Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

There are more Russians standing up to Putin than Republicans.

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

Baby steps, because the Republican Party is full of angry babies.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

Relentless negativity is not a sign that you are more realistic.

“woke” is the new caravan.

President Musk and Trump are both poorly raised, coddled 8 year old boys.

This chaos was totally avoidable.

Dear elected officials: Trump is temporary, dishonor is forever.

He seems like a smart guy, but JFC, what a dick!

White supremacy is terrorism.

I like political parties that aren’t owned by foreign adversaries.

Consistently wrong since 2002

Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

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

“Until such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on.”

All hail the time of the bunny!

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

Welcome to day five of every-bit-as-bad-as-you-thought-it-would-be.

If ‘weird’ was the finish line, they ran through the tape and kept running.

Also, are you sure you want people to rate your comments?

You are here: Home / Politics / Biden Administration in Action / Friday (AT LAST) Morning Open Thread

Friday (AT LAST) Morning Open Thread

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Not a whole lot to celebrate this holiday weekend, apart from the end of a pretty terrible summer…

Reader Interactions

188Comments

  4. 4.

    Baud

    far fewer takes today about how the largest GOP-run state and GOP-run Supreme Court tossing Roe will affect the GOP’s…

    From my cursory and unscientific glancing at the commentary, I was disappointed with the number of people I saw whose reaction included blaming Democrats for Republican actions.

  5. 5.

    Baud

    The death toll from the remnants of Ida has topped 40 people from Maryland to Connecticut,

    What does this mean?

  11. 11.

    debbie

    @Baud:

    At least at this moment, 20 times more people in New England have died from the storm than in the South (likely to change as crews are able to access smaller communities). Shocking that so many people drowned in their basement apartments because the floodwater came in as quickly as it did.

  13. 13.

    debbie

    I cannot believe how it’s become so normalized that it can be assumed that a president will base his policies on his personal beliefs rather than the larger good of the country.

  24. 24.

    Ken

    @Chief Oshkosh: My, how things have changed in sixty years, from “Isn’t it concerning that this Democrat might take orders from the Pope” to “Isn’t it concerning that this Democrat isn’t taking orders from the Pope”.

  27. 27.

    Ken

    @debbie: I’m overly cynical.  I assumed most of the northeast deaths were from people trying to drive through floodwaters. Or maybe I’ve just come to expect that, since around here that’s usually the cause when someone drowns after flooding.

  29. 29.

    Amir Khalid

    @mrmoshpotato:
    There were people who didn’t understand this about JFK, and there are still people who don’t — or don’t want to — understand it about Joe Biden: he is the President of the United States, not the President of the Catholics.

  32. 32.

    Kay

    There isn’t enough coverage of the SCOTUS action to even reach less-engaged voters and the coverage there is they won’t understand.
    “Supreme Court Upholds Texas Abortion Law”
    I bet 90% of people don’t know there was a “Texas abortion law” at issue or what’s in it.
    The “shadow docket” works like a charm. They won’t even know what happened, let alone what it might mean to them.

  33. 33.

    Soprano2

    I heard a story today that said some people in NYC died from flooding in illegal basement apartments. I guess that means the basement wasn’t legally able to be rented as an apartment. Evidently they don’t have that here; I’ve never heard of a basement being “authorized” as an apartment before. Sometimes water can come up really fast, and it surprises people. They also have no idea how strong water can be. That stream looks shallow, but if the water is moving swiftly it can mean trouble for a vehicle. “Turn around, don’t drown” is promoted for a reason.

  34. 34.

    Baud

    @Kay: That’s the NYT headline, I believe.  They are garbage.

    Based on my limited bubble, however, Texas is getting some play.  We’ll see.

  36. 36.

    Starfish

    @Baud: The number of people who wanted to blame women as if no men were involved in these decisions was also interesting.

  37. 37.

    Soprano2

    @Kay: As someone else said somewhere, for the NY Times this didn’t raise to the level of e-mail server management by Hillary Clinton in importance. The Texas legislature basically made abortion illegal in Texas, and the Supreme Court used a bullshit excuse to let that law take effect, yet the press isn’t telling people this directly. I agree, most people don’t know what the “Texas abortion law” actually is.

  38. 38.

    sab

    @debbie: Well, the US Catholic bishops are trying to make us believe that government officials should make decisions based on religious dictates, and the Supreme Court is certainly obliging.

    Seven of our nine justices were raised Catholic. Gorsuch is now Episcopalian, but my Catholic husband calls that Catholic light and says he really couldn’t tell the difference between the services.

  40. 40.

    Kay

    @Baud:

    What I learned over 20 years of canvassing is you have to tell them and you can’t assume any context at all.

    90% not knowing is too optimistic. It’ll be 95%. There wil be a substantial portion who will believe the opposite happened- that the law was upheld.

  42. 42.

    PST

    @Ken: At least Joe follows the Pope’s teaching on capital punishment. It’s easy to be pro-choice on abortion — just don’t feel compelled to insist that everyone follow the tenets of your faith. It’s not possible to be pro-choice about execution, except maybe to offer a choice of a bullet, a rope, or the guillotine.

  46. 46.

    NotMax

    @Soprano2

    See: My Sister Eileen.

    ;)

    Full disclosure: at one point I moved, within the same building, from a top floor (third story) apartment into a much more capacious basement unit in Queens. Separate entrance ’round the back of the building. A basement apartment far from an uncommon fixture, most often the living quarters of the building’s super.

