The longer we keep the right-wingers out of power, the more hope we have. It's simple but it's true. https://t.co/YAnJePUkRt
— chatham harrison is tending his garden (@chathamharrison) October 31, 2022
NEW: Capitol Police cameras caught break-in at Pelosi home, but no one was watching. Now, an urgent conversation about lawmaker security amid increased threats. w/ @CarolLeonnig @MariannaReports @pkcapitol and team.
https://t.co/px5XXMPs0f— Aaron C. Davis (@byaaroncdavis) November 2, 2022
Inside the command center for the U.S. Capitol Police, a handful of officers were going through their routines early Friday morning, cycling through live feeds from the department’s 1,800 cameras used to monitor the nearby Capitol complex as well as some points beyond, when an officer stopped. On a screen showing a darkened street nearly 3,000 miles away, police lights were flashing outside the home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), officials say.
The officer in D.C. quickly pulled up additional camera angles from around Pelosi’s home and began to backtrack, watching recordings from the minutes before San Francisco police arrived. There, on camera, was a man with a hammer, breaking a glass panel and entering the speaker’s home, according to three people familiar with how Capitol Police learned of the break-in and who have been briefed on or viewed the video themselves…
The Capitol Police first installed cameras around Pelosi’s home more than eight years ago; she has an around-the-clock security detail; and for many months after the attacks of Jan. 6, 2021, a San Francisco police cruiser sat outside her home day and night. But hours after Pelosi left San Francisco last week and returned to D.C., much of the security left with her, and officers in Washington stopped continuously monitoring video feeds outside her house.
The targeted security and lack of full-time, active surveillance — even at the home of the member of Congress with the most death threats — reflect the competing demands facing local and federal law enforcement agencies, as well as the balances that lawmakers, their families and security officials have tried to strike in the nearly two years since the attack on the Capitol.
The Capitol Police have been working to implement more than 100 security improvements recommended by outside experts, including enhancements to officer training, equipment, protocols and staffing. But the department has simultaneously faced a tenfold increase in threats to members of Congress, who regularly return to their home districts and crisscross the country….
While other members of Congress may face episodic threats, Pelosi is the subject of the most violent death threats against any lawmaker, and their volume is both high and continuous, a law enforcement official said.
Police attribute the scale of the threats to her being demonized by Republicans, being a woman and being second in line to the presidency. She has a protective detail of two to three diplomatic security agents of the Capitol Police wherever she travels, including inside the Capitol, as well as a police officer who is a driver, the official said…
Hah stupid libs are spreading disinfo by saying he was trying to assassinate her. He was merely trying to kidnap her and bludgeon her. I am a serious journalist https://t.co/mFnTySyn23
— Centrism Fan Acct 🔹 (@Wilson__Valdez) November 2, 2022
“Sadistic glee in harming others is a sin (at least in my faith). But it is also a social cancer, a rot that can spread quickly and kill the spirit of democracy,” @RadioFreeTom https://t.co/YvyqHoZUdf
— Eugene Scott (@Eugene_Scott) November 1, 2022
Tom Nichols, conspicuously *not* a bleeding-heart sort:
… It might seem late in the game to point to any one event as a final or conclusive moment in the decline of the Republican Party. And I have no doubt that if the GOP returns to power this winter, its worst members will find new ways to appall decent people while gamboling about in jester’s bells for its base. (As my Atlantic colleague Adam Serwer has put it so well, “The cruelty is the point.”) But the reaction among Republican elected officials and their conservative-media life-support system to the beating of Paul Pelosi—by a man named David DePape, who was charged with attempting to kidnap Speaker Nancy Pelosi and admitted to planning to torture her—feels different.
… I have struggled for a few days to decide why, exactly, this moment seems like an inflection point. In terms of actual damage, January 6 was far worse than one violent crime in San Francisco. Republican leaders—and here I will leave aside Donald Trump, who is in a class of hideousness all by himself—have said far worse things over the past five years. But a parade of Republicans somehow think that an unhinged, hammer-wielding intruder putting an old man in the ICU is funny…
One might think that it would be easy for America, as one nation, to condemn an attempt to kidnap the woman second in line to the presidency that resulted in the beating of her husband with a hammer. As Ernest Hemingway would say: Pretty to think so. Instead, we have seen the dark heart of the Republican Party, with a reaction so callous, so flippantly sadistic, so hateful, that it all feels irredeemable.
The problem is that the GOP and their media footmen are flooding the zone with hate, and creating more potential DePapes every day. There is no equivalence here; it’s not liberals who are threatening election officials, stalking ballot boxes with guns, or barraging Congress’s phones and inboxes daily with threats. January 6 should have been our warning that these messages have real power, and yet that terrible day has already receded from our collective memory.
Sadistic glee in harming others is a sin (at least in my faith). But it is also a social cancer, a rot that can spread quickly and kill the spirit of democracy. If all attempts at reason and all offers of friendship fail, the rest of us should shun those whose dark hearts encourage them to revel in such poison. Unfortunately, millions of our fellow citizens seem poised to vote many such people into power. The darkness is spreading.
But Both Sides!
Here's video of Andrea Mitchell's "both sides" comment saying Republicans have been targeted by violent threats and then citing Cheney and Kinzinger, who have in fact been pilloried by *other Republicans*.https://t.co/93j3cxOuU2
— Mark Jacob (@MarkJacob16) November 1, 2022
Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), when asked why Republicans are having such a hard time condemning the violent assault on Paul Pelosi:
“Liz [Cheney] and I are not courageous. There’s no strength in this. We’re just surrounded by cowards.” pic.twitter.com/AgCsBTJ1rz
— The Recount (@therecount) November 1, 2022
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone😊😊😊
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
Baud
As secret gay lovers are wont to do.
Spanky
Nominate Kinzinger’s quote as a rotating tag, but probably too long.
Baud
Dude, they are all the worst members.
Baud
I would be ok with charging Byron York a lot of money for his blue check.
ETA: also too, we have a lefty media?
Baud
When will the liberal cable news channel fire Andrea Mitchell?
Baud
Regarding “both sides,” I’ve said before that Republican problems are fundamentally problems with human nature. So it’s not impossible to find analogous behavior in non-Republicans. The difference between the two sides is that Republican society is designed to amplify bad behaviors, while our side works to suppress them (sometimes to a fault). That difference is reflected in the different characters of the top leaders of the two parties.
