Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Democracy cannot function without a free press.

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

Good lord, these people are nuts.

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

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

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

Every reporter and pundit should have to declare if they ever vacationed with a billionaire.

“Loving your country does not mean lying about its history.”

You’re just a puppy masquerading as an old coot.

Republicans firmly believe having an abortion is a very personal, very private decision between a woman and J.D. Vance.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

Radicalized white males who support Trump are pitching a tent in the abyss.

Let me file that under fuck it.

It is possible to do the right thing without the promise of a cookie.

One lie, alone, tears the fabric of reality.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

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

One of our two political parties is a cult whose leader admires Vladimir Putin.

Let the trolls come, and then ignore them. that’s the worst thing you can do to a troll.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

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

Today’s gop: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

You are here: Home / Politics / Biden Administration in Action / Thursday Morning Open Thread: What, *Still* Not Friday?

Thursday Morning Open Thread: What, *Still* Not Friday?

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Can we declare the weekend begins now, by fiat?

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Reader Interactions

140Comments

  1. 1.

    Baud

    The cable guys are the real heroes in Ukraine right now. They’re keeping the internet on and the information flowing. Working for Comcast, it astounded me how quickly we were able to rebuild entire systems after disasters. These guys are doing it during war. CABLE GODS!

    Oh man. The Comcast jokes in the replies must be epic.

  2. 2.

    Baud

    It’s so cool that American libs have turned Zelensky into a God. A dude who oversaw his country turn into a Rampage level is the greatest statesman of the age. Sexually attracted to losers

    I thought the new right wing talking point was that Zelenskyy was redefining what it means to be a man.

  4. 4.

    Soprano2

    This interview with Rick Scott, R-Douchebag, is actually kind of hilarious. He spins as sputters as he tries to explain how his proposal to increase income taxes on 50% of Americans is actually not a proposal to increase taxes, and he really doesn’t want Medicare and Social Security to be repealed, he just thinks we should have the conversation. If this is an example of how Republicans try to defend this idiocy, every Democrat in America should hit their opponent over the head repeatedly with this 11-point “plan”.

  7. 7.

    dmsilev

    @Baud: A hot war is probably a reasonable excuse for giving people 8 hour arrival windows for a repair tech.

    Probably.

  8. 8.

    narya

    I was hoping he’d call out the oil companies–and with a simple graph, no less! Love it.

  10. 10.

    Argiope

    @Steeplejack: Waiiiiiiit a minute.  Are you telling me we’ve all been getting drunk all these years because of some missionary to Ireland, not Constantine’s virgin niece?

  13. 13.

    lowtechcyclist

    It’s so cool that American libs have turned Zelensky into a God. A dude who oversaw his country turn into a Rampage level is the greatest statesman of the age.

    I don’t think anyone’s saying he’s the greatest stateman of the age.  But when’s the last time anyone has risen to a moment the way he has?

    And you think of his background: a comedian with no government, leadership, or administrative experience.  One would hope Joe Biden would be ready for a moment like the one he’s in: he’s been in government for practically all of his adult life.  But Zelenskyy? He’s like Frodo with the Ring here.

  14. 14.

    Bruce K in ATH-GR

    @Baud: This is what Orwell meant by “doublethink”: the ability to believe that two statements that completely contradict one another are both true.

  15. 15.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Argiope:

    Waiiiiiiit a minute.  Are you telling me we’ve all been getting drunk all these years because of some missionary to Ireland, not Constantine’s virgin niece?

    What, we need an excuse??

  16. 16.

    Betty Cracker

    @Soprano2: Good for NPR for highlighting Scott’s ridiculous manifesto. I think Inskeep should have pushed Scott harder when he tried to deflect, but I’m glad he pointed out that many Republicans benefit from government programs Scott wants to “sunset.” Every elected Republican should be asked about Scott’s plan, which is the only agenda that caucus has offered for 2022. McConnell rejected it. Let the rest of them go on record.

  21. 21.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Bruce K in ATH-GR: This is what Orwell meant by “doublethink”: the ability to believe that two statements that completely contradict one another are both true.

    Which reminds me: the other day, Tierney Sneed (formerly of TPM, now with CNN) had a great catch the other day of Justice Alito taking both sides of an issue in different opinions, in order to take the side that favored the GOP in both cases.

  24. 24.

    Soprano2

    @Betty Cracker: I liked the example Inskeep used of a single mother whose taxes would be increased under Scott’s stupid plan. I think it’s hilarious how Scott kept talking about taxes on billionaires. Since when did they care whether or not those people paid taxes? For years they’ve been telling us billionaires paying no taxes is a sign they’re smart!

  25. 25.

    Jeffro

    Let’s see if we can count all the ways that this tweet from the WaPo’s Ashley Parker is repellent:

    “Biden (wearing a suit, subdued, age 79) found himself, for one of the first times since Russia invaded Ukraine, clearly in response mode to Zelensky (clad in military green, resolute, age 44).” My latest from today’s Biden-Zelensky dueling speeches.

  26. 26.

    matt

    Matt Christman is one of three co-founders and regular co-hosts of Chapo Trap House

    Evidently there’s a show for these upset guys who hate good things and love bad things.

  28. 28.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    Can we declare the weekend begins now, by fiat?

    I’m pretty sure that’s in the Senate bill abolishing the twice-yearly clock changes.

    If not, the House should add it. Call your Congressional Representative!

  29. 29.