  47. 47.

    jonas

    @Kay: ​
    There seems to be an “Oh, well. Wacky right-wing Texas. Waddya gonna do?” undercurrent to what little reporting is going on with the Texas abortion ruling. There are no Democrats to criticize, so the MSM are having a tough time figuring out how to cover it.

  48. 48.

    Starfish

    @Soprano2: Yes, the refusal to be clear-eyed about who did what is nuts. The way that people were trying to blame RBG and Clinton and the way that people are still unwilling to throw their support behind women as candidates bothers me.

  51. 51.

    Cameron

    I could only stomach the first couple of sentences of Joe Manchin doing his concerned-Republican act in the WSJ.  Can’t support 3.5 trillion because debt, deficit, etc. So much for that.

  52. 52.

    frosty

    @NotMax: Among all her quotes this one stood out to me: “Some people like a natural looking turd and some people like it when their turds glisten”

  53. 53.

    Kay

    @Baud:

    CNN

    “Women stage protest in Taliban-controlled Kabul” is their story. Roe is one legal analysis sidebars out of three analysis sidebars, one of which appears to be about Justice Roberts and the other is about the “lack of transparency” of the Court.

    It isn’t what they want to cover.

  54. 54.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Soprano2:

    Guess who said this?

    “The Texas law is extreme and harmful. The Supreme Court recognized that there are ‘serious questions’ regarding the constitutionality of the Texas law, and it emphasised that it’s recent ruling does not address those questions. I oppose the Court’s decision to allow the law to remain in effect for now while these underlying constitutional and procedural questions are litigated.

    I’ve cast votes on seven of the nine justices on the Supreme Court. Of those I’ve voted to confirm, three voted with the majority and three voted with the minority. The one I voted against voted with the majority.”

    It’s too early in the morning for this kind of obfuscation.

  56. 56.

    satby

    @PST: Of course, the problem with Kennedy was not that he was anti-abortion, since that wasn’t even a thing in 1960, it’s that he was already as a Senator pushing for a civil rights act. Which his successor was able to push through Congress partially assisted by the shock and anger at Kennedy’s assassination. JFK, as well as Goldwater, recognized the danger that religious extremists posed to the Constitution.

    JFK on Face the Nation

  58. 58.

    Starfish

    So a couple of years ago South Carolina Democrats introduced a bill that would require the state to pay for the children the state wanted to force pregnant people to have—up to college. We need more of that. https://t.co/d2kyKGdAPN
    — Imani Gandy (@AngryBlackLady) September 3, 2021

    The Pro Birth Accountability Act that SC introduced would have required that the state cover:

    -Pre and postnatal care
    -the kid’s health care until age 18
    -if the kid is born with a disability, all related costs forever

    …
    — Imani Gandy (@AngryBlackLady) September 3, 2021

  64. 64.

    Immanentize

    @Soprano2: Here in Medford MA, there are codes that prevent people from making basements into apartments. My favorite is that you can have either a kitchen or a bathroom in your basement, but not both. The Italian neighborhoods usually went for kitchen for summer garden bounty processing (particularly gravy!)  The Irish neighborhoods tended toward the bathroom sometimes with a bar. Sorry, but there is your true life stereotypes in action.

  65. 65.

    schrodingers_cat

    Can some lawyer explain the Texas Law and what the Supreme Court did. What is next. I am trying to understand what happened. Also, what’s the legal course of action for those who oppose the law.

  67. 67.

    Bex

    @debbie: “I don’t know why nobody predicted how quickly the Taliban has taken control of Texas.”  Saw this, don’t remember where.

  70. 70.

    NotMax

    @satby

    Had he won, the stock market crash would surely still have occurred and then we’d never have gotten FDR.

    Silver lining.

  72. 72.

    sab

    @Kay: There isn’t enough coverage of the incredibly revolutionary enforcement mechanism of this law. Let’s remove any government oversight, and let any random creep tie up our people and our courts in hopes of getting a bounty.

    And virtually no coverage of this as anything but an abortion law, when it is a pregnancy monitoring law ( as you keep saying.)  Everyone around a woman who had or might have had a miscarriage is now at risk of having to defend a lawsuit.

  75. 75.

    Ken

    @SiubhanDuinne: Vernor Vinge had that in one of his novels. It was set about 50 million years in the future, and people had recorded seismograph readings and taken pictures of the Earth from space. With the recordings sped up, they could watch the continents move and hear the squeaks and crumpling noises as they collided and pushed up mountains.

  77. 77.

    PST

    @satby: In a peculiar way, the ferocious anti-Catholicism voiced by many evangelical Christians and many southerners during my childhood gives me hope. It has evaporated almost completely, so much so that right-wing Republican assholes now jump easily from Baptist to Catholic with no effect on their electability. They’re all in the same boat now. If such deeply rooted prejudices can fade in less than half a century, what else might be possible?

  79. 79.

    Kay

    @sab:

    “Supreme Court Won’t Block Texas Abortion Law”

    Read that as someone who reads or listens to 5 minutes of news a day (if that)

    What do you know?

  80. 80.

    Steeplejack

    @Cameron:

    Good thread:

    Hard to overstate how much Democrats did the bipartisan infrastructure framework track expressly *for Manchin and Sinema*, to mollify them and make them feel better about reconciliation, and how they already shrank the reconciliation package by trillions to make it easier on them.