Betty Cracker
Food blogger Julie Powell (of “Julie & Julia” fame) is dead at age 49 of cardiac arrest. According to her tweets, she’d recently had a nasty bout of covid, so people are wondering if that was a factor. On Twitter, Powell had mentioned discussing covid symptoms with a doctor.
Years ago I read that cardiac symptoms are different for women than men and that dangers are sometimes overlooked because the medical guidance on cardiac care is mostly based on studies involving men. I don’t know if that’s still the case, but fairly recently it was. Anyway, it’s a shame.
Burnspbesq
Hope the Capitol Police understand chain of custody on video evidence. That footage needs to be admissible at trial, if there is one.
Baud
@Burnspbesq: From what I read yesterday, it looks like the lawyer is going to pursue an insanity defense.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Baud: There are no liberal cable news channels….
Baud
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone:
Liberal = not hating Dems with a white hot uncontrollable rage.
Apparantly.
Benw
@Baud:
And cancel culture rears its ugly head again. Can’t you libs meet her face to face in the marketplace of ideas, as Jesus intended?
livewyre
@Baud: I’d take a side path from there and attribute it not to immutable nature, but to normative structures. Meaning, a level on which cruelty is something we’re expected to do.
Thankfully, there are other norms that seem to override it – at least for most of us, depending on how we’re brought up. But if it’s what’s taught in the absence of decency, then that might explain how popular it is just under the surface, when it thinks no one is watching who’ll object. How to get rid of a systemic imperative to cruelty is left as an exercise for the reader.
Lady WereBear
Oh, gee, my worries are over, she said.
Some undereducated and overspoiled white guy has found an inflection point, people!
Where have THEY been?
Princess
The problem isn’t that Republicans don’t know their inflammatory words will lead to people being hurt and killed. The problem isn’t even that they don’t care. The problem is that they actually want people to take them up on their talk. They want the De Papes. They want us to be terrified and back down and for those people to do their work for them.
The problem is, they are fascists.
Baud
@Princess: Yes, I agree.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Princess: Which is why they’re able to use it as laugh lines in their political discourse
Cameron
Off topic, I read something that really surprised me on a Florida political e-newsletter this morning. A recent poll showed a higher percentage of Florida voters (83) favored gun control than in either California or New York (both 78). Given how the state is currently run, it probably doesn’t mean much.
Baud
@Cameron: Gun control always polls well. It rarely seems to be the decisive issue for Dems in any particular election.
Chris T.
On the one hand, Republicans are calling for the death penalty for being a Democrat. On the other hand, Democrats are pointing out that this is not a good idea. So: both sides!
PBK
@Betty Cracker: Very upsetting to read this. So young!
Kay
Someone send this to Andrea Mitchell, who despite being a well connected insider doesn’t know basic facts:
The most violent death threats.
I don’t ask a lot of them. Just find out some things (read, talk to someone who knows) and then say or write them in a timely manner. Report the news. They make millions of dollars. They should work harder than this.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Kay: They behave as if not hurting R’s feelings is more important than stating the blunt truth
Lady WereBear
@Betty Cracker: Same thing happened to the author of I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, Michelle McNamara.
Died in her sleep of undiagnosed heart disease. She was the wife of Patton Oswalt in LA so it’s not like she couldn’t get at good medical care, either.
But she had a long time problem with insomnia, which only underlines how this is the body’s cry for some kind of help. Which, it turns out more and more, is not being provided by the sleeping medicines handed out today.
Apparently the non-drowsy feeling of the hypnotics which is such a selling point is not actually letting people sleep. They only think they are, and continue to suffer the bad health effects of sleep deprivation.
Lady WereBear
@Dorothy A. Winsor: In their world of access journalism, it’s true.
VOR
Re Andrea Mitchell, Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. “
Quinerly
@rikyrah: good morning!!!!
Princess
Andrea Mitchell knows the same people who are threatening Pelosi are also threatening Cheney and Kitzinger. She knows. She chooses to conceal it to protect the GOP brand.
Baud
@Kay: Someway, somehow, we really need our own media. It’s competition from right-wing media that influenced how mainstream media covers the news.
Kay
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
She’s terrible. She rivaled the NYTimes political team in promoting the “but her emails” fiasco of 2016. They of course win the award for garbage work quality in 2016 but she was a strong contender for second place.
I’m telling you if we took the tens or maybe hundreds of millions of dollars these celebrity political media people are paid and spread it out a little we could have 50 high quality news services covering each statehouse and sending reporters to DC.
Lady WereBear
@Kay: And it’s a relatively cheap solution as these things go. Actual journalism students in a kind of system which lets them actually apply it…
Profit cannot be the ONLY motive. As our single helix friends would have it.
different-church-lady
Huh. Seems like a odd way to initiate consensual gay sex…
Betty Cracker
@Lady WereBear: I read something about McNamara’s death at the time — a terrible thing.
I took Ambien once when it first came out and reported the resulting horror show to my doctor the next morning. I never took Ambien or any other sleep aid ever again — it was that bad. This was before all the weird Ambien stories came out about sleep driving, etc. My doctor probably thought I was nuts at the time, but I understood immediately that it was poison for me.
Soprano2
What’s still shocking to me (but shouldn’t be, I know) is how many of these people claim to be Christians. A true Christian would be nothing but appalled at the attack on Paul Pelosi. Having hate in the heart is supposed to be a terrible sin, yet many of these people are open about the hate in their hearts.
Kay
@Baud:
Agreed. It’s not a passive “trickle down” either. They follow the leader. It’s a decision.
Of course I know that tens of millions of Ohio voters are not reading the fucking NYTimes. I don’t even read it. It’s that they drive all the rest of the coverage. If they’re shit (and they are) then the rest is shit too.
They really owe Tim Ryan an apology. It’s dirty pool to announce he’s lost at the end of the GOP primary, which is what they did. They knew because they has sent a reporter to “Youngstown” (well, AROUND Youngstown, they don’t enter the city) and he had a beer at a bar. I’m not making this up.
I know Ryan is a long shot but give me a fucking break. Can they BACK OFF a little and stop driving the narrative? They’re IN FRONT and they’re not supposed to be.