    Jeffro

    @Soprano2: [Scott] really doesn’t want Medicare and Social Security to be repealed, he just thinks we should have the conversation

    …and then…what?  Congratulate ourselves for having had the conversation?  Come on now Rick Scott!

    I agree with you 100% about Democrats hitting their opponents over the head with this.  Republicans have ZERO to offer voters (well, except culture war – that, they never seem to run out of)

  30. 30.

    debbie

    The Ohio Supreme Court AGAIN rejected redistricting maps. This was the third time, and the vote was 5 to 2 (compared to earlier 4-3 counts). The Court ordered the commission to hold FREQUENT meetings IN PUBLIC and also ordered that the Democrats be INCLUDED in the process.

    I call this good news!

  32. 32.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Betty Cracker: Zelensky’s prior career let him hone his communication skills. That and his physical courage make him the man for this moment.

    Sure, the communication skills are big. But you still have to have the wisdom to know what you should say and what you should do, and have the courage to do it.

    I keep thinking of the Bosstones’ “The Impression That I Get“:

    Never had to knock on wood, and I’m glad I haven’t yet
    because I’m sure it isn’t good, that’s the impression that I get

    And presumably, he’s also doing the more routine shit that a President has to do, which isn’t exactly routine right now, because his country’s still running like a country even in the midst of a war.

  34. 34.

    guachi

    @debbie: As a future Michigander I’m laughing at Ohio’s problems.

    Michigan voted for a commission and the process went smoothly. Ohio voted for better redistricting and what they voted for was designed to fail.

  35. 35.

    narya

    Maybe I’m an outlier, but I would MUCH prefer to fall back and stay back, rather than spring forward and stay forward. I’m a morning person, and, in particular, I exercise before work, which means I will be running in the dark for months.

  36. 36.

    Kay

    @guachi:

    The “better redistricting” advocates were great people and they earnestly tried, but I agree with you. They ended up with so many compromises which led to such complexity that by the time I saw their final presentation – they presented to both D and R political groups- I gave up. I didn’t think it would work. They’re these mild, wonky “good government” people up against rabid partisans. It was just a mismatch.

  38. 38.

    Jeffro

    @Betty: I think it was the “dueling speeches” that sent me over the edge.  These were ‘dueling’ how, exactly?  These two gentlemen are about 98.5% aligned on the subject of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and how to deal with it.

    “Dueling”.  Jesus.

  39. 39.

    Soprano2

    @debbie: I think our House redistricting is going to end up in the courts, where they will probably do a 6-2 R/D map like what we have now, and like what the saner Republicans want to do. The rabid Trumpers want a 7-1 R/D map that gets rid of a majority black district in KC, which would definitely land them in court. The D’s want a 5-3 R/D map, which would be fairer but has no chance of passing our state legislature.

  41. 41.

    narya

    @Baud: Maybe I’m NOT an outlier. I’d rather have the sunlight in the morning, though. I’ve seen that they’ve tried it before, but I don’t remember it (I was 12, I guess?); just didn’t make any impression on me. I also suspect I’m an outlier in that I am not particularly affected by the change twice a year, except in resetting a zillion devices. (Why does a microwave have a clock? I can see a stove, if you want to do the kosher thing, but a microwave? No.)

  42. 42.

    Betty Cracker

    @Kay: There’s a big fight in FL over redistricting maps too, and now DeSantis is fighting the state legislature that gave him all the culture war bullshit he’s using to run for president. He’s hellbent on eliminating a majority black district and appears to be teeing the issue up for a SCOTUS ruling so that Federalist Society Hall of Fame can finishing destroying  the VRA.

  43. 43.

    Betty Cracker

    @Jeffro: Maybe it makes sense if you stop thinking of Beltway coverage as a journalistic enterprise and view it as theater criticism.

  44. 44.

    Soprano2

    Holy Cow, this story. How did I miss that in 2018 this guy had a plan to kill all liberals to make a theocracy in the U.S.? Here’s the headline of the story:

    State Rep Who Wrote Genocide Plan for Libs Shows Up in Poland with Ukrainian Kids He Wants to Give to American Families

  45. 45.

    Soprano2

    @Jeffro: As was pretty easy to predict, she’s getting dragged all over the place in the comments to this tweet. I thought it was mocking the way this would be treated if the two men were women! Because you know that’s how they’d talk about it.

  46. 46.

    mali muso

    Open thread…I’ve been saving this twitter thread because it’s too excellent not to share. Michael Harriot just has a way with words and imagery. You definitely have to read to the very end to get the full impact though.

    I’ve always wanted to do a home renovation show called “Spite House,” where Black folks redecorated the properties bought with their free labor just to make white people mad.

    I know it sounds mean and kinda racist, but hear me out.

    I know the perfect place for it.

    A thread.

  47. 47.

    RSA

    @narya:

    Why does a microwave have a clock?

    So I can see what time it is when I’m in the kitchen… My microwave is above the stove, and it’s a convenient place for the time to be displayed.

  49. 49.

    satby

    @narya: The amount of moaning and whining about the time change amazes me, honestly. What a soft bunch Americans have become when changing a few clocks is a burden. Talk about first world problems. And when the new system is repealed (even assuming it passes the house and gets signed into law, not likely), people will piss and moan about that.

    Billions of people around the world would love to have our “problem”. edit: directed not really at you, but at the constant kvetching and dumb snap solutions.

