We need more leaders with Rep. Jamie Raskin’s fire and passion:
One for the ages. Rep. Jamie Raskin rips Marjorie Taylor Greene to shreds- buckle up, it’s brutal. pic.twitter.com/3gWnUq4MWe
— Mike Sington (@MikeSington) April 28, 2022
It gives me hope to see the Dems bare some teeth. We need to amplify that and support it. We are in a fight for Democracy and playing nice ain’t gonna cut it. Truth is a very sharp knife, Dems need to wield it.
Cannot wait for the Jan 6 open hearings. Gonna be lit. It seems clear from Raskin’s fiery rebuttal here, he knows everything she did in regards to Jan 6 and he’s over her nonsense.
IMHO, Greene is days away from a complete meltdown in which she will accidentally reveal all she knows and implicate all her cohorts. She just seems to be vibrating with fear and anxiety, and she’s not tightly wound to begin with, her unraveling will be a thing of beauty.
This is an open thread
Squishable Friday Morning Open Thread
Alison Rose ???
I loathe her and I love him.
debbie
Oh, he’s not stopping there!
Frank Wilhoit
“…days away from a complete meltdown…”
Every time we have said this, about any of them, it doesn’t happen; but their nerve always fails in some way, and we need in each case to make it fail sooner, because that is the only way to minimize collateral damage. So you are right that the necessary tactic is to turn up the heat.
Ken
@debbie: Oh come now. Has he forgotten that Bill Clinton lied about having sex with an intern? Or that Obama had the temerity to even enter the Oval Office?
Frank Wilhoit
@debbie: Superlatives are still not things to throw around recklessly. Using superlatives, at this point, is really one of theirs, and they need to be consistently mocked for it — not emulated.
japa21
I love how he uses the term “gentlelady”. Sticking with the decorum while sticking a knife not into her back but directly from the front. He is pissed and rightly so. All real Americans, not Amerikans like MTG, should be pissed. And I love how he is equating her with the whole GQP. We are seeing now, from Biden on down, the upcoming mid-term strategies. Go after one GQPer but use that to condemn the whole party.
Laertes
“She does not mention more than one hundred Ukrainian children who’ve been shot and killed by the Ukrainian army…”
That’s a really unfortunate brainfart, and it’ll probably be featured in some effective enemy propaganda videos.
narya
I see there is a new entry in the dictionary next to “righteous anger,” and I am here for it.
Jerzy Russian
Hasn’t anyone watched the Wizard of Oz? It is well known that a bucket of water will hasten the meltdown. If metal buckets can’t get past the metal detectors, use a plastic one.
sab
@Ken: That intern was an adult. Immature, perhaps, but not a child. College graduate and all.
Damien
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gHhOn2hnqmI
The Moar You Know
@japa21: The GOP has been incredibly successful at painting the Democratic Party as a wholly owned subsidiary of Bill and Hillary Clinton, even during the years when we weren’t in power.
I see no reason to not return the favor, with interest. Party of Trump.
trollhattan
@Ken: Tan suit. Never forget.
#DudeWoreTanSuitGate
WaterGirl
I can’t wait to watch that! That will be my reward when I finish the not very fun thing I am in the middle of.
Jerzy Russian
@WaterGirl:
Your tooth will feel a lot better after the dentist is done rooting around in there.
rikyrah
Raskin
clap clap clap clap clap
gvg
Wandering off topic, I have lately noticed how much bill Clinton has disappeared from public life. I am wondering how he is doing healthwise. I suspect he isn’t doing well.
Bill gets a lot of flack for going too far to the right during his terms in office but I remember times were different then and the republicans had the votes for a lot of bad things. Bill vetoed a lot of things that would have made things worse and mitigated others. I regarded him as protecting women’s rights even if he was a serial cheater. He did what he could and now we can do better. I spite of the GOP extremists getting worse, the public has actually moved for the better IMO, though nothing is forever or taken for granted.
cope
I got in the car the other day and somebody was being interviewed on one of our PBS stations. He went on in such an aggressive manner I told myself that whomever it was, he’s not an elected official because none of our Democrats speak so strongly to truth. At the end of the interview, I learned it was Raskin. “More of this”, I said to the dog.
Alison Rose ???
@sab: Let’s not go there. Don’t act like there wasn’t a massive power differential between a 22-year-old intern and the 50-year-old president of the United States. Yes, she was an adult. But an adult can still be taken advantage of, and he absolutely did so. I liked Clinton as a president and still like him now, but that was 100% a shit move on his part.
JPL
Greene won’t have a meltdown. What you see is what you get. You have to remember she’s the person who cheated on her boyfriend at the time, while married to someone else. It might have been three affairs at the same time. She has a lot of energy.
debbie
I’ve been rummaging through Twitter, trying to find something that included MTG’s remarks. No luck, so I guess I’ll assume it was her earlier tweet calling both NATO and Ukraine Nazis.
tam1MI
Well, there was also the interview she did where she said the Catholic church was ruled by Satan…
Jim, Foolish Literalist
He spoke at Madeleine Albright’s funeral, I didn’t hear the whole thing, and I don’t want to be Audio-Dr Frist, but my first thought was, damn, he doesn’t sound good
kindness
The upcoming 1/6 hearings being televised won’t budge Trumpers, but it will probably get through to those middle of the roaders and that is 2022’s elections bread and butter.
Now if only Garland will step up to the plate.
JPL
@tam1MI: Don’t forget they are all pedophiles.
PAM Dirac
Since I got polled for MD-6 the other day I guess it is official that I am out of Raskin’s district (MD-8). That’s a real bummer. Raskin is not only good as far as the national stage goes, but he also takes care of a lot of local nuts and bolts; shows up to support Ds at the county and local level, gets information out, handles constituent problems, etc. When the pandemic started he had a weekly phone meeting that had local officials and what they were doing and what they needed. He mainly introduced people and let them talk. It was very comforting to know that while the orange fart cloud was trying desperately to screw things up, competent local officials were working together to get things done. One up side to the polling is that I hadn’t paid a lot of attention to David Trone, the MD-6 rep and the things the poll questions brought up made me feel pretty happy to vote for him.
different-church-lady
I don’t usually end up dissenting on a TaMara post, but I can’t share this sentiment. First, we keep telling ourselves that “THIS” will be the thing, THE meltdown, THE bridge to far, and every time the psychotic side of the American electorate clutches them even tighter.
Second, the way this lawmaker is going to unravel will be much more like an ancient landmine than a ball of yarn. Far from beautiful, it will be as ugly as possible and she will try to damage anyone and anything in the vicinity, including democracy itself.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
So I’m learning how the political world works in red spaces through my own little nonpartisan judicial race. My county is suburban/exurban, and full to the brim of the infinity pool with too many people who moved this direction so their kids wouldn’t have to go to school with, you know, those people. Lots of realtors and insurance salesmen and bank types, decently educated and totally not racist, but. Local GOP party organizers now have the numbers and made it clear that they want no Democratic input into any level of government, and that the only elections that matter are GOP primaries. They went as far as to send someone to all holders of nonpartisan offices and told them that if they are personally registered as Democrats, opponents would be tendered, so some number switched to “independent”, giving them no voice whatsoever.
It is so bad that in a county of 50-55K, there is only one registered Democrat running for any office – me, and that’s just a nonpartisan judicial race.
The other two are more mixed partywise, with a number of Democrats in office. They’re conservative, for certain, but aren’t exclusionary or into the team sport type of scorched earth politics of suburban Rs – they’re farmers, farm machinery purveyors, sileage managers, and worry about getting products down the road and to market. Their meetings are about road projects, drainage, infrastructure grants, broadband, building codes.
Last night, at a candidate meeting in the outmost, most rural county, a state senate candidate for the district (who lives in my county, and is an engineer) hijacked the mic and prattled endlessly on abortion, masks, vaccines, CRT, guns, abortion, doing things in the name of Jesus and abortion. People looked at him like he was from mars – they didn’t want to hear it, because it had nothing to do with them. Then, as he was touting his own party creds about bleeding in Republican for life, he expounded on how proud he was that his first vote was for Richard Nixon. I wasn’t the only person shaking my head.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
I will add – my yard signs are all getting collected by the works department of my county, and my irreplaceable metal frames trashed. Everyone else’s signs get to stay up.