Soprano2
@Baud: The video won’t matter to the conspiracy people, they’ll just say it was staged. I’m glad there is video though, it will convince people who aren’t conspiracy theorists.
sab
@Princess: And Cheney and Mitchell both blame Antifa a lot, just to have a plausible other side to blame.
Geminid
@Soprano2: Christanity is just “flag of convenience” for a lot of these people.
Other MJS
@Spanky: “We’re just surrounded by cowards” will do nicely.
Quinerly
@Princess: you nailed it!
Quinerly
@Princess: you nailed it!
oatler
@Chris T.:
This is ABC News. Can you appear on our Power Panel this Sunday?
Kay
@Baud:
It’s not “liberal” but they do cover abortion and womens issues, to perhaps make up the lack of investment or interest by the big media outlets:
I lookeed at their 501 filing. One of their financial supporters is the liberal Murdoch son and his wife.
Amir Khalid
Some good news. From Sky News, Russia has backed down and will resume its participation in the UN-brokered grain shipment deal.
Eyeroller
@Kay: “It is difficult to get a (wo)man to understand something when his (her) salary depends on not understanding it.” (Which I see has already been posted.)
Kay
@Soprano2:
Glenn Greenwald was on Tucker Carlson pushing the conspiracy.
“The contrarians” are just ordinary Republicans. They’re identical to the GOP media celebrities and GOP base.
Baud
@Kay: Technically speaking, I don’t want liberal spin (which is what a lot of MSNBC talking head shows are, not to mention liberal social media). I would love an outlet whose definition of what is newsworthy is similar to what mainstream liberals would consider newsworthy, and that is not afraid of being called liberal for reporting on such topics fairly and accurately.
I also want a pony.,
eversor
@Baud:
When she stops backing tax cuts for the rich, lower corporate regulations, and slashing the social safety net. At that point she will no longer be allowed to represent team Democrat and be fired on the spot.
The voters are engaged in a mass argument over race and religion full stop. The media is frantically screaming “social liberalism, but no social security, gay marriage, but low taxes on the rich” at the top of it’s lungs and then wondering why nobody likes them.
Punching the poors and screaming more female CEOs is the liberal stance. Don’t do a fucking thing about economic inequality but make sure the executive ranks are diverse has been the Democratic stance since Clinton. Which is why nobody under 50 buys what they are selling now.
Soprano2
@Geminid: I agree, it’s an identity like being a member of the Elks Club. It’s not the way they live their life, it’s just a ticket they get punched.
Kay
@Eyeroller:
She’s full of shit as a person. She expressed MONTHS of trumped up alarm at the risk to national security by Hillary Clinton’s server and then just dropped it when Trump took over.
Who can trust these people? They’re frauds. She doesn’t give a shit about “national security” and servers. She feigned that because it juiced up the story they had all fallen in love with.
Baud
@eversor:
You are culturally indistinguishable from right-wingers.
Princess
The fact that the NYT doesn’t always suck — it is still capable of great journalism — tells us that when it’s political reporting sucks, it’s because they want it to suck. They want to drive that message. They tell some ambitious slob, “Go down to Youngstown and don’t come back until you have quotes from three people who dislike Tim Ryan. Bonus if one of them claims to have voted for Obama.” They’re not incompetent; they are bad people.
John S.
Mrs. Alan Greenspan (aka Andrea Mitchell) is a corporate shill and hack who carries water for Republicans?
I’m SHOCKED. SHOCKED I tell you!
Baud
@Princess:
We don’t even have to guess. Some jackal a while back said her daughter was a freelance reporter in Arizona, I think. The daughter got a call from the NYT to cover one of the women’s marches. But the NYT said they were only interested in hearing from participants who were disappointed with Biden. The daughter refused the gig, as someone of integrity would.
I found it refreshing to have hard testimonial evidence.
Princess
@Baud: Yeah, I agree. I don’t *want* a liberal spin. I’m not a fan of shows like Maddow, for that reason. I want the chips to fall where they may. I want the news. But there’s no business incentive for that I guess. I get all my news from the CBC right now tbh.
Kay
@Baud:
Amy Chozick’s book that she wrote while supposedly “covering” Hillary Clinton for the NYTimes was picked up by HBO.
Such a shame to reward her for such garbage work. The whole things is laughable- it’s “about” sexism in politics. She’d godammned KNOW I guess since the NYTimes is the worst offender.
They’ve all been rewarded financially for their 2016 work. It’s not merit based. It’s a broken market.
Baud
@Kay: I thought her show fell flat. Is this a new pick-up?
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: “Nobody under 50” defined as “me and both of my friends.”
Kay
A big part of the death threats to Pelosi are because she’s a woman and the US is a really sexist country, becoming more so just in my adult life.
I wish I could say I was passing along a less sexist country to my daughter and grandaughters, but I’m not. They would be better off in 1980. We’ve gone backward and other countries kept moving forward. We’re not competitive on that measure.
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly: Yeah, there’s this weird thing where I’m supposed to care that the people who hate me hate me. People under 50 have the same right as anyone else to live their lives as they want. We’re not entitled to anyone’s support or trust. If that means the Republicans are in control, so be it. As long as voters get to make that choice, I can’t complain too much.
Chris T.
@Betty Cracker: I took Ambien a couple of times, including once for a sleep test for apnea (which I do have but the test didn’t show it, back then). The Ambien did very little for me one way or another.
(I got diagnosed much later with a take-home-machine. I stopped breathing more than 60 times per hour!)
Betty Cracker
As we’ve discussed endlessly, Beltway coverage is terrible across the board, not just at the NYT. I’m not sure if that’s because of the NYT’s enormous influence (hard to overstate just how relentlessly the Maggie model trickles down) or because of the nature of the coverage or what.
I don’t know what the solution is, but I hope there is one because a democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies. We’re seeing the fruits of that breakdown now.
Kay
@Baud:
It looked like they wouldn’t pick it up because honestly who wants a repeat of the Clinton coverage perfrmance but they’re restyled it now as not about Clinton but instead about how Clinton’s campaign were mean to Amy Chozick. She’s a survivor though, Baud. She somehow made it thru – the NYTimes reporter I mean. The country is still paying for her shit work. We haven’t done as well.
Baud
@Princess: tbh, too often even the “liberal spin” is hair on fire, which isn’t helpful when the Dems are in control.