  82. 82.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Soprano2:

    As well as the people who want to blame Democrats for not doing something about it.

    I had to turn off MSNBC three times yesterday as guests started in with DEMOCRATS LET/ARE LETTING THIS HAPPEN!

    And I’m a Rachel Maddow fan, but Faux Naive Rachel (“Why hasn’t Roe been codified?”) makes me stabby

  84. 84.

    mali muso

    @sab: And virtually no coverage of this as anything but an abortion law, when it is a pregnancy monitoring law ( as you keep saying.) Everyone around a woman who had or might have had a miscarriage is now at risk of having to defend a lawsuit.

     
    This is something that people need to be shouting from the rooftops. Everyone knows someone who has experience with miscarriage. I remember when I had my first one and started talking to friends, it seemed like almost every woman had a story. It’s already very isolating, the grief and the loneliness. I cannot wrap my head around compounding that grief with the fear of being reported by some secret neighborhood “stasi” and having my private medical information dragged into court.

  87. 87.

    sab

    @SiubhanDuinne: Trying to guess who voted for what in her summary, and the math is too tough for me this early. Maybe the anti-having-to-do-math-in-my-head crowd will be annoyed.

  88. 88.

    NotMax

    @NotMax

    Realize in retrospect that could appear to be directed at SD. It’s not.

    Entirely (one hopes humorously) self-deprecating.

  90. 90.

    Cameron

    @Steeplejack: I can’t see where we go from here. He’s undercutting the centerpiece of the Dem economic agenda. But I’m sure he’ll come around for a filibuster carve-out for voting rights. Sure he will

  92. 92.

    MontyTheClipArtMongoose

    @Ken: oh but biden is taking orders from francis

    it’s just that francis isn’t the pope — stop the steal at the vatican, install timmy cardinal d as rightful vicar of rome

  93. 93.

    Baud

    @schrodingers_cat:

    • Texas gave private individuals the right to get bounties from people who help women get abortions after 6 weeks.
    • Texas prohibited state officials from enforcing the abortion laws.
    • Abortion advocates sued Texas state officials arguing that Texas couldn’t do an end-run around Roe by deputizing private citizens and leaving women with no one to sue.
    • The Supreme Court said, Texas can get away their scheme, at least while the lawsuit is pending.
    • Because the law is in effect, abortion after 6 weeks is effectively banned in Texas because no one is going to take on the legal risk of being hit with a lawsuit and paying the bounty.
    • In theory, the law could still be declared unconstitutional at some future date.
    • But…there is a Mississippi case in front of the Supreme Court that could officially end Roe permanently.
  95. 95.

    Cheryl from Maryland

    Regarding yesterday’s venting re the Supremes and Texas’ abortion vigilante law, Salon has a good link for funding organizations in Texas working with this situation.  I’m horrified about the law but also horrified that the Hacktastic Five are so focused on Roe vs. Wade that they can’t see the wider implications of making vigilante groups legal.

  96. 96.

    JMG

    Manchin is negotiating in public, which is dumb. Now Schumer et. al. will go to him and say, “OK, Joe, whaddaya want to cut out to lower the total number.” His answer will be leaked in about a nanosecond and he’ll have to defend cutting something popular.  Unless of course he doesn’t answer. That’ll be leaked, too. Saying “this bill with 900 things in it is too big” is just an opening bid. A weak one IMO because it’s so easy to counter.

  97. 97.

    schrodingers_cat

    @Baud: Thanks, that was succinct and clear. e-mail lady was right again. Thanks for nothing Berners

    Politically this seems like an overreach. This could backfire on the Republicans and not just in Texas.

  98. 98.

    FlyingToaster

    @debbie:  Only one died in New England: a Connecticut State Trooper whose patrol car was caught in a flash flood.

    It looks like about a third of the deaths in New Jersey and New York were drive-into-the-deep incidents; the remainder were collapsing or flooding lower-level residences. Queens was particularly hard hit.

    Boston would have been hit harder, but it was Allston Christmas and if someone had seen water coming into their basement apartment, they were heading upstairs and not moving anything else in until this was done. And we’ve been hit before, like a couple weeks back with Henri, so there was a heavy fire/police presence in known trouble spots (WashingtonSt trestle underpass in Somerville; Lower EverettSt in Allston, etc.). Over the past few years, friends of mine with rock-wall basements have been getting concrete liners poured, to try to forestall foundation collapses in these storms.

    The biggest worry in all of New England is flash flooding. You can be driving normally and have a wall of water come down a side street and slam into you. You have numerous places — Storrow, Memorial, and Morrissey Drives in Boston/Cambridge, for instance — where you have underpasses lower than the neighboring river/bay/ocean and 5 inches of rain means that it’s completely under water.

    And we’ve finally figured out the removable flood gates, so Aquarium and Kenmore T Stations don’t fill with water any longer.

  102. 102.

    Betty Cracker

    @Cameron: I’m tired of that goddamned drama llama too, but I assume this is the opening step of an elaborate dance that will end with Manchin (and Sinema and the nameless conservadems who hide behind their skirts) to eventually get to “yes” on the bill. They’ll whittle it down on behalf of their No Labels pals, but I don’t think they are crazy enough to tank it. (That said, I did not read the op-ed because I’m sick of hearing from that dimwit.)