JPL
In GA you can vote in the democratic or republican primary. If I lived in her district, I’d vote for MTG’s republican challenger. That’s the only way she loses. I plan on sitting the primary out unless there’s a runoff for the republican SOS. Then I’ll vote for Raffemsberger.
Waldo
Sadly, we haven’t seen a Dem firebrand like Raskin since A. Wiener got more exposure than anyone asked for.
UncleEbeneezer
@japa21: I hope so. They’ve been doing that shit to us for years by tying every Dem to the most radical statements of AOC, Ilhan Omar etc.
Betty Cracker
#1 — It doesn’t seem possible that Raskin and Greene have the same job, and yet they do.
#2 — What’s happening right now to Greene’s fellow dumb and treasonous kook, Madison Cawthorn, defines the limits of how Republicans can run afoul of their caucus, i.e., by disparaging fellow Republicans.
TaMara
@different-church-lady: What?! Dissent? I will not allow it.? /jk
@Betty Cracker: I saw the hit piece in the
mirrordaily mail last night. YowzaSteve in the ATL
@cope:
This may be the most Balloon Juice comment ever
JPL
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: Find out if they are collected and put somewhere where you can access them. In a burb outside of Atlanta, they were placed next to a dumpster outside of the city hall. It gave folks the opportunity to gather them.
TaMara
@Steve in the ATL: Yes!
JoyceH
@Alison Rose ???: Taken advantage of? Have you forgotten that she came to DC intending to seduce the president? Not a supposition, she TOLD friends that. Granted, it was wrong of Clinton to cooperate with a younger woman who was throwing herself at him. But let’s not pretend that the powerful man overpowered the unwilling woman. He’s the one who gave in.
WaterGirl
@Jerzy Russian: Nope not dentist. You wouldn’t have made that joke, I’m sure, if you knew how anxious even talking about / hearing about dental work makes me. :: shudder ::
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@JPL:
Thats exactly where I found some of them, along with the destroyed frames. A jailer candidate who likes me called me – he thinks it is ridiculous.
I think they’ve yanked about 40 signs to date.
schrodingers_cat
Have we discussed why progressive darlings voted with MTG against seizing the assets of Ruski oligarchs. I say its because they have the same paymaster.
Alison Rose ???
@JoyceH: I didn’t say she was unwilling, but that doesn’t negate the power differential. And what age would she have had to be to not be seen as a vixen here? 20? 18? 17?
WaterGirl
@Steve in the ATL:
Rotating tag?
“More of this,” I said to the dog.
ian
For those of you who may read twitter, I highly recommend following Monica Lewinski. She is extremely funny and a good writer.
Ken
I’m beginning to wish that in responding to “worst presidential political crime” I had just mentioned Obama’s existence, and not brought up Clinton.
Old School
@schrodingers_cat:
My guess is it was because the A.C.L.U. had expressed reservations over the bill, but I doubt that’d change your mind.
opiejeanne
@Alison Rose ???: It’s not her lack of age, it’s her behavior; she had a history of stalking a married man before she announced her desire to get her “Presidential kneepads”.
WaterGirl
@Ken: I share that wish.
opiejeanne
@Ken: It’s fine. You can’t predict what someone else will say.
Steve in the ATL
@WaterGirl: could be paired with “Less of this,” I said to the cat.
Laertes
@Old School: Do we have to guess? It seems like the kind of vote that they’d have explained at some length. I went looking for an explanation from the reps themselves, and haven’t found one. I figure I just didn’t look in the right place
(The only thing I’ve found are some quotes at a hostile site that I don’t trust to quote AOC correctly.)
schrodingers_cat
@Old School: Tax the rich, but not those ones. Yes makes perfect sense. When you are so left that you are right. After all 360 degrees and zero degrees are the same pt.
JPL
@WaterGirl: yes
apocalipstick
@different-church-lady: I agree wholeheartedly. MTG isn’t going to melt down: she’s going to double down. Raskin is going to become a groomer pedophile Naze Communist Socialist CRT America-hating…
Finish the thought with the insane invective of your choice.
schrodingers_cat
@ian: Hard pass on the Blow job Cicada h/t Trinity’s mustache.
zhena gogolia
MTG’s outfit looks a little “Orange Is the New Black” to me.
Betty Cracker
I love this tweet from Raskin:
Don’t get in the car with those creepy cultists! I like the possibilities.
Elizabelle
@Alison Rose ???: She pursued him. Clinton’s female gatekeepers recognized Monica’s behavior and got her transferred to the Pentagon.
I am happy that Monica Lewinsky got a second act (actually, probably a third, by now), but she is hardly a victim of workplace harrassement. And she showed appalling (lack of) judgment in telling all to Linda Tripp (who emerged, with Ken Starr, as one of the real villains of this sad sideshow).
Bill Clinton’s judgement was poor, too. And he is so damn lucky that Monica was not affiliated with any other nation or organization.
I think he should have confessed and not lied about the affair. He could have made it past, since voters already knew he was sketchy in that department (who had forgotten Gennifer Flowers at that point)? More poor judgement.
That said, I think Bill Clinton did his best and was a good president for the times. He’s the last to have been elected before Fox News ramped up, isn’t he??
opiejeanne
@schrodingers_cat: I read her for a little bit and was somewhat entertained for the moment, until her victimhood was resurrected in the media not long ago.
Old School
@Laertes:
Apparently. The Republican nays haven’t explained their vote either. In an article from two days ago:
Omnes Omnibus
@gvg: I was happy to vote for him in ‘92 and ‘96. I see no reason to regret either of those votes.
Old School
@schrodingers_cat:
I think you mean “Convene a working group through a nonbinding resolution”.
schrodingers_cat
@Elizabelle: Co-sign. And she has been milking that incident for decades now. I don’t think she is either a victim or a vixen. And right now she is just tiresome.
zhena gogolia
@Betty Cracker: Nice!
Albatrossity
I nominate
“More of this”, I said to the dog.
for the rotating tag library
waspuppet
Cannot wait for Steny Hoyer to announce they’ve been postponed another six months.
Anyway
@Old School:
“confiscate their assets” is a nice slogan. Powerful oligarchs know to have many dotted lines between them and their assets and shrewd attorneys who know to throw sand in the works -see how long it’s taking the NY AG to get a penny out of TFG.
There’s nothing wrong with trying to confiscate assets but at this point it’s just a slogan. Those guys are way ahead of (various) govt justice depts
Anyway
Duplicate again Don’t know what I’m doing wrong
zhena gogolia
@Anyway: Happens to me all the time on my phone.
RaflW
MTG is really quite stupid. But I think she’s taken note, via the strategic leaks and attacks against Cawthorne, that if/when her worm turns, the GOP will draw their knives with speed. It turns out that a party that will do anything to get and hold power will do things up to and including jettisoning their own to seek to ensure a more pliant replacement can be sourced.
Geminid
@schrodingers_cat: Well, we’re mixing it up some on this matter over on the Ukraine war thread.
a thousand flouncing lurkers was fidelio
Something that strikes me about both MTG and the disaster that NC-11 have taken for their representative—both are from families that are accustomed to be big fish in small ponds, and they have been raised with the notion that other people do not get to criticize—or indeed condemn!—their conduct. “Do you know who I am?” Finding themselves in a situation where not just their local peers but the entire national news media, and every interested party on social media can comments, criticize, and even condemn their words and actions has to be pretty unsettling; coming to terms with the possibility of actual legal consequences that can’t be made to go away by Big Daddy has to be a struggle.
While I find I can bear their distress fairly easily, it occurs to me that this is another thing many people in the GOP base hate about cities—it’s not just that Those People do not know their place, but that no one knows their place—and their own status as part of The (or at least A) Family That Matters is not just weakened but imperiled, if not eroded entirely.