  50. 50.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    Good to see the conterians found their voice again in what must be their dorkest hour.

    matt christman, any reason we should could care about what this limp dick thinks?

  51. 51.

    Kalakal

    It’s so cool that American libs GQPers have turned Zelensky Trump into a God. A dude who oversaw his country turn into a Rampage level plague pit is the greatest statesman of the age. Sexually attracted to losers

    Seems like fair comment

  52. 52.

    satby

    @Soprano2: I thought it was mocking the way this would be treated if the two men were women!

    No, that’s how she thinks. Her Hillary Clinton and V.P. Harris coverage provides ample proof she’s a vapid, mean-spirited twit.

  54. 54.

    delk

    Tomorrow is St Patty’s Day when you have to walk down the streets avoiding piles of green vomit.

  55. 55.

    O. Felix Culpa

    @delk: Riding the CTA after St. Patrick’s Day is a thing to be avoided.

    ETA: Actually, during the day as well. I remember being hemmed in by hordes of pre-drunk people heading to the parade. Blech.

  58. 58.

    Hoodie

    @Betty Cracker: That’s the only frame these morons know, i.e,. “if all you have is a hammer . . . ”  Many if not most members of the political press are careerist functionaries, monkeys who are taught a formula and apply it equally to every event because that’s what you do if you are a serious political reporter.   It’s  not even theatre criticism, which at at least requires recognition of different plots.  Honestly, you see better reporting in sports and entertainment, where there is less pretense.

  59. 59.

    Tony Jay

    OT, but I’m due a short rant.

    The Guardian’s shitty Politics Live site is oddly slow in posting comments today. I say odd because there’s a shit-ton of things for commentators to blow off steam about. There’s Flobalob running off to Saudi Arabia begging for oil (unsuccessfully) and dodgy donations to offset the loss of Russian oligarch funding (probably successfully). The return to Britain from Iran of the hostages Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Anousheh Ashouri, the former after six years in jail, four of which were due to a conviction for anti-Mullah propagandising based substantially on incorrect statements about what she was doing in Iran made by the then Foreign Secretary Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. There’s the decision by Dubai-owned P&O ferries to sack their entire UK workforce without any warning and replace them with foreign (but not EU) labour recruited from employment agencies.

    Lots of stuff to talk about. I wonder what could be holding up traffic?

    Unless it’s the typical overreaction of their Moderators and Censors Guild as they paw through every comment binning anything to do with the very terse article on the Guardian site regarding the humiliatingly grovelling apology (with damages) made in court by the pro-Flobby, pro-Brexit, pro-Putin Daily Telegraph rag and former Blairite Labour MP turned Flobby-backing ‘Lord’ Ian Austin regarding a piece Austin wrote calling Corbyn’s former aide Laura Murray an “anti-Jewish racist” and part of the “vile antisemitism of Corbyn’s Labour”. Turns out it was all complete bullshit and the guilty parties have had to admit that while she was Corbyn’s aide Murray (like her boss) was actually on the front lines of challenging genuine anti-semitism wherever it reared its ugly head.

    I’m stupendously unsurprised that the Guardian is banning any comments referring to this topic. They spent five years working to get Tories elected by mainstreaming the most vile anti-Labour shit spewed by Likud’s mouthpieces in the UK while scrubbing any dissenting voices from the narrative and, in the end, got what they wanted. Allowing anyone to point out the honking contradiction between what that shitbird Austin (amongst many, many others) was allowed to accuse Corbyn’s Labour of in the pages of the Guardian and today’s humiliating climbdown might lead to difficult questions about the validity of the Guardian’s reporting on this topic and the credibility of the people, organisations and organs they chose to make the sole frontpage voices on it between 2015 and 2019.

    And we can’t have that, can we? Wankers.

    Anyway. Steam valve closed. As you were.

  61. 61.

    different-church-lady

    @narya:

    Why does a microwave have a clock?

    I know, right? Can’t the smart fridge just tell it what time it is?

  63. 63.

    dww44

    @Jeffro: Well, Ben Sasse, on MSNBC this morning was highly critical of Biden and the Administration’s strategy vis-a-vis Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.  While his critique was respectful  with the argument that Biden is playing into Putin’s hand, allowing him to set strategy..we are just too namby-pamby. Joe S kinda sorta actually took up for Biden,

    As I kept waiting for Ben Sasse to show some true courage during the Trump years  with the latter’s toadying up to his authoritarian master, I have a hard time with this element of the GOP going after the current President.

  65. 65.

    Betty Cracker

    @Hoodie: IMO, sports writers are very often the most talented people on staff. You’re right that good theater criticism requires more skill than most of our famous Beltway types possess. They do understand “plot,” but only one, and they hammer every square peg into that same round hole.

  67. 67.

    different-church-lady

    @satby: I agree we complain about too many first world things, but I gotta note that for two weeks out of every year I find myself depressed as all fuck because of the clocks.

  68. 68.

    Geminid

    @guachi: Virginia voted for a commision and it deadlocked. A provision in the constitutional amendment resulted in new maps being drawn by two Special Masters under authority of the state’s Supreme Court.

    Some Democrats denounced the result. I think the maps are drawn fairly neutrally, and the angry Democrats are still sore over Democrats in the General Assembly voting to put the amendment on the 2020 ballot the requisite second time (some Democrats wanted to do some gerrymandering of their own). The amendment passed by a 2-1 margin.