  104. 104.

    taumaturgo

    @Steeplejack:  AOC said the silent part aloud, called Machin a corrupt lobbyist for Exxon. No coincidence the day corporate powers announced a multi-million dollars campaign to defeat the infrastructure bill, Machin decides to tell Biden in a WSJ oped to fuck himself and not his beloved corporate donors. Unless the democrats summons the courage to eradicate the corrupt influence of money in the party and come home to their roots, game over.

  105. 105.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Baud: 

    From my cursory and unscientific glancing at the commentary, I was disappointed with the number of people I saw whose reaction included blaming Democrats for Republican actions.

    Exactly what pissed me off about the whole thing. I understand introspection but why does modern liberalism have to be so obsessively self-loathing and ally-blaming? The other side only does this on the margins.

  106. 106.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Cameron:

    Joe Manchin doing his concerned-Republican act in the WSJ.  Can’t support 3.5 trillion because debt, deficit, etc. So much for that.

    and, somehow, because Afghanistan. Never have I ever heard Joe mention paying off that some of that debt by eliminating the unpopular trump tax cuts

  107. 107.

    schrodingers_cat

    @Baud: Some Berner, an academic no less, even blamed neo-liberalism of Biden and the Ds, whatever that means

    Apparently Ds control the Presidency, the Congress and the Senate but won’t do anything because they are neo-liberal.

    When did politics reduce to throwing tantrums 24/7 for not getting your way.

  109. 109.

    Matt McIrvin

    @FlyingToaster: It’s times like these I’m thankful we happened to be shopping for a house during a period of massive regional flooding. There is no better time to buy one in New England. You just pass on the ones that have three feet of water in the basement. Our house is right next to a slope that goes down to a steeply graded stream that empties through a culvert into the Merrimack River. The drainage on the lot is incredible.

    One day, I’m sure the river will rise so high that none of this is any use, but when that happens, the entire city will be extinct.

  110. 110.

    Baud

    @Matt McIrvin: I don’t get it either.  It’s very frustrating and disheartening.  I’m driven to the conclusion that the need to blame Democrats for everything is only predominantly rather than exclusively a feature of right-wing culture.

  111. 111.

    sab

    @schrodingers_cat: Supreme Court looking at a very novel approach to interfering with a currently (for last 50 years) recognized right decided it was too complicated for them to decide yet so let the law go into effect without any hearings or discussion of its constitutionality.

    Normally, they would have stayed the law until the underlying constitutionality could be litigated. They decided this time to go the other way. They decided too early to temporarily block this law because it is so weird. In a normal approach they would have temporarily blocked this law because it is so weird.

    So women who under Roe v Wade (still the law of the land) are entitled to an abortion won’t be able to get one in Texas until (years from now) the cases wind their way through the courts.

    Abortion clinics providing a legally recognized service have closed because all of their employees are afraid of the bounty law suits.

    And the bounty lawsuits. Even  of the people around the woman win eventually, all the employees from receptionist up to doctors risk crippling legal fees. And under this law, the bounty hunters don’t have to pay the other side’s legal fees if the bounty hunter loses, but the abortion provider (or ob/gyn doing the d &c after the miscarriage) will have to pay the bounty hunter’s legal fees if the doctor’s side loses.

    And apparently the bounty people can sue all sorts of peripheral people, not just the medical people. Uber drivers. Friends, relatives and organizations that lent her the money for the procedure

    ETA Everything about this law is unclear, but the Supreme Court decided not to temporarily block it, instead of blocking it as a mess until the lower courts can figure some of the issues out.

  114. 114.

    Feathers

    In my town, and I expect most if Mass. a room can’t legally be a bedroom if it doesn’t have windows a fireman in gear can get through. A good friend from high school drowned in a flash flood. She got a basement recording studio with no windows.

  115. 115.

    FlyingToaster

    @NotMax: And we remain unprepared for it, 102 years further on.  Nowadays that’s Langone Park (I think), so a little less likely to kill a dozen and damage an El.

  118. 118.

    Betty Cracker

    Josh Marshall had some thoughts yesterday about the corrupt SCOTUS and legal elites who assured us judges like Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett merited inclusion on the court due to their brilliance:

    When a purported leading light of the liberal legal academy confidently informs Democratic voters that a hard right ideologue deserves their support we can see they have quite simply lost the plot. Or to put it differently, they’ve forgotten who they work for. On the merits, they are in the thrall of the conceits of their profession believing they are participants in a domain of knowledge akin to physics or medicine rather than one that is involved in value decisions of public policy and is – lets be frank – entirely self-referential and made up. More practically, all their coveted judicial appointments come not from jurisprudential merit or innate brilliance but rather from Democratic voters, just as conservative lawyers get their gigs from Republicans voters.

    The “balls and strikes” thing was always bullshit, of course, but now it should be crystal clear to everyone that we have a rogue, ideological court that functions as another lever to enforce unpopular policies and anti-democratic minority rule.

    The challenge is getting Americans to care. The MSM coverage has been shitty, but as other wingnut-run states rush to emulate the horrifying TX law, maybe that’ll change. I don’t know.

  119. 119.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Kathleen: To some extent this is the result of a sort of backlash cycle–there was a period after JFK’s death of liberals lionizing him as the greatest President or something close to it, as well as assigning him the credit but not the blame for everything that happened during LBJ’s time in office. Once the direct emotional hit receded, there was a period of “well, his term was so short, what did he accomplish really?” Now maybe people are erring in the other direction.