Kropacetic
@OzarkHillbilly: Speaking as a person significantly under 50, I’m now buying what the Democrats are selling more than at any other point in my adult life.
Baud
@Kay: I’m glad I don’t have HBO.
OzarkHillbilly
That’s the school by my brother’s house, fortunately his kids went to a different school. I have to wonder if they will ever be able to sell that house.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
If you need persuading that The Maggie Model has trickled down go read a couple of the tens of interviews promoting Haberman’s book. They all begin with the journalist fawning all over Haberman, telling her how wonderful she is. It’s embarrasing to read.
They ALL mention “roots in city tabloids” – that means she’s tough and gritty. Like in the movies.
Nobody loves these people like they love themselves. It’s a support group, basically.
Nelle
@Princess: My daughter did a Masters in journalism at the Cronkite School at ASU. I was shocked at the number of times, both in school and during the years when she was a stringer for the NYT, to get someone to say x, y, or z. She had a group of Trump supporters who would talk to her. They didn’t want Democrats so she didn’t need go to people on the other side.
She went into journalism at just the worst time. She has left the field entirely.
Nelle
@Baud: Ah, you remembered!
BenCisco 🇺🇸🎖️🖥️♦️
@Baud: Liberal. You made a funny.
(Only not so much)
Kay
@Baud:
I do have HBO. Pretty soon I’m not going to have anything to watch.
It’s not all bad- I think quitting Twitter has made me both more productive and happier.
WaterGirl
@Amir Khalid: I guess they didn’t enjoy the public humiliation?
Soprano2
Evidently people on Fox News are pissed because a study found that cats on college campuses help relieve college student’s stress. (link is to Twitter) The host actually said she thinks college students “deserve a slap in the face”.
From TPM, a GOP House candidate in NC proposes literal “rape panels” made up of community members who would decide whether a woman’s rape was legitimate enough for her to get an abortion. And in Wisconsin, the GOP candidate for governor promises to make sure Republicans never lose another election there! These are insane ideas that they are now saying out loud.
Immanentize
@OzarkHillbilly: Love Canal
Betty Cracker
@Kay: You’re right — it’s a support group. In addition to the ritual fawning over Haberman in every one of those articles, there’s tut-tutting about how critics just don’t understand how journalism works, presumably including the many veteran journalists and journalism professors at prestige universities who are among the critics. I’ve never encountered a group more allergic to self-examination in my life.
Baud
@Nelle: Absolutely. That stuck in my mind. I have been calling the NYT garbage based on my assessment of their reporting, but your example gave me real world evidence of their perfidy.
OzarkHillbilly
@Kropacetic: So are both my sons and their wives. But they don’t count because they both have daughters and so they are biased.
Kay
@Soprano2:
What a weirdo. She’s a multi millionaire news personality and she wants to assault random college students? Does FOX have an employee intervention program? She’s a disturbed individual.
Kropacetic
@OzarkHillbilly: I’m childless; but I’m gay, feminist, pro labor, pro biosphere, pro religious and racial diversity; those must be my biases.
OzarkHillbilly
@Immanentize: I suspect a buy out is their only real hope but have no idea how likely that is for them. They are 2-3 blocks from the creek and I kinda doubt the waste would have migrated that far.
Baud
@Kropacetic:
Ugh. The biosphere should be illegal.
Kropacetic
@Baud: If the biosphere wants rights, it should vote and finance a billion dollar lobbying industry like the rest of us.
Skepticat
This definitely is true, and it may be so for more conditions than cardiac issues.
OzarkHillbilly
@Kropacetic: Wow, the sextuplet. Obviously no NYT reporter would ever interview you.
Tony G
@Princess: Absolutely right. The inevitable Hitler analogy: Hitler might have killed a few French soldiers during the First World War, but, to my knowledge, he never personally killed anyone in the decades after that war. Instead, he used the power of words to incite and organize other Germans to commit mass murder. Words matter. Am I comparing the contemporary American right wing to Hitler? Why, yes, I am.
Kropacetic
@OzarkHillbilly: I send the NYT my restaurant itinerary for the week every week, yet they never show up.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
I don’t think they were helped by us all seeing them on Twitter. It’s really revealing, what they choose to promote and what they sneer at or ignore. At least that’s my take- I actually love newspapers. I buy three.
It’s been a real education to find out they’re all kind of careerist, rigidly conventional assholes. How fucking STODGY and SCOLDING they are was the most suprising thing. I didn’t expect such sophisticated BIg City denizens to be more rigidly conventional than the local Rotary Club members.
I may never get over the fact that the reporter who interviewed Fetterman was just blown away by talking with someone who had a stroke. This was AMAZING and WEIRD enough to her to merit her babbling about it on Twitter. I think I interview someone with some kind of disabilty at least once a week. What the fuck kind of cloistered world do these people live in?
Starfish
@Baud: At least two of the Colorado mass shooters (that I know of) have not had trials due to insanity. That includes the Boulder King Soopers shooter and the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood shooter.
Looking into other Colorado mass shootings, the Aurora movie theater shooter was not guilty by reason of insanity.
At least one of the kids responsible for the STEM School Highlands Ranch shooting went to prison for a long time.
Starfish
@Cameron: Everyone in Florida knows Florida Man, and they know THAT GUY shouldn’t have a gun.
OzarkHillbilly
@Kropacetic: Any diners in that list?
Kay
@Soprano2:
My son is a college student and talking with him and his GF there seems to be some social cache now to doing things in real life – camping, hockey games, live music. I think it’s great and I hope it becomes fashionable to abandon social media and spend more time in real life. That’s the thing about the young uns. They change. By the time the early middle aged scolds on Fox catch up to Tik Tok they’ll be gone :)
schrodingers_cat
Elon Musk bought Twitter to destroy it from within. Change my mind. I would look closely into who funded this financially loss making deal and why
From that perspective his actions are logical
ETA: This morning Twitter suggested I follow Ben fucking Shapiro. I blocked him instead. After his tweet darkened my timeline. Eeww.
OzarkHillbilly
@Starfish: I once commented to a somewhat conservative neighbor that we all know somebody who should never be anywhere near a gun. At first he said he didn’t. Then after a minute or 2 he corrected himself and said, “My nephew.”
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
I think I read somewhere that Ben Shapiro gets “recommended” a lot on social media. I wonder if he pays to be promoted that way.