    The new Congressional map has six fairy safe Democratic seats and four relatively safe Republican districts. One district, the coastal 2nd, is considered a tossup. The 2nd District is currently represented by Elaine Luria, one of the 40 Democrats  who flipped Republican seats in the 2018 midterms.

  70. 70.

    Betty Cracker

    @Soprano2:

    I thought it was mocking the way this would be treated if the two men were women!

    That would be funny, and WaPo has a staffer who could totally pull that off: Alexandra Petri.

  71. 71.

    Anyway

    @Betty Cracker:

    This. Plus they shun the word “policy” (‘cepfer tax cuts) and avoid any meaningful discussion of it at all costs. All that’s left is theater.

    I have more respect for E! News “correspondents” who parrot PR for the most part

  72. 72.

    schrodingers_cat

    @different-church-lady: I too hate the changing of clocks twice every year. In the tropics where I spent my childhood we did not change clocks so yes it is quite literally a problem I only experienced in the United States. It messes up my sleep patterns for a week at least.

    Do not want.

  73. 73.

    Betty Cracker

    @satby: I don’t care so much now that I don’t have to roust a teenager out of bed to go to school. What should absolutely change is the time kids are in school. They just aren’t built for early mornings, especially teens. We know this from science! :)

  74. 74.

    dww44

    @different-church-lady: So, which side of the permanent time debate do you fall on…permanent standard or permanent daylight savings time?  My sister shared a text link to an article this morning that “sleep experts say the Senate chose the wrong one… that standard time is better for people’s health.” For me, it’s a question of whether one wants to go to work in the dark or come home in the dark.  I vote for the former.

  75. 75.

    VincentN

    @satby: We complain because it’s a pointless time change that our bodies have to adjust to twice a year for our entire lives. It was also one of the few trivial things that everyone could enjoy complaining about. Like the weather or traffic.

  76. 76.

    mali muso

    @O. Felix Culpa: He is now writing at The Grio as are some of the other Root alumns.

    Copying and pasting the Twitter thread since it seems to have disappeared.

    I’ve always wanted to do a home renovation show called “Spite House,” where Black folks redecorated the properties bought with their free labor just to make white people mad.

    I know it sounds mean and kinda racist, but hear me out.

    I know the perfect place for it.

    A thread.

    First of all, I’m gonna be kinda vague in this thread because I don’t want the internet sleuths to dox anyone, but there is a very wealthy family who came to the US to build their fortune in the 1700s and succeeded beyond their wildest imagination.

    But you also need to know this

    Whenever you hear about these blueblood families, they didn’t get rich from hard work or perseverance. The people who came to America didn’t know shit. They weren’t smart or talented. Most of the Jamestown died because they didn’t know how to grow shit.

    Starving Settlers in Jamestown Colony Resorted to Cannibalism

    New archaeological evidence and forensic analysis reveals that a 14-year-old girl was cannibalized in desperation

    And the next crop, too. And the next ones. When the word got back to England than this colonizing stuff was hard, they came up with a plan to get some people who know how to do stuff.

    For each person you paid to come to America, you’d get 50 acres of land.

    The indentured servants would typically work for the person who paid their passage for 7 years. But you know white folks will find a loophole. And in 1638, George Menefie realized that he could import Africans, make them work forever and get the rights to 50 acres per head

    This ain’t CRT. Again, those old, rich families ONLY gained their generational wealth from Black people’s existence. They didn’t know how to farm. They were dumb, fragile colonizers who gained their wealth from human trafficking.

    But this one family, though…

    They imported so many enslaved people to SC that by 1800, they had been granted 50 grants worth 281,097 acres of land.

    How much free land is that?

    Well, it’s kind of a lot.

    And here is the wildest thing: They kept this wealth in the family by cousin-fucking

    Seriously, that ain’t no joke.

    But that wasn’t enough for this family. So, when Andrew Jackson kicked the native Americans past the Mississippi, this family was like: “Oooh, free land!”

    And they got MORE land from the “Indian Lottery” that was only available to white people. To be fair, they were scared AF

    They kept hearing about slave revolts in SC & wanted to get their free labor away from the “troublesome” kind. So in 1840, this dude and his wife-in-law/cousin/grandsister packed up and moved to another state with nothing but their hogs, their faith & 100 human beings they owned.

    The first thing he did was build a 15-room Greek colonial-style revival house. Now, that’s what the historians said. But here’s the thing:

    You think this motherfuckery built a 15 room house in the middle of the literal forest by himself? Hell no! Black people built that house.

    And you might think I’m being misogynistic for leaving his wife out of the conversation. How did I know she didn’t help? Well, her ass was too fat and lazy because she made little Black girls serve as her personal air conditioner.

    I wish I was making this shit up.

    One story says they fed their enslaved people through a hole in the back door and didn’t allow Black people in the big house when their families came to visit from SOuth Carolina.

    I know it’s a long trip, but who else were they gonna fuck?

    No, seriously.

    You gotta remember, they had forced the indigenous people off their land, so the only people around were either family or slaves. In 1860, the couple still enslaved 50 people. Think of how brutal this “Christian family” must have been that those Africans didn’t revolt.

    So this family’s free land eventually became the town when they sold rights to the railroad, the post office, etc. And all this time, they had created an industry with free labor (again, I have to be vague, here.)

    Then the Civil War rolls around, so what will they do?

    Would they fight to keep their free labor? Or would they fight for the side that literally GAVE THEM generations of untold wealth and cousin-booty and enforced the laws that maintained their wealth??