  124. 124.

    Soprano2

    @sab: And virtually no coverage of this as anything but an abortion law, when it is a pregnancy monitoring law ( as you keep saying.)  Everyone around a woman who had or might have had a miscarriage is now at risk of having to defend a lawsuit.

    I think a lot of them don’t understand what this law actually means or what it will do. They see it as nothing more than another chapter in the ongoing war over abortion, and they don’t have much interest in finding out about it.

  127. 127.

    topclimber

    @Ken: As a sometimes lapsing lapsed Catholic, I must defend Pope Francis. Early on he pissed off the Darth Pope wing of his church by saying the flock should ease off of 24/7 abortion crusades and pay some attention to the rest the Jesus message.

    But you are so right about how the right always shifts their litmus tests.

  128. 128.

    Ohio Mom

    The typical image of NYC apartment living might be a tall building (with the super’s apartment in the basement) but there are lots of row houses in the outer boroughs.

    And many of them have that sort of split-level setup where the driveway is a ramp down to a basement garage and there is a flight of steps up to the first floor (I’m sure there is an architectural term for that which I don’t know).

    In expensive NYC, where such a modest row house can now go for a million, it’s not unheard of for homeowners to turn their garage/basement level into an illegal apartment.

    There was one next door to my late aunt’s Jackson Heights, Queens row house. If you know what to look for, you’ll see them all over.

    In expensive NY, where affordable housing is scarce and there many people in low-wage jobs, there are a lot of people willing to live in dark basements. Maybe we should be surprised that so relatively few people drowned in their apartments.

  129. 129.

    sab

    @schrodingers_cat: Yes it does go against the rule of law. This is much bigger than an abortion case. This is the Supreme Court ignoring precedent, rules and norms and procedures, long-time established constitutional rights, all to get a result the majority want.

    I don’t know how lawyers can even figure out how to argue cases when the majority of the Supreme Court does not seem to believe that traditions or precedents matter.

  130. 130.

    satby

    @PST: It has not evaporated. It’s underground while both Evangelicals and Opus Dei Catholics are aligned on abortion, but will flare up again once that alliance outlives its usefulness. As one of the xtians recently reminded me when he referred to “the Roman church”.*

    *A very old slur, and that fact that I have not been a practicing Catholic for 50 years doesn’t excuse me as apostate in their eyes.

  131. 131.

    different-church-lady

    @schrodingers_cat: ​
     

    One Indian Tankie in my mentions said CIA killed JFK because he wanted to end the war in Vietnam.

    I know, it’s completely crazy! JFK lived into the 90s while hiding in Brazil.

  132. 132.

    Kathleen

    @schrodingers_cat: Started when plan was that he’d to destroy Democratic Party which I think started in early to mid 60’s and has become more sophisticated and targeted as technology has evolved and media ownership has become more consolidated. I’m assuming Do Something Twitter is part of the op and I will block accordingly.

  133. 133.

    Kathleen

    @schrodingers_cat: Started with plan  to destroy Democratic Party which I think started in early to mid 60’s and has become more .sophisticated and targeted as technology has evolved and media ownership has become more consolidated. I’m assuming Do Something Twitter is part of the op and I will block accordingly.

  135. 135.

    What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?

    @Ohio Mom:  It’s called an English basement or semi-basement. We have a lot of them in the DC area. We were thankfully spared the worst of this past storm – it seems to have stayed further West until it was North of us. But…there will undoubtedly be a next one that’ll hit us directly. Honestly every typical thunderstorm these days they issue flash flood warnings or watches.

    It is not uncommon during virtually all summer downpours to have swiftly moving water an inch or so deep moving swiftly down every street in my neighborhood. The stormwater management system here seems to be getting overwhelmed in real time. It’s a little frustrating in that Maryland has a stormwater management fee (colloquially called the “rain tax”) to fund stormwater management upgrades. They’re putting in rain garden water catchment basins whenever they redo streets but they’re already obsolete/unable to handle the volume of water that’s coming into them during what are currently pretty typical storms, much less extreme ones.

  138. 138.

    Zinsky

    Trying to help put a positive spin on a difficult, grueling week:

    • Biden’s exit from Afghanistan was chaotic but turned out much better than it might have, given the very poor choices he was left by the orange, spray-tanned, degenerate con man from Mar-a-Lago.
    • The idiotic abortion vigilante bounty hunter nonsense law in Texas cannot stand.  It is so obviously unconstitutional and unworkable as to be cartoon-like.  The website to “report” people who aid and abet abortion-seekers is already completely dysfunctional.
    • Jen Psaki’s takedown of the morally constipated tool from the Catholic Reporter was epic.  Men, in general, need to STFU about abortion, since they quite literally have no actual skin in that game.  Jen should have asked him how the men that impregnate a woman seeking an abortion should be punished?  Castration?  Sterilization?
    • Hard to put much of a positive spin on this God-awful weather, other than reminding everyone that we need to:  Work like Hell on a Green New Deal, buy an EV, compost, bike, fly as little as possible, eat less meat and garden more!

    Have a wonderful, safe and happy Labor Day weekend, everyone!

  142. 142.

    Miss Bianca

    @Cameron: Oh, man, it’s time to watch that movie again. Because of the awesomeness that is Bruce Campbell and Ossie Davis combining forces.