Kay
@schrodingers_cat:
I’m confident something else will replace it once it’s either 100% far Right garbage or gone. If nothing else media people need a platform to sell their books, substacks, podcasts, etc. I would be amused if everyone else left and they were talking exclusively to one another :)
Soprano2
@Kay: I agree, but I also think it’s the normal “hate on young people look how stupid and fragile they are” stuff. I saw one of those on FB this morning, about how young people are stupid now because a car owner’s manual tells them not to drink the fluid in the battery (not even sure that’s true). I always defend young people, because this ritual hating on them “just because” is dumb. I tell people my age that when we were in our 20’s people who were the age we are now were saying the exact same things about us, and were they true? It’s dumb and lazy.
Miss Bianca
@Betty Cracker: Oh, that’s way too bad. I read both Julie and Julia and her second book, Cleaving, about the break-up of her marriage and her newborn fascination with the art and craft of butchering, which wasn’t nearly as well received – I think people preferred the relatively sunny vision of the first book – but I found fascinating.
RIP
pat
@Benw:
Just the fact that she could even think that it’s dems who are doing this with Cheney and Kinzinger tells me she is no longer working with a full deck.
Sheesh, just retire already.
AWOL
@Baud: After they reinstate Phil Donahue.
MSNBC is the Republican Anonymous Network. Geo W Bush is a hero of leadership there.
No idea why liberals watch it.
Soprano2
@Kay: Do you think it’s partly an effect from Covid? They had to be isolated at a key part of their lives, so now they’ve decided no more being isolated behind screens.
Barbara
@Skepticat: Even when cardiac symptoms are the same as they are in men doctors are more likely to dismiss them in women. My MIL had classic signs of cardiac issues, such as sudden, increased breathlessness after climbing steps and pain in her chest so severe it made her cry. Her doctor told her she was getting old. She had a heart attack two months after she consulted him (which she survived). I was so angry, and yet, they still went to him afterwards. He was, however, a very good resource when she needed hospice care.
Geminid
@WaterGirl: Turkish President Erdogan may have persuaded the Russians in this matter. He holds some high cards, both militarily and otherwise. Erdogan seems determined to keep the grain shipments going, and he is a very stubborn man.
schrodingers_cat
@Kay: Perhaps. But there are many fragile coalitions that benefit from being able to connect on Twitter.
Indian Twitter for example is a robust space for news and views that the BJP is strangling in the traditional print and broadcast and cable news media.
Those networks have been built over a decade they will be hard to replicate on a new site. There is a world beyond the USA. They are but one example of an entity that would love to silence Twitter.
Twitter is not just for the news media but also many marginalized communities that don’t see much representation if any in the traditional media.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: This was the first time he was recommended to me. I have been on Twitter since 2013 and tweeting since 2019.
Is Apartheid Clyde elevating RWNJs?
WaterGirl
@Baud: It’s all part of the twitter algorithm, and after while it’s self-feeding.
Eyeroller
@Soprano2: That has nothing to do with young people, it’s about lawsuit avoidance. It’s mostly due to urban legends that it seems even lawyers believe, but apparently people really are audacious enough that there have been lawsuits (which cost the company money even when dismissed) when somebody does something incredibly stupid because “nobody ever told me not to do it.” But of course geezers assume it’s young people because “we didn’t have those warnings back on our day” Lawn Off etc.
Kay
The “he’s just a kook” framing media have settled on with Pelosi’s would be assassin is funny too.
All the assassins were kooks. How do they think this works? It’s like a spy novel? They’re all fucking loser kooks.
Lee Harvey Oswald was pathetic. He got fired from what were basically minimum wage jobs because he frightened people and put them off. He bounced around for years- failed at everything he tried. But he succeeded at one thing!
Can they wrap their rigid little world view on “kook” and “assassin” being the same person? Because that’s how it actually is. The “assassin” doesn’t wear gloves and a black mask. He isn’t sauve and successful. They’re all oddball losers. It’s what they have in common.
zhena gogolia
@schrodingers_cat:
OT, do you know about this?
Just saw it in an e-mail at my university.
zhena gogolia
@Kay: They should review their Stephen Sondheim!
schrodingers_cat
@zhena gogolia: Nope. First time I heard about this.
Kay
@schrodingers_cat:
I agree. The “ordinary people” reporters on Twitter are really valuable so I understand staying to keep that community and connection.
I have the kind of luxury of walking away, and in that situation I just cannot see myself supporting this business model. I don’t want any part of Elon Musk. He’s bad news for the country. No good will come of any of this.
zeecube
@rikyrah: Good morning, No. 1.
Suzanne
@Kay:
Yes. But this is also why, when the right-wingers call them liberal elitists, it doesn’t land for them. They aren’t really liberal. They’re pretty culturally conservative, actually.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: RWNJs have a weird notion of what lovers do. Projection or imagination? I wonder.
I for one would be much happier if they kept their kinks to themselves.
zhena gogolia
@Kay: Roots in a father who’s a major contributor to the NYT.
Betty Cracker
@Miss Bianca: Apparently she and her husband patched things up after that. They were living together in upstate NY (I think) when she died.
Kay
@zhena gogolia:
Lee Harvey Oswald was really self important so one of the things that made people uncomfortable and led to them firing him was he took his minimum wage jobs too seriously. He was delusional about the import of him pumping gas or whatever as opposed to someone else. I thought that was sad.
This would-be assassin thinks he has the rght to tie up Pelosi and demand answers – “the truth”. They’re all like that. It’s what makes them dangerous.
Geminid
Blech! Votes in yesterday’s Israeli election are mostly counted, and Benjamin Netanyahu’s 4-party coalition will easily exceed the 61 Knesset members needed to form a government. The biggest surprise was a surge in turnout compared to the election twenty months ago. The liberal Meretz party might not reach the 3.25% threshold and may be out of the Knesset.
So it looks like “Bibi” will be Prime Minister again, probably for the next four years. He’s still faces criminal charges, but the trial has been crawling along since April, 2020 and is not nearly finished. A friendly Justice Minister will probably fix Netanyahu’s problem.
JML
@Soprano2: Yeah, we do that every semester on my campus. There’s a “De-stress With Pets” event during finals week where students (and occasionally staff) go play with dogs and cats, or just watch them play with each other and be goofy. It’s great. I hate to think that one of these right-wing lunatic groups might come after us for doing something that harms no one and helps people in a fun way.