They love hierarchy so much—especially if they’re near or at the top!
Amir Khalid
@Steve in the ATL:
Indeed, the only way it could be more Balloon Juice would be the dog barking in agreement.
schrodingers_cat
@Geminid: I find it interesting that there are multiple threads bashing Sinema and Manchin, which they completely deserve but this blog* (and a lot of leftie blogs and social media) is mum about the antics of the so-called progressives Putin and oligarch sympathizers.
*When I say the blog. I am referring to FP posts not comments.
Thanks will go and check that thread.
ian
@schrodingers_cat:
Well I hope people don’t define me by mistakes I made more than 25 years ago, but YMMV.
Ken
@Betty Cracker: The Republican response has only made me more firmly convinced that Madison Cawthorn’s sin wasn’t telling ridiculous lies about party orgies, but telling the truth. Omertà and all that.
rikyrah
They are clowns![]()
They miss being Dolt45 stenographers.
Brian Schatz (@brianschatz) tweeted at 8:07 AM on Fri, Apr 29, 2022:
This quote makes me nauseated. “Jen [Psaki] is very good at her job, which is unfortunate,” one reporter who has covered the past two administrations from the room said.” https://t.co/USWdTYXQfp
(https://twitter.com/brianschatz/status/1520026962307301377?t=Hjrpj0jqVB41nMcITNxhMA&s=03)
Steve in the ATL
@Amir Khalid: “I concur fully,” the dog responded.
schrodingers_cat
@ian: It is she who keeps reminding people of that not I.
rikyrah
CLAP CLAP CLAP CLAP
Palmer Report (@PalmerReport) tweeted at 7:13 PM on Thu, Apr 28, 2022:
Jamie Raskin is absolutely nailing it on messaging. The Democratic Party overall is very good at messaging. But most of you don’t understand that your goddamn job as an activist is to amplify that messaging – not sit around and pretend that the Democratic Party has no messaging.
(https://twitter.com/PalmerReport/status/1519832273419350016?t=1fcpiWGxYWzS0ZwD62hozQ&s=03)
RaflW
@tam1MI: “there was also the interview she did where she said the Catholic church was ruled by Satan”
I saw some small corner of this kerfuffle the other day. It will be ugly, but I hope that more of this total bananas infighting gets going.
(IIRC, the core of her attack isn’t wrong, the Catholic Church did cover up a ton of pedophilia and sexual abuse. But she is simply not capable of talking about that in a way that doesn’t sound unhinged. So she should proceed. Putting right wing US bishops on the defensive against an elected Congressional lunatic is , well, fascinating.)
Omnes Omnibus
@schrodingers_cat: If that is the case, why did they vote for arming Ukraine?
WaterGirl
@Steve in the ATL: There is a children’s picture book to be made out of this, I think. Between the dog and the cat, for sure.
The only question is whether the story is about other animals, too, or just the adventures of the dog and the cat.
germy
Wisdom O. Cole is the National Director of the NAACP Youth & College Division. In this role, he serves more than 700 youth councils, high school chapters, and college chapters actively involved in the fight for civil rights. Wisdom brings extensive experience in civil rights advocacy training institute, electoral action training, grassroots organizing, issues toolkits, and webinars at the local, state, and national level.
trollhattan
@RaflW:
She misspoke and meant to say they’re “ruled by Santa.”
WaterGirl
@Amir Khalid: @Steve in the ATL:
See, the children’s story is being written as we speak. Brief Outline
Dog: more of this
Cat: less of
thisthatThe dog barks in agreement
What does the cat do???
Old School
@Omnes Omnibus: They are Putin sympathizers by voting against non-binding resolutions establishing working groups. Putin allows them to vote for supplying arms to Ukraine.
Please try to keep up.
schrodingers_cat
I have been a regularly participating in a Twitter Space hosted by Ferlain and Walter Report and they report from the ground in Ukraine and have speakers from Europe and people on the ground and the point made again and again is that Russia didn’t just infiltrate the RWNJ groups but also left leaning groups. Not just in the US but also in many European countries.
BS campaign was helped by GRU as well and that is well documented (Mueller Report, Senate Intel Committee report )
Link to Walter Report
hueyplong
@RaflW: The MadCaw leaks this week are consistent with a Goodfellas message to Greene: “Never rat on your friends and keep your mouth shut.”
Being stupid, she’s going to have trouble with that second part because even though she’d never consciously stray from the correct talking points, she literally cannot keep her mouth shut.
Which in a just world would lead to a subsequent Scorsese movie (Casino), in which mob boss Remo, after being assured by other bosses that one character under federal pressure will keep his mouth shut, says, “Why take a chance?”
I know many here tire of the gangster movie quotes, but they’re a pretty fair analogy to the way the current GOP operates.
schrodingers_cat
@Old School: Yes I know the Red Squad is never wrong they can only be wronged.
Quiltingfool
@Elizabelle: My advice to Bill Clinton: “Dude, if you want to avoid trouble, you need to keep your pants zipped.” Also known as, “Don’t shit where you eat.” I’m sure he heard that from advisors, but obviously he didn’t listen.
All the time spent on going after Clinton for his poor judgment could have been used for important things. I considered his philandering a character flaw and I knew that it would cause huge problems (for Democrats) in the political arena. And it has. It masked the good things that came from his presidency.
I can’t speak for Hillary, she stuck with him, and that is her choice. The sad thing is his behavior created baggage for her.
Steve in the ATL
@WaterGirl: yawns, rolls over, and goes to sleep.
What else would a cat do?
wetzel
That’s it. The disdain of the lawful person for the unlawful and fascistic.
His loathing and disgust for their sedition at the end of the speech, the shame of shunning by the righteous prosecutor in a legal tribunal. The Putin-Trump axis has put the United States on the precipice of a new fascism.
Representative Raskin did a good job. Through the Oath Keepers and Roger Stone a plot to assassinate Nancy Pelosi, third in the line of succession, attaches to Donald Trump himself. A true new Hitler, he was hoping for the Night of the Long Knives.
I think Representative Raskin understands that before we can rejoin debate, it is nos accusens. Our Democratic representatives, along with Representatives Cheney and Kinzinger, can sit on tribunal in full righteous indignation, especially if through Guiliani we connect back to Russiagate, reveal the full Putinist conspiracy which has subverted the Grand Ole Party.
I believe the Nov. 6 commission will show the complete tree of the crime, how the conspiracy insinuated itself through the microsociologies of power to implicate the national party of the GOP itself, after it got too close to Putin’s internationale, his mafia, by giving Manafort, Guiliani and Trump the reins, who all are separately, obvious counter-intelligence threats vis-a-vis Russia, as if that were debatable at this point.
I believe the full scope of the plot at FSB would have included a fake war now with Russia over Ukraine, which would have allowed Putin to control the State of Emergency in the United States. I believe it’s Putin’s interest in our 2020 election that was the actual animus driving Donald Trump and other’s to go so far as seditious conspiracy against the Constitution to try to subvert the election.
different-church-lady
Lewinsky was a willing participant, but Clinton should have known better. Not rocket science here.
zhena gogolia
@different-church-lady: And he should never have been impeached for it.
leeleeFL
@Alison Rose ???: And we knew who he was before we put him into the Oval Office. If I had been Hillary, I would have tole the Secret Service to keep any female under 60 out of his line of sight. I t would have been a mitzvah!
different-church-lady
@Elizabelle:
I think he should have said, “I did not have sex with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky. I wanted to. I tried to! But she would not have me.” And the whole country would have gone, “Yup, makes sense.”
leeleeFL
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I thought he sounded sad af. It’s not easy to bury people you know and love. It gets harder as we get older, because the numbers are generally much larger.
TaMara
@hueyplong: This. You’ve explained it better than I did in the OP. She’s just going to melt down because she cannot help herself, she cannot shut up. LOL
leeleeFL
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: Use Cement. Fuck ’em!