  143. 143.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    I long ago gave up trying to understand the goat entrails and chicken turds that make up the stuff of Wall St prognostication, but doesn’t this suggest that 1) Delta, anti-Vaxxers, the Murdochs and Ron Johnson are bad for the economy and 2) Joe Manchin should not be worried about inflation? 

    Catherine Rampell @crampell
    Oooof. Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 235,000 in August. Huge miss. Consensus was around 700k

    Delta’s fingerprints are alllll over this report. We had been having really strong growth, averaging ~700k/month in the six months from Feb to July. Then a surge in infections, and hiring plummeted, with some losses in the sectors most sensitive to the pandemic

  144. 144.

    MontyTheClipArtMongoose

    @Baud: he was the bishop of washington dc so he did this knowing that comet ping pong was the bigger fish for qatholic paedo hunters

    like the guy who killed his estranged wife in upstate ny on 9/11/01 — who’s going to notice

  145. 145.

    PST

    @sab:

    There isn’t enough coverage of the incredibly revolutionary enforcement mechanism of this law.

    It’s diabolical! I just read the whole bill, start to finish. There were some skillful legal minds at work on this — not the kind of yahoos I would expect to see drafting Texas abortion laws. Someone was at work dotting every i, crossing every t, preempting every workaround, and putting every ounce of risk on the defendants alone in one of these civil enforcement actions. The care can be found in even the mundane provisions, such as venue. It’s awful.

    But …

    It provides a template for any state to address the issues its voters find important but have been frustrated in trying to solve because of the constitutional interpretations of the federal courts. I suggest gun control as the first. California, Illinois, New York, Massachusetts, and every other sensible state should be working already on a draconian statutory scheme that will make it as hard to purchase or carry a firearm as it is to get an abortion in Texas. I think a couple of legislative staffers with legal training could do it over a long holiday weekend. It wouldn’t stand in the long run, but let the gun humpers howl for the next three years!

  146. 146.

    Ohio Mom

    @What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?:

    English basement or semi-basement, I’ll remember that.

    Cincinnati just missed the remains of Ida as well — the storm went south of us. Though we’ve been hit with plenty of other remains of hurricanes, including one about fifteen years ago with very strong winds that knocked out our electricity for four days.

    On a completely different note, I think one thing that will impede widespread reporting on, and understanding of, the Texas law is that it’s convoluted and goes against common sense.

    Look how many paragraphs it is taking us here in the comments, to explain all its permutations.

    A “normie” is probably going to get stuck at the counter-intuitive idea that someone who has no relation to a woman seeking an abortion, does not live in her town, does not know her, can collect money from a taxi driver? Really, it can sound like the person explaining this is pulling your leg. I hope someone comes up with a bumper sticker-sized summary.

  147. 147.

    gene108

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: 

    had to turn off MSNBC three times yesterday as guests started in with DEMOCRATS LET/ARE LETTING THIS HAPPEN!

    The media and many Democratic voters have internalized the fact that Republicans will never pass legislation to help people and make things better, and will only pass laws to help their partisan agenda.

    Feels a lot like, “what do you expect him to do, after coming home from work, a couple of beers, and getting served a cold dinner” abuser enabling mindset that people who should know better have embraced about Republicans only acting in their partisan self interest.

  148. 148.

    taumaturgo

    @Kathleen: Listen to AOC and listen to Manchin and the party’s leadership. She’s telling us exactly how corrupt the leadership of the party has become, and the leadership is telling us they don’t care. Soliciting, taking, and depositing the donor’s checks and then claimed there is no influence is the pinnacle of political corruption. There is data that shows over the last couple of decades any proposed legislation that could have been supported by a large majority of the voters had a statistically insignificant chance of becoming law unless it had corporate backing. Said another way, the oligarchs get what they want, and block everything else. This is what the elite pays for.

    The record also clearly shows the political parties are controlled by corporate donations, except for a small but growing number of representatives that reject corporate donations and only accept individuals donations.

  149. 149.

    Matt McIrvin

    @schrodingers_cat: That’s a really common notion among JFK-assassination conspiracy theorists in the US. I think that for boomers the psychological mechanism there is pretty obvious: the assassination of JFK was such a huge, seemingly senseless thing and the Vietnam War was the central event of US history over the next decade, so it’s natural to assume that killing JFK was really somehow about the Vietnam War, to give it meaning.

  150. 150.

    Ksmiami

    @Cameron: you all still think the system is worth saving? I’m done- it’s over the bad guys will certainly heighten the difference if they don’t kill us all first. Oh well, I’ll take as many of them down with me…

  152. 152.

    Matt McIrvin

    (You could see the same thing as the JFK conspiracy theories playing out in the mainstream after 9/11: people assuming that al Qaeda must be this unusually terrifying and well-organized “hyperterrorist” group, the harbinger of a new age of hyperterrorist acts and connected to a grand transnational movement that somehow included every Muslim we didn’t like, even if they apparently hated al Qaeda’s guts… because that was the only way to make sense of 9/11, which was this gigantic symbolic blow to the USA’s self-image. That they just got incredibly lucky with the actual attack wasn’t worth considering. Nor was the idea that they were better connected to our ostensible allies than our longstanding enemies.)

  153. 153.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Ksmiami:everyone needs to call his office. Tell his staff they might as well switch sides.