WaterGirl
@Geminid: These guys are like zombies, they just don’t die. (politically)
Betty Cracker
@Suzanne: I wonder if the culturally conservative mold fits the political media figures only? One of my dearest friends since childhood is now managing editor of a major daily. She and I went to the same college, so I got to know lots of her J-school friends, some of whom I am still friendly with and a few of who are still working journos.
I wouldn’t describe a single one of them as conservative, but they’re all straight news people and not lavishly salaried pundits and/or Beltway beat reporters.
Kay
@Suzanne:
I think they are temperamentally conservative. There’s not a lot of fluidity or open mindedness. I will never forget how they treated CHICAGO as a kind of foreign land when Obama arrived on the scene. They had to bundle up in parkas and trek out to the hinterlands- “Chicago! God knows what goes on THERE.”
Parochial.
They know one analysis method- comparison. “THIS is like THAT’. It often isn’t “like that” but when all you have is a hammer and you refuse to learn how to use a screwdriver, well, you gotta pound the screw into the wood.
Jim Appleton
Can we please rebranded the GOP as the Antidemocracy Party?
Kay
@Suzanne:
There’s a really interesting story about how there is real black political power in Ohio within the (urban) Democratic Party but that’s not an Ohio story they’re interested in telling. It’s interesting because it’s stronger than the numbers of black people in Ohio. They punch above their weight in 5 counties.
That’s not how they see the state- they see the state like people who think movies are real life.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: There’s definitely a sense of entitlement and self-importance that assassins like Oswald share. Mass shooters seem to share those traits too: “With my mighty AR-15, you will all know my name and acknowledge my power.” So many of them express similar thoughts in their manifestos or pre-shooting videos. It is pitiful and dangerous at the same time.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Kay: Twitter is really good for breaking events. People with cell phones show them as they happen. Obviously, you have to be careful about first conclusions, but you do see things in almost real time.
Baud
@Geminid:
That sucks.
ETA: Righties never give up.
jonas
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Well, we see what happens when you hurt Republican feelings. They completely lose their shit, call you a genocidal pedophile, and the next thing you know one of their crazy supporters is breaking into your house trying to kill you.
Geminid
@WaterGirl: Israel has a very polarized electorate. The bad news in this election was that the radical right wing National Religious Party jumped from 6 MKs to 14. Its nominal head is Mr. Smotrich, but its most dynamic politician is the reprehensible Ihana Ben-Gvir. He makes Benjamin Netanyahu look like Mr. Rodgers.
cain
@Betty Cracker:
Imagine having this going around creating heart conditions in the populace and we have the GOP trying to kill healthcare. So far every policy they plan on implementing will turn around and kill them in a few years simply because they are unpopular. Our side fights so much to slow that – Americans and journalists depend on this behavior and so they turn their brain offs and don’t engage and see it as noise.
Of course, people have heard this from me before. lol. I should come up with some new shit.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Yep. They don’t. When Indira Gandhi passed away and new elections were held. BJP got 2 (out of 543) seats in the LokSabha (Indian versions of the House of Commons)
Many on our side are ready to give up at the first brush with adversity.
eachother
My yard signs were torn up last night.
zhena gogolia
@eachother: I’m sorry. That’s always a bad feeling.
Baud
@eachother:
Take it has a sign of the righteousness of your efforts.
J R in WV
@Kay:
We are news junkies, esp Ms Wife, and so we watched the 2016 political nominating conventions closely, all of them that were broadcast.
One thing that I noticed very soon was that Wife and I could watch a speech, followed by Andrea Mitchell’s description and analysis of that speech, which bore absolutely no resemblance to the speech we had watched and listened to right along with Ms Mitchell.
She was distorting what was said into lies right there on the TV in front of everyone. Not a reporter at all, not for a very long time if ever… she is a political operative for the Republican Party, period.
As full of lies as a hive is full of bees!
Soprano2
@Barbara: I’m glad my doc took me seriously when I told him about my periods of lightheadedness. That’s how we found my left bundle branch block.
SteverinoCT
I had a 10-12-ish year-old Trick-or-Treater ask me if I was on TikTok after spotting my phone sitting next to the candy bowl. I definitely should check it out, he assured me!
UncleEbeneezer
@Kay: I think Trump, the GOP and the internet have really emboldened a lot of it to come out for everyone to see.
Cacti
With respect to all of the online right wing conspiracy garbage that’s been circling around about the terrorist attack on the Pelosi home, I couldn’t help but notice how just about everything with them is either a gay sex or pedo fantasy of some sort.
Yes, Virginia. Republicans are a bunch of repressed weirdos.
Robin Goodfellow
@Princess: Access, it’s all about access, that and not offending the corporate honchos she works for.
dww44
@Princess: I think that Andrea Mitchell’s problem is not that she’s pro GOP or anti Democrats, she’s just bought into the bothsiderism for so long that now, as her on air faculties are diminishing, she’s unable to frame anything without waffling.
Burnspbesq
Humming the classic Charlie Parker tune, “Relaxin’ at Camarillo.”
@Baud:
Barbara
@dww44: People get lazy. At some point in your life, you just don’t want to learn new things or new ways, especially if you have succeeded at a high level with the old. That is a major problem with people like Andrea Mitchell and other media types. Whether they understand how the Republican party has shifted from being that center of right force that kept Democrats from shifting too far to the left, to a hysterical, conspiracy driven bunch of flame throwers and worse, they just don’t want to take the effort to understand that story and shift their own image to tell it.
Compare Andrea Mitchell with Dan Rather — it can be done, but she (and her bosses, come on) don’t want to do it.
patrick II
@Kay:
I would add to that list:
Being an very effective Democratic leader.
Effectively and straightforward confronting Trump on numerous occasions.
The first of these is less obvious because it is more driven by conscious Republican media strategy. They pick out our best early and follow hide them over years. Ask Hillary.
kindness
Far too many ‘reasonable’ Republicans are doing everything they can to stoke their base into a new civil war. All their statements attempt to trigger their own people in lashing out. I think Democrats will fare well in the elections and that makes me fear for the weeks following it.