RaflW
@schrodingers_cat: I have very mixed feels about ‘the squad’ generally, but at least in AOC’s instance here, she says it is because it sets a dangerous precedent that the US President can seize and liquidate assets without due process.
I think given the twin experiences of 1.) a reckless, unbounded and totally corrupt President having just occupied the WH for four years and 2.) law enforcement in the US already abusing the absolute fuck out of civil asset forfeiture, that she makes a decent argument.
Her spox also noted that she voted for heavy sanctions on the oligarchs. She’s not excusing them, she’s saying the opportunity for our next or subsequent President to just run wild with something modeled on this law is too great.
If I were in Congress (hah!) this would actually be a hard vote for me. I want to do all that I can for Ukraine. And against Putin. But she is correct that secret-process asset forfeiture is already a vicious, largely unappealable tool that damages a lot of poor and marginalized Americans. Aiming at bloated, thieving RU autocrat-fluffers looks great. But is it.
Quiltingfool
Cats and a pianist. https://twitter.com/sarperduman/status/1519996738446270464?s=20&t=_T2mMQG0Ua8rOO-vUOpXTA
Bill Arnold
@trollhattan:
Re Tan Suit, here’s a large collection:
The Daily Show Presents The Top Ten Obama ‘Scandals’ (Frances Langum, 1/03/20)
Those who falsely asserts that Fox News is not a propaganda outlet should be confronted with that segment. Very well done.
germy
@Quiltingfool:
Remember Nora?
rikyrah
Sheldon Whitehouse (@SenWhitehouse) tweeted at 3:02 PM on Thu, Apr 28, 2022:
Why the sudden barrage of abortion bans? Because this Supreme Court has signaled its willingness to torpedo nearly 50 years of precedent in Roe v. Wade. The Court is on the cusp of fulfilling a major demand of the right-wing donor class, and lawmakers are pouncing.
(https://twitter.com/SenWhitehouse/status/1519768918151340038?t=IS91z9XNngx7Qa11opDn3g&s=03)
Old School
@schrodingers_cat:
Never said they couldn’t be wrong. However, I do find the idea that they are all being paid by Putin (or whomever) to be nonsense.
Chris Johnson
@schrodingers_cat: The reason is because the actual Putin leftist pawns are like Chapo Trap House, Caleb Maupin etc. They are the constituency in which the Squad swims, but (and there may come a time when I learn otherwise about maybe one of the Squad but it wouldn’t be a leader like AOC) the Squad are not the Putin leftist pawns.
I was AMONG those people. I can tell the difference. You’re so far away from them on the other extreme that they’re all Putin’s spies, to you. I was among them and it still pisses me off that Putin was doing his thing that he always did do, infitrating all the extremes without concern for what wing they were on, and goading them to fight each other.
zhena gogolia
We’re having a webinar with people in Dnipro and with Sen. Blumenthal right now. It’s inspiring.
StringOnAStick
News bits I haven’t seen mentioned here, all gleaned from Twitter:
In Germany: Deutche Bank raided by authorities looking for money laundering evidence this morning.
Some salacious photos and video have emerged of Madison Cawthorne groping his live-in congressional assistant (male) and appear to have been released by R’s, so he’s toast. Also information about how this assistant is being paid with his office funds, so it looks illegal too Do they have any other R candidate for that district waiting in the wings?
RaflW
@rikyrah: They sure do miss it. The Beltway’s “best” just sat around, and like mana from heaven, stories fell in their laps all day.
That the stories pointed to the utter ruination of our country was immaterial. It was such easy fun!
TaMara
@Quiltingfool: Oh, my, that’s just…well, about right. LOL Substitute a keyboard and it’s me trying to write or work.
Gin & Tonic
@schrodingers_cat: They are concerned about the 4th amendment rights of russian gangsters.
trollhattan
Things I did not know, part the infinity: Belarus President Lukashenko has been in office 28 years as still-the-first president of Belarus. Nice job security.
Anyway, he says the Baltic nations are jealous and therefore, do not allow their citizens to travel to Belarus in case they find out how well they live. In particular, they do not have enough salt. Feel like I just time-warped to the eighteenth century. What else, not enough draught horses? Medical leeches?
Ken
@rikyrah: I must disagree with Sen. Whitehouse on one point:
Overturning Roe is not a major demand of the donor class. They don’t care, because they’ll still be able to go to California or New York or Ireland for abortions. It is, however, what they’ve been using to pump up the base’s enthusiasm for fifty years.
zhena gogolia
@trollhattan: Haha, yeah, everyone in Vilnius just can’t wait to move to Minsk.
Joe from Lowell
People who come onto threads critical of Republicans and try to deflect to attacks on progressives are doing it to try to promote dissention among Democrats. It’s a tactic common to both Trumpies and Russian trolls.
rikyrah
Yes….makes one wonder![]()
![]()
dave karpf (@davekarpf) tweeted at 1:24 PM on Thu, Apr 28, 2022:
Look, I’m no business genius.
But if MY fortune was tied up in running a company that sells luxury electric cars to left-leaning consumers, then I probably wouldn’t go full Breitbart just when bigger car manufacturers have started releasing their own lines of electric vehicles.
(https://twitter.com/davekarpf/status/1519744293094711299?t=uIPNfbyNHa8h9qzPd6d6Nw&s=03)
TaMara
Best book review ever:
JPL
@Ken: Now they are moving on to the gays. The court was put in place to dismantle the EPA Culture issues are just icing on the cake. imo
Another Scott
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I didn’t hear or see it, but the oak trees are going nuts in DC and the pollen is really thick. I think Bill has pollen allergies.
But he’s also getting up in years, too.
Cheers,
Scott.
rikyrah
See none.
D (@dilemmv) tweeted at 7:20 AM on Fri, Apr 29, 2022:
Madison Cawthorn has not seen peace ever since he accused GOP members of engaging in orgies.
(https://twitter.com/dilemmv/status/1520015274161881090?t=gZXFk55EEzkaYJqXf12L2g&s=03)
zhena gogolia
@rikyrah: Yeah, it’s remarkable.
Joe from Lowell
Ask yourself who responds to concerns about law enforcement overreach by accusing those raising them of sympathizing with criminals.
Ask yourself who you’ve seen using that language over the past two years.
When someone shows you who they are, believe them.
danielx
@Ken:
AND he wore a tan suit! Utter desecration of the office!
zhena gogolia
@Gin & Tonic: Do you know this organization?
taps.org.ua
Paul in KY
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: I’d go into the works dept and have a shitfit. I’m probably not really an ‘electable’ type of person, though…
germy
@TaMara:
I’d never heard of Winslow until I saw him quoted here by a frontpager. I was impressed. A few days later I quoted a few of his tweets and one of our commenters replied “who is he and why should I care what he thinks?”
It’s always a tough crowd here.
Omnes Omnibus
@RaflW: Civil asset forfeiture has been a nightmare for a while. I really do not blame people for having doubts about expanding those powers.
Paul in KY
@Elizabelle: I love Bill, but since he did make the mistake of lying under oath about the affair, etc., I feel he should have resigned and let Al run as an incumbent. Might have made the difference in 2000.
Amir Khalid
Have any non-Britons here seen this? A Tory MP was accused of watching porn in the House of Commons.
Ruckus ??
@WaterGirl:
Hope things get better.
I hated dentists with a steel melting passion when I was young because my mother found the most sadistic bastard dentist I’ve ever had the displeasure of being attacked by. The first dentist that actually didn’t make me want to do things with big sharp knives to various parts of their bodies was a dental tech in boot camp. He saw a cavity on x-ray and did the work with zero pain. I have since found quite a few dentists who didn’t get trained at the Sadistic School of Dentistry. (And another one who was head of his class there – he’s still sheered in my brain and I’m sure has a hope that I never run into him ever again – over 50 yrs later as I’d be extremely likely to forget my non violent and peaceful ways.) IOW I have a mixed regard for dentists and understand never wanting to see one ever again, and I’ve also had some who actually seemed to like NOT causing pain and terror to their patients. My teeth and I are grateful for finding and knowing the second group, the NON sadistic bastards. They are out there. Good luck.