    You know what these evil motherfuckers did.

    After these traitors got their asses kicked, they STILL couldn’t do shit without free labor, so they said they’d pay the labor, but they don’t have to pay the sick ones and they can deduct wages if they caught the ex-slaves stealing

    STEALING WHAT? That was THEIR SHIT!

    Again, I gotta emphasize that these white people were outnumbered, so the town became majority Black. It still is. But these white folks enforced the lynching law to protect their property.

    Anyway, its 2022 and this family still has this ostentatious plantation in a Black town

    Of course, they don’t wanna live around “da Blacks” so they rent it out for weddings and use it as a Bed & Breakfast for Confederate enthusiasts. They are STILL generating wealth from slavery.

    But these people aren’t smart, so their business model is failing.

    What if someone showed up at the door and offered them a lump sum for the house at the right time?

    You’d need a white couple to act as buyers (trust me, they wouldn’t sell to Black folks) & promise to honor the family legacy and the history of the home.

    The original owners are invited back, the TRUE history is exposed & the house is unveiled. Is it reimagined as if enslaved people actually won a revolt? Do we just burn it down? Are there nude paintings of the cousin-fuckers??

    Who knows what happens on an episode of Spite House!

    I came up with this idea while writing a story on plantation tourism, which is how I realized why white people THINK they know history:

    On 1 tour, the guide said 3 family members lived in the main house & 100 enslaved people lived on the property.

    But for 100 years, when they told the story of the property and the forced labor farm there, they called it “the McLeod Plantation” the name of the people who did THE LEAST

    Telling the story of 3 white people & ERASING the contributions of 100 Black people is NOT HISTORY.

    And when you tell the story of this specific town, or that house, you can’t tell the story of a white man and his sweaty-ass wife. They did not build SHIT.

    I’d just love to see the faces when the home is rededicated to the memory of the ancestors who built it.

    Even if the white family was fairly compensated, they’d probably still be angry & SWEAR their family history is being erased.

    Oh the irony!

    Now that I think about it, the above-referenced house wouldn’t work for Spite House. The white family doesn’t actually own it anymore.

    I do, now.

  77. 77.

    Jeffro

    @dww44: I just Googled “sasse ukraine biden” and got a dozen links from the past month, all of them featuring ol’ Ben – experienced 7-year senator that he is – telling President Biden what to do, all of which could be filed under the heading “more” and “faster”.

    Also, he called Putin ‘evil’ – whoa there buddy!  You are some kind of visionary or something!  Well, except for that vote to aquit during trumpov’s first impeachement, that is… (eyeroll)

  78. 78.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Baud: Apparently they tried this in 1970 and people ended up hating it.

    1974, actually, in response to the 1973-74 energy crisis.  But the part about people hating it is correct.

    @narya: Why does a microwave have a clock?

    It has to have a timer, so why not have it double as a clock?

  81. 81.

    different-church-lady

    @schrodingers_cat: To put a finer point on it, I don’t hate the time change itself, but nonetheless it has a bad effect for me. It hurts us in real (if minor) ways, and I don’t see any commensurate benefits in this modern world over-abundant artificial light.

  83. 83.

    different-church-lady

    @dww44: Honestly I don’t know. I’m such a night owl that if we were going to let my particular body rhythms decide how the clocks are set, then 10pm would fall around daybreak.

    I’ll adjust to either choice. I’d just prefer to adjust and stay, not adjust twice a year.

  84. 84.

    satby

    @different-church-lady: (warning, general statement to follow)

    I don’t really depend on clocks to set my circadian rhythm, and I try (really, but I often fail) to be tolerant that other people don’t. But most of it has to do with attitude, because when people start grizzling about it days ahead, complain about it days afterward, and generally expect it to cause huge problems for them, well the universe and your subconscious will surely answer that call for you. Resilience has been shown repeatedly to have more to do with attitude than any inherent psychological qualities. We can train people to be more resilient. But In our American culture, our inconvenience trumps (sorry, not sorry ?) all.

  85. 85.

    O. Felix Culpa

    @mali muso: Great story, and definitely worth reading through to the last line. Thanks for the link to the Grio. The Root is a pale (sorry) version of its former self with most of its best writers gone.

  86. 86.

    lowtechcyclist

    I’ve never understood people’s difficulties in switching back and forth.  I think it would be nice if they sprang forward on a Friday night to have an extra day to get used to it before Monday, but other than that, I’m fine with it.

    Biggest difficulty – real first-world problem here! – is that instead of being cued by the impending darkness that it’s time to get dinner ready, that cue has been moved an hour back and is now useless, so I’ve got to cue myself in in other ways.

    Main thing for me is, in the winter, I still want things to get light by around 7am, and they do.  But in the summer, I’d rather take that hour of daylight that would otherwise be between 4am and 5am, and have it between 8pm and 9pm instead.

  87. 87.

    different-church-lady

    @satby:  I agree, but in this one case ceasing to screw with the clocks seems like a far easier solution to the problems created by screwing with the clocks.

  88. 88.

    different-church-lady

    BTW, I remember reading about some experiments years ago where they disconnected people from natural light and clocks, and discovered we fall into a 30 hour day. So maybe we’ll never come up with the “right” way to set the clock.