Tony G
@Soprano2: Well, yes. But as a former Catholic I know that there are an awful lot of “religious Catholics” who are just the most hateful, bigoted people on the face of the earth. (There are also a significant number of people, like my late mother, who really do “love thy neighbor” and treat people with kindness.). I’m pretty sure that Evangelicals tend to be at least as bad as Catholics. My impression is that, for a lot of “religious” people their religion is just a club, a “personal brand”, that gives them permission to be as hateful, greedy and corrupt as they want to be. They become “made men” (and “made women”) who no longer have to obey the rules.
Tony G
@Burnspbesq: Well, Charlie Parker was a musical genius with a bad heroin addiction that killed him at age 35. This guy is a violent, fascist thug. I’d like to see him beaten for a while with a hammer, but a long prison sentence would be OK too.
jonas
@schrodingers_cat:
I keep getting a promoted follow link for Franklin Fucking Graham for some reason on Twitter. Bizarre.
I’ve been wondering the same thing. Who in the world agreed to lend Musk the money for this shitshow? There was no way in hell Twitter, even under the best circumstances, could be profitable enough to make the interest payments, much less recoup their investment after having paid 10x more than the company was probably actually worth. This doesn’t even make any sense from a vulture capital perspective. Twitter doesn’t have any valuable core assets that you can potentially sell off to pay down the debt. WTF?
Eyeroller
@Kay: Even worse, they treated Hawaii as a foreign country. Was it Cokie who said that Obama should have vacationed in Myrtle Beach and not his home state?
Miss Bianca
@Betty Cracker: Huge shame. 49 is way too young to die.
jonas
@kindness:
It’s because *there are no consequences*. The media reports their cries for blood as if it’s legitimate news. Voters apparently don’t give a shit that one party is, literally, pro-coup/anti-democracy. They’ve learned they can simply get away with anything and everything, so they will try.
Citizen Alan
@Baud: Well to be fair, above abolishing Christianity wholesale is not a right wing position.. I’m pretty sure eversor is a talkie at heart.
Cheez Whiz
@PBK: it was all that butter,
Kay
@Eyeroller:
They had Lynne Sweet as the Chicago expert. One person. I have no idea if she’s reliable or knows anything but I was only given the one so I had to go with her.
Which national outlet did the groundbreaking story on how the Obamas are well off so had a “jumbo” mortgage? This was framed as some kind of incipient corruption. Maybe “Chicago style” We all know what that means!
Shocking! Well off black people! What is this world coming to? Imagine if they encountered a well off black person not from the east coast who had also had a stroke? They would break into tiny pieces.
Soprano2
@jonas: I saw it was revealed that Saudi Arabia is a major investor in Twitter, so that might answer some questions.
schrodingers_cat
@Soprano2: And Larry Ellison of Oracle IIRC.
Soprano2
@Eyeroller: Trust me, for a lot of them Hawai’i would feel like a foreign state!
Geminid
@Geminid: Correction: that’s the reprehensible Itamar, not Ihana, Ben-Gvir.
The Israeli left definitely left Knesset seats on the table this election. The threshold for winning 4 Knesset seats is 3.25%, and a party slate finishing below that gets blanked. Late reports were that the Arab Balad party was at 3.09%. It split from the Arab Joint List right before the election. It looks like the Joint List will win 4 MKs, and the other Arab Party, Mansour Abbas’s Ra’am, will win 5. Ra’am was part of the coalition government formed after the March, 2021 election.
The liberal Meretz party stood at 3.17%. Their leaders wanted to form a joint slate with Labor but Merav Michaeli, Labor’s leader rebuffed them. Labor’s own total for MK’s dropped from 7 seats to 4. I’m not sure of the math but it seems like a unfied Labor-Meretz slate and one of Balad with the Joint List would have added 4 or 5 MKs to the anti-Netanyahu coalition.
rdldot
@OzarkHillbilly: About 1/2 mile from where I grew up but I didn’t attend. Demographics in Florissant have changed alot since the 90s but this school has been around a long time. I am supprised they mentioned race in this though, because the radiation issue has affected the area since post WW2.
Soprano2
@schrodingers_cat: I hadn’t seen that one, but it wouldn’t surprise me. My deceased stepson talked to Larry Ellison once. Ellison wanted to know if his pie order was ready. Stepson told him “I don’t know anything about that, we don’t take pie orders but if you want to come here you can buy whatever you want”. LOL I asked him if he knew who Ellison was; he did, vaguely. I said “You know he basically owns one of those islands, right?”. He lived a weird life.
Conservatives are looking for a space where a) they can say whatever they want without any censorship and b) liberals will be forced to stay and interact with them, and the press will have to take them seriously. They’re never going to have it, but that won’t stop them from trying to make it.
Eolirin
@Geminid: Wonderful, Russia is about to get another weapons supplier in addition to the Iranians. 😡
CaseyL
The question isn’t whether DePape is insane – sane people don’t do what he did – the question is whether he’s legally insane; i.e., didn’t know what he was doing is wrong/illegal.
Kay
@Soprano2:
Lol. So true. Prior to 2016 and the hard Right nasty turn, I used to have some fun with local conservative lawyers (they’re all conservatives here). They were fairly generous, like one is when one utterly controls local government and they’re lawyers so they like to think there’s a “debate” going on.
I don’t engage anymore because they’re too red faced and worked up and I didn’t sign up for misery and having a stroke and it pisses them off that I won’t.
They can talk to each other about politics. I’m out. I didn’t volunteer as the target of the bullies.
Kay
@Soprano2:
Because it’s such a small legal community here and I can name every lawyer in the county and also will have encountered that person, I think what happened is the more “normal” conservatives stopped talking politics, leaving just the wingnuts, who of course never shut up.
That’s who they demand we interact with, their spittle-flecked base. They drowned out all the other people.
Eyeroller
@Soprano2: The people talking about that were wealthy. They may well have been there on a vacation at some point. Emphasizing the “foreigness” of Hawaii was another way to make Obama seem less American.
Geminid
@Eolirin: The Israelis aren’t gonna send weapons to Russia. They won’t send them to Ukraine either, even though during the his campaign Netanyahu talked like he would consider it. He was just bullshitting.
They are selling anti-drone weapons to the UAE, though, which are spotted on satellite photos. An under-reported story of the last couple years is the military alliance Israel is developing with the Arab Gulf states. Saudi Arabia is in on it even they still have no formal diplomatic ties.
