban get the credit for the successful withdrawal from Afghanistan”, something like that.

  36. 36.

    Cermet

    @Dan B: I read it is terrible unless one believes a lot of right wing myths: makes students a bunch of snow flakes, many prof’s a bunch of losers and is more rightwing in approach to colleges= maybe not but it is media meant for amerikan public.

  38. 38.

    Brachiator

    943,000 jobs, cutting child poverty by 40%, stock mrkt up 15% in 2021, low interest rates, vax rates surging in most of the US, school starting relatively safely outside the South, infrastructure deal, & ending a war maj of US wants ended…yeah, “devastating month”[eyeroll]

    I keep praising Biden’s economic incentives, especially the expansion of the child tax credit. Unsurprisingly, neither pundits nor many liberal politicians give him enough credit for reducing child poverty.

    So, for example, many progressives are hot to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. An absolutely worthy goal. But meanwhile about 25 percent of households earn less than $35,000 and a good chunk of these households have children. The annualized minimum wage would equal $31,200.

    In effect, Biden has provided immediate economic relief to lower income taxpayers while the haggling over a wage increase continues.

    That’s a president I admire.

  39. 39.

    MomSense

    @lowtechcyclist:

    Yes.  I spent several summers working at the hotel where the press corpse stayed when HW was President.  I have so many stories about them.  They are the absolute fucking worst.  The only good thing was listening the producers, camera people, and the wire photographers bad mouth them.

  42. 42.

    smith

    @Ken:  Yes, that was Michael Ledeen, “every now and again the United States has to pick up a crappy little country and throw it against a wall just to prove we are serious.” An advisor to Bush the Lesser and a major cheerleader for our Excellent Mideast Adventures.

    This kind of strutting macho display, which itself was a way to cover up for feelings of humiliation after 9/11, is exactly the same well from which the current whining about leaving Afghanistan springs. How could the American Colossus have lost to a bunch of ragheads again?

  49. 49.

    Baud

    Calling Kay.

    America is leaving thousands of people behind in Afghanistan. This is a moral disaster.

    Washington Post: Breaking News, World, U… / by the Editorial Board / 1h

  52. 52.

    trollhattan

    @smith:

    My very first time hearing Gorka interviewed, braying about how “The alpha males are back in charge” before Trump was inaugurated I thought uh-oh, these guys are going to outdo the Bushie neocon crew. Luckily, their egos exceeded their competence.

  53. 53.

    Baud

    Democrats, calm down. Afghanistan is a mess, but it’s not the end of the Biden presidency.

    MSNBC Biden AfghanistanWashington Post: Breaking News, World, U… / by Matt Bai / 2h

    Are Democrats freaking out? Who is Matt Bai? (I didn’t click to read the article).

  54. 54.

    trollhattan

    @Baud:

    Technically, Afghanistan has so many thousands they literally count in the millions. Without Afghans, how could there be an Afghanistan?

  55. 55.

    Dan B

    @Cermet: It seems more campy than serious propaganda.  I can understand how people might view it through a right wing propaganda lens but the students seem very sharp.  Everyone gets skewered and their redeeming qualities are revealed in interesting ways.

  57. 57.

    brendancalling

    I haven’t paid much attention to the news today, so I’ll skip the “news related” part and go right to the “something good” part.

    I went on my first run since July today—only 5K and slow, and I tend to be slow to begin with, so I mean sssslllloooowwwwwww—but it felt good. Also, the doc says my broken finger is healing nicely. And the school where I sub is making noises about bringing me onto staff.

  59. 59.

    Captain C

    @Baud: Go rent a plane and get ’em, fellas!   I mean, if the whole Post editorial board pooled their funds, they could surely afford to rent a large plane, right?

  60. 60.

    Dan B

    @Dan B: There was a show about the crooked SoCal real estate family, the Bluths – can’t remember name of show – that had great fun caricaturing people but they were not evil and the actors had great fun.  The Chair is similarly over the top and the people redeem themselves well.

  64. 64.

    Dan B

    @Captain C: Yep.  Thanks!  The Chair is less over the top but close enough.  There are more touching moments where people’s good qualities, as well as the stories that shape them are revealed.

  67. 67.

    pajaro

    @Baud:

    We left no Americans behind.  We got out 130,000 people with only one violent incident, which wasn’t from the Taliban.  The people who are taking over would like us to continue a diplomatic presence, which, if we agree, will provide incentive for them not to do what was done in Vietnam and other conflict zones of the past.  Amazingly, it appears that there may be some evacuations that come after we leave.  Vietnam in 1975 this is not.

    Obviously, in a 20-year effort, there were a lot of non-Americans with whom we worked.  The idea that we became responsible for everyone with whom we worked, in our effort (bungled as it was) to assist the government, is really stretching even my bleeding heart’s view of what our appropriate moral responsibility ought to be.  It would have been nice if the government that represented them would have given a fraction as much of a damn as we are asked to give right now.