Martin
Ms Martin has serious crushes on both Zelenskyy and Raskin. I’ve got one for Mallory McMorrow.
WaterGirl
@Steve in the ATL: You are good at this! :-)
Spanky
@StringOnAStick:
Always! After all, they’re not looking for talent, they’re looking for obedience.
cain
@germy: I would have responded with:
“He is the NIGHT! He is VENGEANCE! He is WINSLOW!”
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
OT – I’m dying here – I had to go to the dermatologist this week (irresponsible behavior in the sun throughout my time on this spinning rock) and had a bunch of shit frozen off of my scalp, face and forehead, and I itch like a raccoon without a flea collar.
I know scratching is not supposed to be happening.
Geminid
@Amir Khalid: I saw a parody tweet about this. There was a picture of a comely young lady stretched out in a seductive pose. She was gazing at her phone, and the caption was, “Porn Star Accused of Watching Parliament!”
germy
@cain:
I thought that was The Batman
Another Scott
@trollhattan: Galeev says that Lukashenko was in line to be Yeltsin’s successor, but lost out. He apparently still has visions of being grand poo-bah in some Greater Russia/Belarus (they signed some union treaty in 1997). He’s apparently not the bumbling idiot he seems.
Thread:
I still don’t know how much to trust Galeev’s grand narratives, but they’re interesting and always something to think about.
Cheers,
Scott.
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us
@PAM Dirac: Raskin is still my rep and was my State Assembly rep before being elected to the House. He was and still is very responsive to constituents.
Ken
@Amir Khalid: As always, I am reminded of the Blackadder episode “Dish and Dishonesty”. Blackadder is trying to get his servant Baldrick elected to Parliament, and is filling out the application.
BLACKADDER: Now then; criminal record…
BALDRICK: Absolutely not.
BLACKADDER: Oh, come on, Baldrick, you’re going to be an MP, for God’s sake! I’ll just put `fraud and sexual deviancy’.
Cheryl from Maryland
@PAM Dirac: I believe my representation is the reverse of yours — was in the 6th and will be moved to the 8th. Trone has been a good congressman — his newsletters on COVID containing concrete examples of how his office could assist have been exemplary. He’s also more to the left than the previous holder of the seat, John Delany. I’m torn about the change — while I’m very, very happy to be able to vote for Raskin, I do want Trone to have as many D votes as possible.
schrodingers_cat
@Old School: IDK whether they are being paid or they are undermining Ds as a labor of love or they are useful idiots. Their actions speak louder than words.
Amir Khalid
@Geminid:
That’s a good one.
sab
@Omnes Omnibus: Civil forfeiture was a nightmare when I was a baby lawyer in 1980. It hasn’t gotten better. Back then they were confiscating criminal defense attorneys’ cars. Just because. And these were highly regarded young lawyers with respectable clerkships on their resumes. That’s why I switched to accounting, IRS has rules and procedures and due process.
Gravenstone
Let’s be real about the source of the comment here.
Betty Cracker
@Joe from Lowell: If you’re suggesting that Schrodinger’s Cat is a Trumper or Russian troll, you are barking up the wrong tree. IMO, she’s a bit of a crank and an aggressive shit-stirrer on the topic of The Squad, Rep. Porter, Sen. Warren and progressives in general, but a sincere crank. :)
trollhattan
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: Mittens?
sdhays
@StringOnAStick: It turns out the orgies and cocaine story was told from the perspective of Chuck Grassley when MadCaw asked HIM to join an orgy and do cocaine.
//
Ishiyama
@schrodingers_cat: Back when I come from we referred to participants in our conspiratorial meetings as Trotskyite Wreckers as a shorthand way to label unsupported and divisive claims about other members. I won’t say it here, but think about the burdens that sort of conduct places on the whole process of building a United Front.
Gravenstone
@Omnes Omnibus: Shhh, there’s a narrative to push. Don’t undermine it with facts.
Ruckus ??
@leeleeFL:
…because the numbers are
generallymuch larger.FIXTIT for you. Believe me they are.
I’m only 3 yrs younger than Bill Clinton (75 yrs old) and siblings and people I know are gone. Yes I know people 20 yrs older than Bill but still, I know of a lot of people that didn’t make it all that close to my current age, let alone his. I’d need 2 more hands to count on fingers, all of those I know.
trollhattan
@Another Scott: He also links to this video clip showing a TV host shout down a military officer who wants a moment of silence for the boys being killed in combat. The host only wants talk about all the nazis they’re killing. ?
And it’s on the military’s channel.
Roger Moore
@a thousand flouncing lurkers was fidelio:
This is a really good point. A key point is that a lot of the rural and small town Republican leadership is used to being the big fish in small ponds. Even if they could be even more prosperous by moving to the big city, they like the social standing more. I think that core idea- that social standing is more valuable than material well being- is really important to understanding the conservative worldview. They’d be happy to return to ’50s living standards if they could regain their ’50s social standing.
Geminid
I am sometimes tempted to join the DSA just so I could hear someone call me “Comrade.” They do this. Then , when they found out my politics I could get accused of “Entryism.”
tam1MI
Absolutely true. The Squad’s actions have been to never vote against a Democratic bill unless it is absolutely assured of passage. They have never been the deciding votes to kill important Dem priorities.
Unlike some moderates we could mention.
Actions speak louder than words.
Subsole
@rikyrah: I have said it before, I will say it again.
They miss Dolt45 because he is them and they are him. They are the exact same kind of snippy, pissy, arrogantly-fragile little junior high meangirl.
They sit there, living lives of insulated privilege, and cannot fathom why the people getting shot, disenfranchised and endlessly denigrated by their creepy little skeeve-ass drinking buddies aren’t laughing along with the joke.
I may be wrong, but the more I listen to the beltway, the more I see their fetishization of the “white I-own-a-dealership-so-let’s-call-it-working class”, the more diner safaris they print, the more bothsidesing they do…the more I hear liveried house servants lecturing the fieldhands about their lack of gratitide.
When we rejected Trump, we rejected them. And they felt that. And they are by God gonna punish us for it.
Omnes Omnibus
@Gin & Tonic: Ernesto Miranda was a pretty shitty human being.
WaterGirl
@Joe from Lowell:
You know, that would make an excellent short TikTok video for our social media initiative to promote.
Interested in making that? All you need is a smart phone and some attitude!
WaterGirl
@Ruckus ??: I read the first line, but not reading the rest, for obvious reasons if you read my first comment.
WaterGirl
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: Sit on your hands, if necessary.
Ruckus ??
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg:
It’s not burnt off it’s frozen off. Ask me how I know…
Fun isn’t it?
And yes, I highly recommend not scratching – very highly.
I’ve had so much frozen off that 2 things have happened. First, it no longer bothers me. Second, I’m extremely glad I never went out without pants.
WaterGirl
@Gravenstone: hahaha
Kay
Just wild, wild stuff coming out on the level of cooperation between Fox News and the Trump Administration:
Is Sean Hannity, right now, today “directing the legal strategies against Biden”?
Subsole
@WaterGirl: I bet you’d like to know, hooman.
Another Scott
@Subsole: It’s simpler than that – their rating tanked after TFG was defeated.
Follow the money.
Cheers,
Scott.
Soprano2
@different-church-lady: This is my view as well. I hate it when people try to make Lewinsky the helpless victim when I know that she pursued him! Even if she was much younger, she was an adult. They tried to make it sound like she was a minor so they could call Bill Clinton a pedo. Don’t do their job for them, people.
schrodingers_cat
@Betty Cracker: Crank? Because I don’t agree with the very white-liberal POV of this blog.
Soprano2
@leeleeFL: My mother told me once that when my grandparents were in their 70’s, they averaged a funeral every other week. She said she was shocked when my grandmother told her this, but it makes sense. There weren’t many people at my grandmother’s funeral because she was 88 when she died; most of her friends were already gone.