  90. 90.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @satby: Bitching about minor things isn’t a sign of a lack of resiliency.  It’s just letting off steam.  From my experience in the army, I have seen soldiers who bitch about any and everything pick up and carry 200 lb artillery shells from one gun to another a 100m away in the mud without complaint.  At least, without complaint about that, they frequently did while complaining about something else.

  91. 91.

    Betty Cracker

    Ukraine probably wishes a motherfucker would try:

    Russia warns United States: we have the might to put you in your place

    Source: Reuters.

  92. 92.

    Kay

    I met with Marcy Kaptur’s campaign so I’ll just give you the rundown. They think (90% certainty) the last map will be the House map- state legislative districts are more up in the air than the House map because the Ohio constitution requires the state legislators to draw maps for state seats, but not for US House.

    That takes Kaptur from a +15 Biden district to a +3 Trump district, but she ran 6 points ahead of Biden last time. Lucas County (Toledo) will be her biggest city and it was Biden +19 so she has to really run up the score there and limit the damage in counties like to mine to losing by 20. IOW, she can lose by 20 but not 25. This is really common for Ohio Democrats so is not as shocking as it sounds.

    So it all comes down to turnout! :)

    Not kidding- that’s really true.

  93. 93.

    Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes

    “While there is a war with substantial war crimes, which I do not support, occurring in the breakaway area of The Ukraine, Hunter Biden. I am a very important journalist with a big brain.”

    -by Glenn Greenwald, probably

  96. 96.

    dww44

    @Soprano2: ​
      As best I could tell, it was for us to set the agenda/talking points by threatening war ourselves. Being too reactive;not proactive enough. Not letting Putin frame the debate.

  98. 98.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @dww44: did anyone bring up that barely two years ago Benji Sasse voted to rubber stamp trump’s attempts to delegitimize Ukraine’s government and national security? in defiance of Congress, also too?

  99. 99.

    Kay

    Cayle Thompson
    @CayleThompson
    ·2h
    There are 1.4 million Americans on unemployment right now, the lowest in 50 years.

    Just amazing. I tell my 19 year old, who has his pick of part time jobs to the extent that he’s gotten incredibly cavalier about it, that he will never see this again in his lifetime. He thinks this is normal!

  101. 101.

    Brachiator

    @satby:

    What a soft bunch Americans have become when changing a few clocks is a burden.

    Does anyone even have a clock to manually change anymore?

    All my devices switch time automatically.

  103. 103.

    schrodingers_cat

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: On the Snooze Hour yesterday Judy Woodruff interviewed the Turtle without a single question about the first impeachment vote or his party’s pro-Putin stance. She just let him bash the Biden admin for not doing enough for Ukraine. These people IMHO are worse than Fox news personalities. Because they masquerade as neutral when really they are as pro Republican as any Fox News personality.

  106. 106.

    Philbert

    I like the Daylight time change for summer but an hour at a time is too much. They should just shift it 10 minutes a month.

  107. 107.

    Geminid

    @Kay: I see from news articles and Representative Kaptur’s website that she has been talking up various projects in Northern Ohio that are funded by the Infrastructure Bill passed last  fall. One of the smaller projects involves improvements at Ottawa National Wildlife Preserve on Lake Erie. Ms. Kaptur and Interior Secretary Debra Haaland visited site two weeks ago to speak about the initiative..

  108. 108.

    Ohio Mom

    I think the time switch in the spring became a lot more abrupt when GW moved it three weeks earlier.

    I am too lazy to do the math but three weeks from now the spring equinox will have passed and the days will be longer naturally.

    He also moved the time change one week later in the fall. In my part of the world, that makes the first hour of trick-or-treating, 6-7, occur in the daylight. By the start of the second hour, 7-8, it’s beginning to get appropriately dark. But I live in the very last part of the Eastern Time Zone so YMMV.

    It’s a minor thing GW messed up, considering all else he mis-accomplished.

  109. 109.

    Brachiator

    @Tony Jay:

    Great rant.

    The return to Britain from Iran of the hostages Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Anousheh Ashouri, the former after six years in jail, four of which were due to a conviction for anti-Mullah propagandising based substantially on incorrect statements about what she was doing in Iran made by the then Foreign Secretary Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.

    This proves that the UK is better than the US. In America, Hillary Clinton got blamed for mistakes that she did NOT make as Secretary of State. In the UK, Boris Johnson becomes prime minister despite his fuck ups that cost people their freedom.

    There’s the decision by Dubai-owned P&O ferries to sack their entire UK workforce without any warning and replace them with foreign (but not EU) labour recruited from employment agencies.

    Is this getting BREXIT done? Or something.

  110. 110.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Brachiator: Does anyone even have a clock to manually change anymore?

    Sure, why not?  I don’t always carry my phone around with me, and I’m not always at a computer.  We have cheap $10-$15 clock radios in the bedrooms (most of them predating the smart phone era), and you can see what time it is from across the room.

    Even when I’m on a computer, that’s easier than squinting to see the tiny time of day number in the lower right hand corner of the screen.

    The time’s on the microwave in the kitchen, and on analog wall clocks in the living room and one of the bathrooms.  I think altogether we’ve got nine or ten clocks that don’t change the time themselves.  Changing them all takes maybe three or four minutes.

  111. 111.