    In other news, we have just survived a hurricane with virtually no loss of life, 16 years and a day after the other feckless Repoublican President spent time playing guitar at McCain’s birthday party and his chosen FEMA head, a former horse breeding association chair, presided over a completely botched response costing thousands of lives.  This President appointed someone competent, and has prepositioned hundreds of ambulances and other emergency equipment to come in after the storm.

    this is what a competent Administration can do–save lives in disasters, man-made and natural, that the Administration did not create.    It is pathetic that Republicans have been become incapable of patriotism that that the difference between life and death seems not to matter to the media.

  69. 69.

    Roger Moore

    @Brachiator: ​
     

    Unsurprisingly, neither pundits nor many liberal politicians give him enough credit for reducing child poverty.

    Which should tell you they don’t give a damn about child poverty. It’s just not on their radar as an issue because none of the people they know are dealing with it.

  70. 70.

    Kay

    @Baud:

    The Biden Administration keeps giving them numbers but they don’t believe the numbers.

    But we can look here.

    The Emergency Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2021, as enacted on July 30, 2021, authorized 8,000 additional Special Immigrant Visas (SIVs) for Afghan principal applicants, for a total of 34,500 visas allocated since December 19, 2014. The Department of State’s authority to issue SIVs to Afghan nationals under section 602(b) of the Afghan Allies Protection Act of 2009, as amended, will continue until all visa numbers allocated under the Act are issued.

    Not that hard to put some numbers to it, so why make it sound unknowable?

  72. 72.

    Kay

    @Baud:

    Your spouse, as well as unmarried children younger than age 21, may be granted SIVs, and may travel with you or may follow to join you after you have been admitted to the United States.

    And they don’t count towards the total. So about double 34.5. Eureka :)
    Matches Biden’s first number.

  73. 73.

    Nelle

    @lowtechcyclist: I am wondering if we should just call them pr people for their corporations, the media conglomerates, rather than journalists as we used to understand the job title.

  74. 74.

    Miss Bianca

    @bbleh:

    I swear, come 9/11/21, Biden is gonna be able to stand up and say “Obama got Bin Laden and I got us out,” and pretty much all the Republicans and half the pundits in the mediaverse are either gonna run from the cameras or look like fish gasping for breath.

    May it be so!

  76. 76.

    Steeplejack

    And the AP weighs in:

    The United States completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan late Monday, ending America’s longest war and closing a chapter in military history likely to be remembered for colossal failures, unfulfilled promises and a frantic final exit that cost the lives of more than 180 Afghans and 13 U.S. service members, some barely older than the war.

    And Twitter responds.

    bendb:

    Pretty bonkers that we almost made it the full 20 years without any service members being killed until the final hours when we lost a baker’s dozen.

    Ineffable Jeff:

    Wait’ll they hear about the *rest* of it . . .

    Paul Tree:

    That the withdrawal “cost” lives carries an enormous amount of implicit assumptions.

    Chris Dawe:

    “Some barely older than the war” isn’t sending the message that it thinks it’s sending.

  79. 79.

    Roger Moore

    @pajaro:

    The people who are taking over would like us to continue a diplomatic presence, which, if we agree, will provide incentive for them not to do what was done in Vietnam and other conflict zones of the past. Amazingly, it appears that there may be some evacuations that come after we leave. Vietnam in 1975 this is not.

    Josh Marshall had a very good column on this; it was actually written by a reader who he thought had a good enough idea to just repost.  The basic point was to counter the argument that the Taliban weren’t going to be afraid of us because they had learned they could just wait us out.  His counter-argument was that spending 20 years literally in the wilderness was not something the Taliban was going to treat as a minor price to pay to get back in power, especially when they can see the US could and would attack them again if they help another 9/11-type attack.

  80. 80.

    bbleh

    @pajaro: well said, and per comment at 9, I think a substantial majority of the public largely do / will agree with you and regard the media circus as something between ignorable and detestable.

  83. 83.

    UncleEbeneezer

    Spending an Anniversary vacation in Pismo Beach CA, and just had to leave the hot tub after some old white man (of course) wouldn’t stop spouting FoxNews talking points. Dems are against the police, global warming is cyclical, we don’t do controlled burns anymore, homelessness is out of control etc. I swear I’m getting to the point where I really can’t take being around my fellow white people. My heart really goes out to PoC who have to deal with us regularly. Also, NOBODY is wearing masks.

  88. 88.

    James E Powell

    @pajaro:

    We left no Americans behind.

    Chris Cuomo says we did. He starts out the story saying he is going to interview a woman who the American military left behind. Then mumble mumble she’s choosing not to leave. The he repeats that she is an American woman who the military left behind

    Just another asshole with a cable show.

  89. 89.

    UncleEbeneezer

    @Ken:  No. But when he said our gas tax $ should only be going towards infrastructure I said he must be excited about the bipartisan infrastructure deal that Biden is pushing. I also asked him if he supports affordable housing to address all the homelessness he’s so concerned about. I’m really getting to the point where I want to just respond “shut the fuck up asshole, you have no clue what you are talking about” to people like him.

  90. 90.

    patroclus

    I was definitely in the “Biden handled it badly” camp last week, but this week is beginning to look like the Berlin Airlift combined with Dunkirk and I’ve been changing my mind.  Wars are not won by evacuations (as Churchill said) but things have been looking better…

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