Kay
Well, the next insurrection we’ll know without a doubt that Fox News is behind the scenes, directing it.
They believed they were going to succeed at this. Dead serious. They were planning to overturn an election.
schrodingers_cat
Yeah only 4 brave Squad members care about the rights of the criminals and none of the other Ds in Congress do.
columbusqueen
@Alison Rose ???: Like JoyceH, I call bullshit on letting Monica L. be characterized as a victim. She has never, to the best of my knowledge, accepted any real responsiblity for helping create the sorry mess she was mired in. She made the play for Bill & was accepted. She needs to acknowledge her own ambition & lust for a change of pace.
Gravenstone
@Soprano2: When my grandmother passed at 92, there was a single member of her cohort who came to the service. That’s gotta suck to realize you’re literally the last of your group left.
PAM Dirac
@Cheryl from Maryland:
He’s got mine.
Omnes Omnibus
@schrodingers_cat: Of course, no one said that.
Subsole
@RaflW: Worse.
They held it for their books. They are, generally speaking, appallingly bad journalists. Shallow. Sloppy work. No sober analysis. No insight. No examination of nuance. Just endless cheap-shot gotcha questions that produce neither heat nor light amid an eternal ouroboros of prattling about optics.
No brain, no eyes, no ears, no spine, no heart. Just a gulping, ever-starved mouth too busy swallowing it’s own ass to add anything useful to the discussion.
They suck as reporters, because they lack the one thing a journalist needs most. Curiosity.
These people don’t have it. No interest in the nation, or the world, or context, or history. For damn sure no care for anything so petty and gauche as people.
Just fame. Being Important. That’s all they care about. It’s why they get so easily hoodwinked and siloed and led about by their luxuriously-braided nosehairs. It’s what turned their profession into a lesser venturi of the GOP puke funnel.
They abandoned curiosity for access.
Ruckus ??
@Roger Moore:
Town I grew up in, here in SoCal was republican. And I knew this because my parents were both democrats. And I saw it in town officials and employees. And over time it changed, and did so in many parts of CA. Those 50s living standards and social standing were power. And they don’t hold water exactly because they were bullshit then and still are. What gets me is that it almost always revolved around a study flow of money/income. Didn’t have to be an overwhelming flow, just a study, useful flow, which was good for them and fuck everyone else. Can’t have those people coming in and having that same flow, having everyone benefit. Thankfully SoCal seems to have, for the most part, said fuck that.
sab
@columbusqueen: She pulled the same shit in college with a professor. She wasn’t a naive newbie at this behavior.
Omnes Omnibus
@columbusqueen: FWIW, I don’t think she ever portrayed herself as a victim of Clinton. As another victim of Ken Starr and band of raging assholes, sure. But that is absolutely true.
germy
@sab:
She wrote an essay in the March 2018 issue of Vanity Fair in which she did not directly explain why she used the #MeToo hashtag in October. She did write that looking back at her relationship with Bill Clinton, although it was consensual, because he was 27 years older than her and in a position with a lot more power than she had, in her opinion the relationship constituted an “abuse of power” on Clinton’s part.
sab
@ian: Suggestion: Don’t write a book about your mistakes twenty-five years after the fact when the other person involved is still married and his wife is running for national office.
Subsole
@Roger Moore: My old man used to describe the type as five pound bass in a six pound aquarium. Big ass fish – until you put them in the ocean. Then they’re just bait.
As far as social standing, that rings true. I told some friends right after the 2016 election that we all got screwed over by people throwing a tantrum because they weren’t 19 anymore, and never would be again. I have seen nothing so far that disproves that hypothesis.
zhena gogolia
@sab: Haha, also not a fan of Lewinsky but I’ve sat back and enjoyed the comments today.
sab
@germy: Bullshit. This was her second go round with a different married man. Having been a young woman myself I understand that there can be a power differential, but this wasn’t a job and her livelihood. It was an internship when she was old enough to be beyond internships and would have been looking for a real job if her parents weren’t so rich. He was important and older. She was very pretty and available. I don’t see so much power differential other than she wanted him more than he wanted her.
James E Powell
@Omnes Omnibus:
Clinton failed to heighten the contradictions, thus delaying the birth of the socialist paradise by a generation, maybe more.
James E Powell
@zhena gogolia:
A very large percent of Americans agreed.
But nearly 100% of the press/media wanted it.
Omnes Omnibus
@James E Powell: Like I said….
CCL
@WaterGirl: Cat: less of that
then (h/t to Steve in the ATL)
“yawns, rolls over and goes to sleep.”
germy
@sab:
Yes and I found her quote astonishing.
Nelle
@Gravenstone: @Gravenstone: My FIL died at 98. Last member of his Navy squadron that fought in the Pacific in WWII. Last member of his MIT class. A survivor of the Bataan Death March played the bugle at his memorial service. A real end of an era.
zhena gogolia
@germy: She tried to (did) capitalize on #Metoo, when her situation had nothing to do with it.
Subsole
@Kay:
Man, remember when some uppity social organizer from Illinois made some less-than-charitable (but factually correct) observations about that network, and every beltway network bubblebrain from Jake Tapper to Chuck Todd to Soledad O’Brien put on the cape for Lachlan and Rupert’s methed-out little monkey parade? I sure do.
No idea why that springs to mind at this particular moment. But spring it do.
sab
@zhena gogolia: Agreed. He was impeached for questions they should not have been asking him . These questions had nothing whatever to do with his job. High crimes and misdemeanors? Really? Yet we didn’t impeach Trump?
And that they were questions that any decent man who loved his wife and his daughter would have lied about.
zhena gogolia
@sab: I agree. (Except we did impeach Trump twice — we just didn’t convict him.)
Betty Cracker
@schrodingers_cat: Hey, I was defending your honor against an accusation that you’re a Trump supporter or Russian troll! BTW, most of the dreaded white liberals on this blog seem to share your opinion on this topic rather than mine, which is fine. The crank part is the inability to give it a goddamned rest. That’s fine too — crank away. Most of us are cranks about one topic or another.
2liberal
I just had something similar (but different) yesterday. I had some scaly skin on my (bald) head. This is considered to be pre-cancerous. The treatment was to slather on some goop, cover that area with Saran Wrap, let me marinate for two hours, then burn if off with a intense blue light (took about 15 minutes of level 2 pain). It was very effective , my head is now as smooth as the proverbial baby’s botton.
sab
@zhena gogolia: Agree with you on the impeachment thing.
...now I try to be amused
@Elizabelle:
Yep; Fox News started in 1996. You can add Newt Gingrich to the list.
I think Republicans lost their shit when Clinton was elected because they had convinced themselves that Saint Ronald gave them a permanent majority. Clinton’s election proved it wasn’t. They didn’t take it well.
Ken
@2liberal: You sure that’s not your skull?
...now I try to be amused
@Roger Moore:
That brings to mind the Chicago song “I Don’t Want Your Money”:
Subsole
@Another Scott: I see the logic, and yeah, Occam’s razor applies.
But they could make just as much money shredding Trump. They boosted him instead. He was the absolute worst president we’ve ever had, and they graded him on a curve so gentle they didn’t bother taking off the bubble-wrap.
Their slant only ever runs one direction.
It’s like Kay says, all these articles about liberal cancel cuture, versus how many articles about book-banning GOPers?
Every election, they ask how Dems can shift to the right to avoid agitating conservatives. When was the last time they asked how cons could shift to the center, nevermind left? When was the last time they even acted like cons had an obligation to do so?
If it was money, they could make plenty blowing the lid off GOP sex pests. Or asking how many adoptions Betsy DeVos’ family made money off of back when all those immigrant kids ‘got lost’ in the system. Plenty of eyeballs there. Instead it gets mentioned once, then dropped.
Instead, the NYT runs soft focus puff pieces on Chris Rufo, the GOP op who ginned up CRT.
Instead, they platform Big Lie advocates without pushback and bury probably the single biggest scoop in our nation’s history since Benedict Arnold.