    No and no, both of those suggestions are worse than useless

    the way around Manchin is more Democratic Senators in 2022. That’s the only way.

    Well, I have some un-Christian thoughts about the health of Ron Johnson, Susan Collins and Pat Toomey, but for the moment ’22 is the only way.

  154. 154.

    Ksmiami

    @Cameron: he is worse than useless. Just strip him of committee leadership and if he defects, fine. I mean he’s just a selfish dishonest hack who is undercutting the entire Democratic party

  155. 155.

    PST

    @satby:

    It has not evaporated. It’s underground while both Evangelicals and Opus Dei Catholics are aligned on abortion, but will flare up again once that alliance outlives its usefulness. As one of the xtians recently reminded me when he referred to “the Roman church”.

    I have to respectfully disagree for the most part. I will admit you can find remnants of that sentiment in some old-timers, nothing ever goes away 100 percent, but when such notable converts as Greg Abbott, Sam Brownback, and Jeb Bush can be elected in their respective states, Papal Panic is a spent force.

  157. 157.

    Anyway

    @schrodingers_cat:

    One advantage of reading LGM – explanations of the law,  how egregious it is, wonderful dissents by Sotomayer and Kagan, and the cowardly silence by the majority — all laid out in gory details.

    I really appreciated the LGM posts.

  158. 158.

    Ksmiami

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: no you’re wrong- if we don’t get anything else done, there is no compelling message in 22. Count on the Dems to save Roe… not anymore. Voting rights for our most significant and loyal voting block nah. The Dems do not like the fight it’s pathetic and it is causing grave harm to our voters to the point where the system will probably break.

  159. 159.

    Matt McIrvin

    @PST: Well, now we have the phenomenon of sedevacantism or something close to it appearing widely among American right-wing Catholics–they’re the ones who are upset about the Pope.

  160. 160.

    J R in WV

    Having seen Kay’s opinions about this law, I’m pretty disappointed about the media coverage. NO one makes the point that this involves monitoring the health of every woman in TX on a continuing basis, every period from their first until they are well into menopause. Sad.

  162. 162.

    James E Powell

    @schrodingers_cat:

    Politically this seems like an overreach. This could backfire on the Republicans and not just in Texas.

    It’s like gun control. The minority position voters care more and work harder to win elections.

    Of the 60% of Americans who say they are pro-choice, how many consider pro-choice a top three factor when they vote?

    While abortion rights are considered a women’s issue, what percentage of women vote pro-choice every time?

    Other than abortion & gun control, what other issues with 60% support consistently lose at election time?

  163. 163.

    Anonymous

    @Ksmiami:

    …[Joe Manchin] he is worse than useless. Just strip him of committee leadership and if he defects, fine. I mean he’s just a selfish dishonest hack who is undercutting the entire Democratic party

    My LEO buddy tells me that Joe has been mobbed up for his whole political career — owned and operated by the old time mob.

    There’s quite  a bit of old fashioned mob influence in northern WV since the feds mostly ran them out of Pittsburgh. By which I separate them from the new Russian mob of NY and NJ.

  166. 166.

    geg6

    @sab: ​
     
    He’s right about the services being indistinguishable, but don’t think they are anything alike in philosophies. Episcopalians are about a thousand times more liberal than Catholics, as far as doctrine goes. Most of the still-religious ex-Catholics I know (including my younger sister and her daughter) left the Catholic Church for the Episcopalian Church. They are not anti-woman (just the opposite, in fact, with many women among the hierarchy), anti-birth control fanatics at all and that’s what makes the church attractive.

  168. 168.

    Steve in the ATL

    @schrodingers_cat:

     

    To my non-lawyerly eyes this goes against the rule of law.

    SCOTUS decides cases based on politics, not on legal principles. Made Con Law much easier once I understood that as I no longer tried to make sense of the legal “reasoning”.

  169. 169.

    Betty Cracker

    @James E Powell: I agree with you about the edge pure dedication gives minority position voters like gun nuts and antichoice fanatics, but it’s possible s-cat is right about overreach. I mean, that bit in the TX law about deputizing random fanatics to police pregnancies is just so ridiculous and outrageous that it could change the calculus, particularly if other wingnut states enact copycat legislation, which at least a couple have announced they’re considering (FL and SD). I never bet on Americans waking the fuck up, but on rare occasions, it does happen.

  170. 170.

    Origuy

    The house I shared with other students in Champaign had a basement with two living areas. One was a separate apartment with its own exit, the other was attached to the rest of the house. Don’t remember if both had windows.

    On the orienteering blog Attackpoint, there’s a thread that contains a lot of information about the Caldor Fire. One guy there has been watching the nightly briefings and is summarizing them, along with pictures. The thread started out talking about the problem of having events planned for fire-prone areas, which is the entire western half of North America.

  171. 171.

    Feathers

    @Baud: 9/11 conspiracies drove out the JFK conspiracies. All the cool kids, etc. My theory is that there was a pushing of the nutball conspiracists in order to discredit anyone who might look into the Bush Admins poor reaction to the very real threat. See also how the “Sarah Palin wasn’t Trig’s mother” claim was used to disappear the very strange, but true, stories of his birth. If you just took her own version as real, the woman was far too nutty to be responsible for anything.

  172. 172.

    LiminalOwl

    @Ken: Indeed. But the SCOTUS plurality, and too many legislators, are of the “more Catholic than the Pope” variety. (I know there’s a better term, but I can’t think of it.)