    Kay

    @Geminid:

    Kaptur is a Great Lakes expert. She was heavily involved with the Great Lakes Compact and she speaks at a Great Lakes environmental event I attend every year. There’s a local issue here where industry interests are lobbying to start taking a lot of water from a huge aquifer that is located in NW Ohio and into Indiana. Like- 5 million gallons a day. Protection of Lake Erie and the aquifer and watershed is a genuinely bipartisan issue in NW Ohio, even in very red counties, so she’ll be very well positioned to take advantage of that. She got a nice share of non-aligned voters last time who voted for her- either Trump voters who split a ticket and voted for her or people who left the Presidential line blank and voted for her. She’ll need them again, even more so now. Water could be how she does that.

  113. 113.

    Soprano2

    @dww44: So he thinks that in order to show we’re strong, or something dumb like that, we should be threatening to go to war with Russia over their invasion of Ukraine. He’s brain damaged if he thinks that’s a smart thing to do. Does he think the American people want our military sent to Ukraine to do battle against Russian troops, especially when it seems that the Ukrainian government doesn’t want us to?

  115. 115.

    Soprano2

    Man, these people…..

    Tennessee Comptroller Jason Mumpower said Tuesday that he will be taking control of the finances of Mason, Tenn. a majority Black town of about 1,500 people located within five miles of the future site Blue Oval City, the Ford electric truck and battery plant that represents one of the largest manufacturing investments in the state’s history.

    “I’m sad for the taxpayers of Mason,” he said. “We will be working hard to step in and get their finances in shape.”

    So for years the white people who used to run this town ripped it off, and the comptroller didn’t seem to notice. In 2015 they all resigned, and the town government became pretty much all black. Now that Ford wants to build a huge new electric car plant 5 miles from the town, suddenly the comptroller is extremely concerned about the finances of the town (which are slowly getting better), so he wants to take over the town, dissolve the town government, and put it under the auspices of the majority white county government. Of course, none of this has anything to do with the new Ford plant or the fact that the town government in this majority black town is made up of black people. /s/s/s/s/s/s/s/s/s/s/s

  116. 116.

    geg6

    @satby: ​
     
    I am completely thrown off by the time change every time it happens. As I get older, it worries me. There’s a lot of research out there about how bad the time change is for our bodies and by sleep disruptions brought about by it. I won’t be back to peak for a month or so after a time change. Maybe it seems trivial to you, but people having heart attacks and other less lethal health issues due to the time change don’t see it that way.

  119. 119.

    Geminid

    @Kay: Preservation of aquifers has become a significant political issue. While resurrecting the Keystone II pipeline has become a pet cause for Republicans these days, it will not happen, I believe, in part because of the threat it poses to the huge Oglalla Aquifer lying under Nebraska.

    Similarly, opposition by coastal communities to oil drilling off of the Southeast Atlantic coast has effectively killed that project. Maritime business interests have been happy to shift from supporting offshore oil rigs to supporting wind farms.

  120. 120.

    Brachiator

    @lowtechcyclist:

    I think altogether we’ve got nine or ten clocks that don’t change the time themselves. Changing them all takes maybe three or four minutes.

    Oh, the horror!

    :)

    I had a VCR that supposedly would automatically change the time. But it would take it a week or so to do it, and if you manually changed it, it would change back.

    I have a clock on a radio, but since I rarely listen to the radio anymore, I don’t pay attention to the clock.

    But I heavily rely on my smartphone and other devices. As long as they switch time automatically, I am happy.

    Years ago I had a clock in my car dashboard that I could never figure out how to adjust. It would defiantly blink the wrong time at me. Monster.

  121. 121.

    Kay

    @Geminid:

    We’ve had two proposals in the last two years to pull millions of gallons a day out of the aquifer. It isn’t just that they pull it out of the aquifer- they then run the waste water out to a river that dumps directly into Lake Erie. Erie is the shallowest and warmest of the Great Lakes. It’s the most sensitive to pollution. They’ll kill it. It’s already burdened with agricultural run off – these Lakes just don’t have endless capacity to recharge no matter the volume of garbage you dump into them. They can take A LOT but you can’t just recklessly pump anything you want into them. I think there’s real resentment of the tax breaks and other “incentives” that are just rampant in Ohio, too. They’re already getting this incredibly valuable public resource free- unlimited, high quality fresh water- and they demand to be taxpayer subsidized too. What happened to free markets? Why am I paying these people to pull 5 million gallons a day out of an aquifer? Pay for SOMETHING. Pay for the water, pay taxes, pay something.

  123. 123.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Ohio Mom:

    He also moved the time change one week later in the fall. In my part of the world, that makes the first hour of trick-or-treating, 6-7, occur in the daylight. By the start of the second hour, 7-8, it’s beginning to get appropriately dark.

    I’m pretty sure that was the intent. The toddlers and wee ones can come for their candy during the first hour while it’s still light, and the tweens and teens can come out during hour 2 when the Halloween atmosphere improves. Speaking as a front-stoop candy distributor, I think it’s actually a pretty nice arrangement.

  124. 124.

    Medicine Man

    @matt: ​
     

    So basically he’s a “shitlib”. Great.

    I bet his timeline is full of complaints about how “Liberals won’t fight, etc”

  125. 125.

    Tony Jay

    @Brachiator:

    Is this getting BREXIT done? Or something.

    Braver folk than I have dipped into the squelching u-bend that is the Daily Mail’s comment site to discover that the self-same ‘patriots’ who claimed Brexit would block foreign workers from taking well-paid white people’s British jobs are laughing their tits off at the P&O story because the fact that P&O’s British crews are part of a Union that, bafflingly, supported Brexit, means that them losing their jobs is a double-victory over EU red-tape and the idea that Unions can protect jobs.