The party of Open-Carry Free-Market Aryans-Only Jesus, the folks who never miss a chance to sneer at everyone else for their inferior devotion to Our Freedom, tried to violently and cravenly throw 70% of the nation’s votes in the trash and install itself as a Volkischkrieg dictatorship, in perpetuum.
And the Beltway can’t package that in a format that moves units?
Are you kidding me?
No. This is emotional on their part. Money might be a factor, but it ain’t the only one. I’m not even sure it’s a major one, anymore.
sab
@schrodingers_cat:Disturbing thought here.( I am white of British, Irish and Swiss ancestry.) My grand-daughter (actually my step-daughter’s kid, but I have no children and step-daughter has no mom but me) age eight got in an argument with her oldest half-sister. ” I’m not black. I’m brown.” Thereby distinguishing herself from her oldest favorite sister and her dad, but not from her other sisters.
I am all for teaching CRT ( My ancestors owned slaves. It got us ahead. I have known it for my whole life and always been ashamed or at least disturbed about it. Kind of like Arnold Schwarzenegers dad was a Nazi but worse, because my guys did it for many generations.)
Cheryl from Maryland
@PAM Dirac: Excellent and thank you !
Betsy
@JPL: classic sociopath. Normal people can hardly comprehend their energy, shamelessness, and malicious drive.
sab
@schrodingers_cat: You are a crank because you are ferocious on the topics you care about. This isn’t, or shouldn’t be seen as an insult,
Ladyracterinok
@Alison Rose ???:
Always wondered how he was able to face Janet Reno and Madeline Albright after all that became public
those women were some strong fierce women!!!!
Hob
@Joe from Lowell: Jumping directly to “these commenters are our enemies because they used a kind of argument that right-wingers also use” is not helpful, especially when 1. you’re talking about a long-time commenter like SC and 2. you’re talking about a kind of argument that lots and lots of people use. That is– the general attitude of “there’s a thing that will punish bad guys, someone is against it, therefore they must be in favor of the bad guys”, while it is a very bad argument that RW law’n’order types do lean heavily on, is also a very natural habit of thinking for people to fall into. If you’ve never heard it expressed honestly by well-meaning progressives, well then you haven’t; I have. It’s just the targets that are different.
Jim Appleton
@sab:
Duly noted.
Gravenstone
Republicanism is a two year old’s temper tantrum, now ongoing for a quarter century. They hated Clinton beating Bush and giving lie to the Republican Reich. They hated Obama for 1) existing and 2) winning – twice. They hate Biden for derailing the Trump cult. They’re purely reactive, vindictive, spiteful, self-entitled fucks.
And they may be the end of us all if we can’t put a serious dent in them, and soon.
wetzel
@Nelle: It’s the end of an era. World War II was a great victory over fascism, the Italian-Japanese-German Axis. Now we have the Russian-Trumpist-Chinese axis.. The fascists are still around, and they are more wily this time around. They are calling from inside the house!!!
I wish people had the straightforward attitude about it that they took on in the 1940’s, the clear sense of the struggle for freedom.
Now it is clouded with propaganda where Facebook, Reddit and Twitter are conditioning half the country to welcome Big Brother when he gets here. Big Brother has already gotten here in the form of Trump’s anointing, like in the Book of Revelations. It was foretold that Trump and Putin would arrive to save them from the child trafficking pedophile LGBTQ vermin. They are God’s instruments to purify the world, them AND their enablers in the DemocRAT Party. The Grand Ole Party itself is an instrument of the Lord. We are one catastrophic attack on the continental United States away from being a terror state. Russian active measures alongside their GOP co-conspirators have installed turn-key totalitarian fascism as a failure pathway for America.
We are faced with a harder war than your father-in-law had to fight. I am sorry he isn’t around anymore. My Dad is 88. I’m scared as hell I blew a micro-droplet into his eye day-before-yesterday. My son just tested antigen positive.
I think we are bigger cry-babies. If fascism isn’t defeated this year by Biden and the Jan 6 commission and the the DOJ 2023-2024, the Putinist conspiracy will put a stake in America. As soon as the GOP wins, we will have a fake war with Russia and become fascist.
I’ll go live somewhere by the water, play music by day and fight in the Resistance by night!! If they line us up against the wall, we can pray to Jesus and go to Heaven!
schrodingers_cat
@sab: These color categories are inadequate to really describe the differences among us. I am using them for the want of something better.
schrodingers_cat
I am tired and cranky, I have had a long week. Thank you to those who defended me. I am going to sign off and take a nap. Hope everyone has a great weekend.
Steeplejack
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg:
Thanks for your dispatches from the red lands. Very useful to get actual on-the-ground information. I hope you win your election.
wetzel
What I mean by failure pathway, is something I don’t think people understand, or haven’t fully comprehended. If the Jan 6 coup plot had succeeded, we would have been without a Constitution.
It’s not like, then we would just all decide to go along just in case we could start having elections again. The constitution would have been superseded, and so it would be a revolutionary moment, Nancy Pelosi would have been assassinated, likely also Vice President Pence.
The only path to re-constituting the state would be fascistic. We would not have a Constitutional Convention. The only way civil order would have returned would be through atrocious, violent spectacle, and we would then be living in an authoritarian state. If the United States became genocidal and began purging itself, we would be a totalitarian terror state. That is downhill, like a stone rolls downhill, from where we are at now, thanks to Russian active measures on us for the past ten years.
sab
@schrodingers_cat: Agreed. They make no sense when I see my six grandchildren.
Makes some sense with my older sister’s kids. Half Chinese but our side of the family thinks of them as white, and that is certainly not how they see themselves.
Race is in many ways a social construct. But it still matters.
Miss Bee
@apocalipstick: CRT-loving, gazpacho-guzzling . . .
Steeplejack
@WaterGirl:
At least fix the punctuation.
schrodingers_cat
@sab: In my family on my mother’s side my great grand father was darker than most black people in the United States and my grandmother had green eyes and fair skin. They were both 100% Indian, of the same caste even. And their 11 children represent every shade known to humanity.
Race has little biological basis.
On the topic at hand the danger to democracy doesn’t just come from the far right, it comes from left wing populists as well. At present the RW populists are more of a danger but that could change and Ds would be wise not to let populism make a home in our party.
If that opinion makes me a crank so be it.
Kay
@wetzel:
They would have invented a pretext to throw it to the House or the Supreme Court and Trump would have been installed.
That’s what they’re discussing in the texts that have been released on how they have to discredit state results to the extent that they have a viable path to some other forum for deciding elections. How to get there. That’s the goal.
Kay
@wetzel:
I think taking it out in the direction you’re taking it makes it difficult for people to comprehend what is a very real threat. There won’t be tanks and armies. These people are soft, coddled middle aged or elderly wealthy people who have never engaged in a real fight in their entire lives. They used lawyers. They’ll use lawyers next time.
They will skim a thin veneer of “law” – even brand new “law”!- over it and the one and only question is there are enough corrupt state officials and state legislatures and governors and judges in the right states to apply it and install whichever loser they’re trying to save.
There weren’t enough last time. That means nothing to predict next time.
sab
@schrodingers_cat: Crank away. I think it is helpful and very patriotic. Crankiness is an American political virtue. MSM forgets it, but nobody was crankier than John Adams, except perhaps Thomas Jefferson.
sab
@schrodingers_cat: My grand
sab
@sab: Long post missed the cut off.
sab
@schrodingers_cat: Agree that race is cultural not color coded.
Gvg
@columbusqueen: actually I have a caveat for this. She was an adult and did actively pursue him. But I saw interviews with her aunt and her mother back then, that showed they actively encouraged her, thought she could get him to divorce Hillary and marry her. That was her upbringing. My upbringing taught me that men who cheat with you, will cheat on you. So I do think she had a poor example. It doesn’t excuse her, but I think it is only fair to mention that. It has also been too many years for me to recall the details but I sort of remember that I thought her parents divorce showed her mother in a poor light. Bill was only equally responsible.