    (Would anybody be interested in a rant, from a non-Catholic, about sedevacantists and their fellow-travelers?)

  174. 174.

    CaseyL

    @SiubhanDuinne: I love this as much as everyone here, but… it’s not quite accurate that they only slowed down the sound.  They created multiple tracks, with some variation in pitch:

    https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/god-39s-chorus-of-crickets/

    ETA: Fair Economist beat me to it!

    I will add this:  the site where Subaru Dianne got the “heavenly chorus of crickets” recording is a Christian Evangelist site. I am always suspicious of anything posted by evangelicals, and felt compelled to check things out.

  175. 175.

    taumaturgo

    Can we call this corruption?

    The 14 Democrats who joined with Republicans to approve a $25 billion boost above Biden’s Pentagon budget took $1.3 million from defense contractors and weapons makers. Long live bipartisanship corruption!

  176. 176.

    Geminid

    @James E Powell: The political dynamic around gun control has changed somewhat, at least in Virginia. Democrats used to shy away from the issue. But by the state 2017 and 2019 elections, Democrats were running on gun safety platforms and winning. This issue seemed to help them especially in the suburbs that now are the battleground in the state. When Democrats finally took control of the General Assembly after the 2019 election, they passed six gun safety laws thepolling showed had 70% or more support among registered voters.

    Now Virginia Republicans are on the defensive in this area. The party is still staunchly behind gun rights. But the Republican candidate for Governor declined to fill out the NRA’s questionnaire, and so received no rating. The NRA and other Republicans did not raise a fuss about this. They know that Youngkin is running a stealth campaign and avoids taking stands on issues that energize Democrats and alienate independents. Gun safety and women’s reproductive rights are two such issues.

    I will be interested in the response of voters to the unrestricted concealed carry laws that have passed in states like Texas and South Carolina. A similar law may well pass in this session of the Ohio legislature. These laws are unpopular among general public, not to mention law enforcement. The Texas Tribune reported a poll showing 56% disapproval of the proposed Texas law. Can Democrats make rolling back these  laws a winning issue? If the recent trend in Virginia is an indicator, gun safety may now be a winning issue in suburban areas. Polls show that proposals like expanded background checks and strict standards for concealed carry permits have majority support even among gun owners.

  179. 179.

    Gravenstone

    @Ksmiami: You are a fucking dumbass, you know that? If he “defects”, say hello to Majority Leader McConnell (again), effective immediately on formal declaration of caucus affiliation – because it will then be 51R/49D.

  181. 181.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Feathers: I remember getting into a fight with a truther who insisted the plane that hit the Pentagon didn’t exist. I had a friend who had personally seen that plane.

  182. 182.

    sab

    @LiminalOwl: On Supreme Court appointments, in my fantasy world Catholics are okay but Federalist Society membership is a not, and we have too many Yale grads. Are they still basically not graded (no  a,b,c,d,f; just pass/fail)?

  183. 183.

    satby

    @PST: I will admit you can find remnants of that sentiment in some old-timers

    The kid who said that to me was 15, the product of the Abeka Christian homeschool brainwashing network and a member of one of those ubiquitous “full Bible” churches all over the red states. The next gen of bigotry is in training right now.

  184. 184.

    Ruckus

    @Cheryl from Maryland:

    also horrified that the Hacktastic Five are so focused on Roe vs. Wade that they can’t see the wider implications of making vigilante groups legal.

    Who says they can’t see it? And don’t care…

  185. 185.

    Ruckus

    @Baud:

    They always blame the most generous so that they don’t look as bad.

    They know what they are doing, they don’t want a government that works for everyone. Because if it does they will look like the chumps that they are. Joe makes $190K a year, in a state where the average is $37,204. His pals make even more. The 25th percentile is $27,811. In CA the average wage is $69,271.

  186. 186.

    Starfish

    @schrodingers_cat: The law says that a person can sue anyone suspected of getting an abortion in court and collect $10,000. If the case does not work out for the person suing, that person does not have to cover the other side’s court fees. Also, if I gave someone $100 to get an abortion, I can get sued by anyone who heard about it anywhere in Texas, so I could get sued over and over for that one $100 donation to a person to get an abortion.

    The help has to be KNOWINGLY done so if someone rode the city bus to the abortion clinic, they can’t sue the bus driver cause the bus driver didn’t know.

    Anyway, with the law being very stupid, California can decide “Hey, we are not going to ban guns, but any private person can sue people that they suspect of having an illegal gun.” Imagine the heads that would explode.

  188. 188.

    James E Powell

    @Geminid:

    I didn’t mean to suggest that there was no hope for any change. I’m just making the – perhaps banal – observation that anti-choice and pro-guns forces are alike in that they get their minority views to prevail because they make it their one and only issue, they are fanatics, they constantly browbeat the press/media, they work their asses off every single election at every single level, and they never quit or get discouraged.

    Obviously, some of the pro-choice majority are certainly as dedicated & hard-working as their opposition, but a significant & outcome determining percentage of pro-choice people just don’t care as much.

    This was at no time more clear than 2016. With an open supreme court seat and another looking to open soon, the pro-choice population had it within their reach to more or less put an end to the peeling away being done by right-wing federal judges. But, you know, emails, Goldman Sachs speeches, I don’t like the way she laughs, rigged! and all that.

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