    They’re a bizarre and awful bunch.

    Meanwhile the former Tory MP and Hufflepuff-candidate for Tory leader back in 2019, Rory Stewart, has apparently told the Media that he was also invited to the infamous orgy black-mass perfectly innocent party at Lebedev’s Italian palace that Flobalob ditched his security detail to attend after a NATO security conference back in 2018.

    Stewart claims that ‘someone’ came up to him at their Party Conference and suggested he’d like to be flown over to spend the weekend with the Russian billionaire where they’d have a great time and there ‘would be girls’. When Stewart demurred, on the grounds that Lebedev was the son of a KGB officer and so incredibly dodgy, he was told “Oh, no no, don’t worry, Boris Johnson the Foreign Secretary is coming”

    Funny that Stewart, with his persona of a nice-guy Tory rebel and his actual voting record of a right-wing Tory loyalist, only just thought to mention this right now. Almost like he’s doing his bit to slide the knife in while Flobalob treads water amidst the swirling confusion of the UK’s actual Ukraine/Russia policy.

  126. 126.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Soprano2:  Yeepers.  Of all the people I ever had as a student, Mumpower’s one of the very last I’d have ever trusted to be in charge of anything that affected other people.

    Sounds like he’s amply earned my lack of trust.  How totally fucking horrible of him.

  127. 127.

    Betty Cracker

    @Brachiator: Oddly enough, my car (2018 Jeep) with a screen that integrates with my iPhone doesn’t automatically change. How stupid is that? Very stupid! It displays the correct time if it’s synced with the phone, which is most of the time. But if not, it’s wrong half the year because I can’t be arsed to go thru the settings and figure out how to change it. The settings also make it super-easy to accidentally change the display from MPH to KPH. Took me a while to fix that! Maybe I’m the stupid one… ;-)

  128. 128.

    Citizen Alan

    @dww44:  I’m still waiting on an explanation of why schools and businesses harmed by the absence of daylight savings time can’t just decide to start an hour later in the day.

  129. 129.

    Geminid

    @Tony Jay: Stewart’s “doing his bit to slide the knife in” reminds me of how Julius Caesar’s assasins promised one  another that they would each individually stab Caesar. Are the Tories this organized?.

  130. 130.

    Tony Jay

    @Geminid:

    I’m of the opinion that they want Flobby to stay where he is until after the local elections in May. If they turn out to be the horrific catastrofuck for the Tories that many are expecting, they’ll get very organised indeed in planting all of the blame on Flobby’s face-down corpse.

  131. 131.

    Brachiator

    @Tony Jay:

    he was told “Oh, no no, don’t worry, Boris Johnson the Foreign Secretary is coming”

    This is frightening on so many levels. How many kids, claimed and unacknowledged, does Boris have now?

    Funny that Stewart, with his persona of a nice-guy Tory rebel and his actual voting record of a right-wing Tory loyalist, only just thought to mention this right now. Almost like he’s doing his bit to slide the knife in while Flobalob treads water amidst the swirling confusion of the UK’s actual Ukraine/Russia policy.

    Interesting guy. He seems to know when his actions might have the maximum impact.

  132. 132.

    Soprano2

    @Kay:  they then run the waste water out to a river that dumps directly into Lake Erie

    Is this water coming from a sewage treatment plant? Because if it is, when it comes out it’s probably cleaner than the water that’s in the river naturally. For some reason people have this idea that treated water coming from a sewage treatment plant is dirty, but it’s anything but. Discharges from sewage treatment plants are heavily regulated, at least the public ones are. I’d have to know more details to be sure, but it’s possible that this discharge could actually make the water in the river a little bit cleaner! I’m sure there are many other good arguments for not drawing water from the aquifer, but this might not be one of them if it’s about pollution.

  133. 133.

    Miss Bianca

    @Soprano2: I just talked to a former editor of mine about this very story. She used to be involved with a big Russian-American adoption effort, she’s out of that now.

  134. 134.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @schrodingers_cat: ​In the tropics where I spent my childhood we did not change clocks so yes it is quite literally a problem I only experienced in the United States.

    And the excellent reason for that is, the closer one gets to the equator, the smaller the difference in length of daylight between the longest and shortest day of the year, and therefore the less daylight there is to “save”; e.g.:

    In New York City (latitude 40.7128° N), the longest day of the year is 15:05 long and the shortest day is 8:46 long, a difference of 6 hours and 19 minutes.

    In Mumbai (latitude 19.0760° N), the longest day of the year is 13:08 long and the shortest day is 10:51 long, a difference of 2 hours 17 minutes.

    In Colombo, Sri Lanka (latitude 6.9271° N), the longest day of the year is 12:24 long and the shortest day is 11:35 long, a difference of 49 minutes

    On the equator (0°) there is no difference: every day is exactly 12 hours long.

    You’re very welcome!

  136. 136.

    Kay

    @Soprano2:

    No, it’s coming out of huge animal production facilities. It’ll be filthy. They’re taking up pristine aquifer water, loading it up with pollutants, and having it drain right into a major river that runs right to Lake Erie, a Lake that is warm and shallow and already has huge trouble with maintaining equilibrium due to gobal warming and fertilizer run off, so much so that people in Toledo were drinking bottled water 2 years ago. It wasn’t safe. It’s where they get their drinking water.

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