2liberal
@Ken: lol, yes carefully examined
Bill Arnold
@waspuppet:
The timing is entirely about maximizing effect on the 2022 midterm elections. This was obvious in 2021. (This has not been stated publicly, AFAIK.)
So, no.
Bill Arnold
@wetzel:
Probably not the FSB (“an agency responsible for counter-intelligence and other aspects of state security as well as intelligence-gathering in some countries, primarily those of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS);” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_agencies_of_Russia
(The interference in the US is 2016 was either GRU or SVR or both, AFAIK. With some affiliated(paid?) actors, mostly controlled by Russia, but not all.)
Bill Arnold
@Joe from Lowell:
Out of curiously, have any of those concerned congresspeople drafted legislation to ban civil asset forfeiture? The latest one I found was Justin Amash’s (Libertarian/Republican):
https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/8997/
wetzel
You are not correct about FSB. We don’t have a similar organization. You are projecting a Western government functional approach. Just like a body has a right and a left, there is an analytical mind, which is FSB in Russia. It’s the cognitive, forecasting function, where planning originates to be executed elsewhere. You can say ‘FSB intends’ to mean ‘Putin intends’. It’s a bureaucratized analytical process to give the state it’s efficacy in Bandura’s sense of being able to motivate to goals by modeling the steps to achieve them.
@Bill Arnold:
Bill Arnold
@wetzel:
We would have had a low-intensity civil war, at least. Initially probably non-violent, but fairly quickly, with assassinations of GOP politicians and judges and other political figures, then death squads, then maybe (probably) uglier. People who say civilian guns (and other tools) can’t defeat the national guard/army/air force are not thinking clearly; a moderately trained(including self-trained) person with a good hunting rifle, let alone an easily-purchased moderately expensive sniper rifle, can kill a human at 800+ meters. Persistent monkey wrenching of various sorts can reliably wreck an economy/country. Not just general strikes (a well-tested tool though not in the US); there are other tools.
There are also hundreds of thousands of federal employees who would not play along (with some hard not play along types) with an attempted fascist takeover.
The GOP dodged their own bullets. And real bullets, literally, in the longer term.
Bill Arnold
@wetzel:
Links? (I’m quite comfortable with a link-heavy academic bibliography, if that works.)
wetzel
@Bill Arnold: Yes. That’s what I mean. After the coup, had it succeeded, the country would have begun a descent into disorder, a crisis of degree, which would not have been resolved until sacrificial, genocidal violence. This would have taken place in the context of a fake war with Russia over Ukraine, where Putin’s actions and Trump’s reciprocities would have given Vladimir Putin control over the State of Emergency in the United States while the Democrats were trying to have our rebellion about the election. Trying to have a war with Russia while there is rebellion at home would have put the military in an impossible position. It would put the Resistance in an impossible position. It can still happen if Trump wins in 2024.
wetzel
@Bill Arnold:Links? (I’m quite comfortable with bibiography)
Renee Girard Violence and the Sacred
Gaston Bachelard Psychoanalysis of Fire
If you really want to understand Putin’s philosophy, you have to understand Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit to understand how Marxism and Ivan Ilyin’s White Russian Christo-fascist phenomenology could be interchangeable ideologies within the Soviet terror state. I really don’t think you can understand how an organization like FSB separates out bourgeousie from those with historical consciousness enough to see the features it has in common with schizoid delusions of reference, as well as to understand FSB analytical method for social construction of reality.
Heidegger’s Being and Time will keep you from shipwrecking through all this, intellectually, I think, even if it didn’t keep him from shipwrecking himself on fascism.
I am sorry, but it was not an easy goddamn job to get to where I’m looking. My undergraduate was metal for the humanities a long time ago. Renee Girard was my advisor. I am his soldier child. Like the Minutemen were for Dylan.
Bill Arnold
@wetzel:
Ah. That one and a couple of others are in my to-reads queue. Suggestions for a Girard reading order? (I am allergic for personal reasons/experience to any philosophical works that attempt to handle time, but Being and Time (“Sein und Zeit”) seems tolerable from reviews.)
wetzel
Darn. My wife interrupted me while that timer was going down, and now forever I have to live with how idiotic I can be extemporaneously. I am bailing from this thread!!!
wetzel
@Bill Arnold: Renee Girard is more anthropology with deep philosophical resonances, like in Giambattista Vico or Levi Strauss.
The Bachelard is a short little delightful book. The book helped me to understand how to articulate the existentiality in symbolic consciousness of the poetic side of truth that isn’t scientific truth.
Heidegger’s Being and Time is a much harder book. It’s worth reading because its the foundation of continental philosophy, the whole twentieth century. Existentialistm, post-structuralism and deconstruction are all conversations about Heidegger’s Being and Time in a way. You can’t get through that in a week or two, or even a month or two. You’d want to read it with a glossary for his terminology. It takes some getting used to. It’s a genuinely profound book. Unbelievable truth value in the sense of revealing the structure of the experience of being a conscious human being. That’s what that book is.
Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit is even harder. I think it is genuinely the hardest book I ever read. It’s mind-blowing philosophy too, but it’s actually the work of a brilliant lunatic. It’s like a brilliant schizophrenia to situate individual consciousness within the unfolding worldview of historical progress contemplating itself where the abstract understanding of individuality of a nineteenth century German Romantic plays the dialectic of enlightenment of the totality of the social construction of reality.
Hegel’s philosophy bent the brains of both Marx and Ivan Ilyin. You have to understand it to understand how FSB thinks of historical change and the social construction of reality, I think. There are characteristic features of a mind driven mad by Hegel. That guy Dugin or Dugen who is Putin’s court philosopher has a syndrome that people get who mix Hegel and geography. He thinks of the suffering of Russia as the historical allegorical form of Christ’s suffering on the cross.
Hob
@wetzel: Some of your posts are interesting but I really wish you would take a deep breath the next time you feel the urge to say things like “something I don’t think people understand, or haven’t fully comprehended…”. You are constantly posting here about how you are the only one who sees things clearly. Even before your unbelievably offensive remarks about Gin & Tonic the other day(*), you were on this kick of insisting that if other people did not share your exact interpretation of Putin’s motives, or if they were more concerned about the active destruction of Ukraine on its own terms rather than as a tool of Russian domestic policy, then they were all missing the point and didn’t really get the dangers of fascism. And that’s the kind of thing that will rightly cause people to ignore or block you. We’ve had plenty of cranks here who don’t really want to discuss anything, they just want to write walls of text about things they claim no one knows. Please don’t be one of them.
(* And even though you did apologize, I’m still not sure you actually got how offensive your conduct on that thread was – completely apart from G&T’s specific circumstances. You were saying that everyone was being “deplatformed” and “slapped” because a commenter disagreed with you. You claimed that another commenter taking issue with your tone was a personal attack, and that the real issue was the severe emotional distress you suffered from that. That is crank behavior.)
Hob
And when I say “crank” I don’t mean it in the semi-affectionate way some others do, like someone who is just ornery. Many of us are that. The stuff I complained about above is something else.
wetzel
I’m out of here Hob.
I did not hear from Gin and Tonic that he was offended.
Who are you to tell me that I was ‘incredibly offensive’? When and how?
Gin and Tonic actually seemed to want to talk about more than just whether Putin would be happy with this or that much of Ukraine. I think my point of view is close to his.
I believe what I’m saying is valuable. There used to be crying fits on Kos when people would put a thorn into one another. I really think people do not understand that emotional pain involves the same neuroendocrine responses as physical pain. It has been difficult to post after all of these years reading to find this response from you. I really get enough of this feeling I have now from other sources. Goodbye Balloon Juice.
Geminid
@wetzel: I’ve drawn plenty of criticism from people here and still perservered. But I think that maybe I am more emotionally detached than you.
You should know, though, that before you left, your story about your son catching covid at his high school prom provided a valued piece of the superspreader puzzle to a researcher on Friday morning’s Covid post. I hope your son fully recovers.
Anyway, good luck, especially in your fishing endeavours!