Also, now that the UAE and Bahrain have diplomatic relations with them, the Pentagon has shifted Israel into CENTCOM. A few months ago a couple Israeli naval vessels sailed down the Red Sea to exercise alongside ships from Arab countries who five years ago would have been unthinkable.
Soprano2
@Kay: I think it’s not “fun” for them if there is no one who disagrees with them to engage with. They have 4chan and 8chan and Parler and TruthSocial, and still they want Twitter too because they think all the liberals will have to stay there and be subjected to their insanity. I mostly don’t engage with them in person about politics anymore because it’s not worth it.
I listened to the 1a program about yesterday’s Supreme Court arguments on affirmative action. It was valuable because they had a former admissions person from Dartmouth on there. She said they had zero quotas for minority students, but they did have quotas – for legacy students! I believe she said it was 10%. I wonder if these conservative groups will ever sue based on the idea that it’s unfair for universities to have quotas for legacy students, who may or may not have “merit” and be “deserving” of admission. I doubt it. On their FB page I was poking at a conservative who was saying that using race for admissions at all is racist. I asked him if buying your way into college like Jared Kushner did was ok, or if there was another way. Should there be a lottery? How fast do you think those Asian parents would sue if their “deserving” kids were subjected to a lottery system at Harvard? LOL I wish we could quit lying about this stuff; conservatives mostly think black and brown kids should go to community college and/or less prestigious state universities, and leave the prestigious schools for white and Asian students. Oh, and kids whose parents can buy the university a building are definitely deserving in their eyes. Let’s just be honest about what’s actually happening here.
Soprano2
@Eyeroller: True, but what I’m saying is that Hawai’i probably feels like a foreign country to white people who live in places where almost everyone is white.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Kay: I always wondered why it was OK for Andrea Mitchell to be a national mouthpiece for a major media outlet when her husband was (at the time) chairman of the board of the Federal Reserve. How is that NOT a conflict of interest…
Ruckus
@Spanky:
No kidding. That is a pretty damn powerful statement Adam made.
After listening to Liz and Adam on the committee hearings, one might assume that they were not all that conservative, but then listen to Liz out in the political world or look at their voting in the house and you see that they are conservative for sure. But what they are not is rabidly insane. I mean I can’t agree with their politics but I can respect that they are not insane and believing that we will all die if we don’t revert back to politics prior to 1850.
sab
@Soprano2: Asian kids, especially ethnically Chinese, have been subjected to a quota system at California universities since forever. I don’t know of that is still the case.
Kay
@Soprano2:
I listened to the last affirmative action argument, where Sandra Day Oconner was still on the bench and my attitude now is “again with this?”
I support affirmative action for the very simple reason that black people suffer from bias based on race in the US. Since the last time the Right brought this up there is a TON of data out of public schools that show this to be true. Black children are disciplined more than white children, and discilplined more harshly. They are called on less in class. They are steered toward gifted programs at a much lower rate. This is BIAS and I don’t believe it ends in high school.
We have 50 million public school students in the US. We have a HUGE sample to test whether black people suffer from racial bias. They do. So to me the one and only question is does that magically end in college? Are college administrators and instructors so much more fair than people who teach high school? I don’t think so. It’s a correction we have to make for bias and that’s all it is to me.
sab
@Eyeroller: And Cokie was from that typical heartland city of New Orleans. Her Hawaii comments always made me roll my eyes.
Eolirin
@Kay: Given that it’s a central part of the worldview on the right that that isn’t bias it’s just a sign of black inferiority, I doubt that’ll be particularly persuasive to them.
Kelly
Those slots in the head are for taking the screw out
Kay
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone:
There’s so many conficts and so much nepotism I think there’s a kind of gentlemans agreement among both media and politicians not to mention it too much.
Your start pulling that string you catch a lot of people.
I still can’t get over the fact that the GOP pays the otherwise unemployable Trump children. It’s just accepted now. Politicos on the Right have to employ the next generation. I think it’s hysterical. Rand Paul’s children are probably already employed by some Party apparatus of some kind, if not the public. Third generation.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Soprano2: It is true, I lived on Oahu for 7 years when I was in the Navy. Some of the white sailors from smaller, more insular places (or maybe the ones with more racist parents) were incensed by the amount of interracial couples and kids. The whining from some of these people that they were someplace where they were not in the vast majority was stunning. Some of the tourists(not all by far, but some) were apparently to dense to realize Hawaii is part of the U.S. Some tourists became quite annoyed that many tour guides are bi or tri lingual because Hawaii gets a lot of tourists from Pacific Rim countries.
Kay
@Eolirin:
This is mean of me, but the woman in the original case, the one who wanted to go to U of M law but decided black people had stopped her from doing that, was not that great a prospect for U of M. I kept going back to that FACT as someone who was once a law student. They couldn’t find a better plaintiff? Why she felt entitled to admission is interesting because I didn’t feel entitled and I had slightly better scores than her. Boo hoo. Black people are ruining their lives again.
Ruckus
@Betty Cracker:
I’d bet that it still is a rather widely held concept that men and women have the same heart and there for the same reactions.
Also anyone can have a heart attack and never know. I have. When I first went to the VA they did their normal complete physical and the woman doctor looked at the cardiogram and said it looks all normal, and then the male cardiologist took a glance and stated, “You’ve had an heart attack.” He even showed me where and why he could say that. He also told me that 80% of heart attacks are unknown by the victim. That woman doc learned a lot that day. As I did as well.
Men and women are different in a lot of ways, many of them subtle. We may be all human, physically not mentally, two sides of a coin if you will, but men and women have relatively large differences in our chemistries as well as physical and that can make large differences in how our bodies work, act and react. I think a lot of medical people do understand that to at least some degree.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Kay: It does seem more prevalent among the Republicans, the adult children of Trump being the most annoying examples. I always have a bit of respect for any politicians kids who go have a career that has NOTHING to do with politics.
Tony G
@Baud: I would be OK with beating Byron York with a hammer
Sheila in nc
@Kay: i absolutely agree. I also can’t help thinking about it from the perspective of the university.
They are simultaneously juggling multiple objectives. Trying to admit a talented cohort of students, obviously. But at the same time, their student body is not just their customer base but also their product. Without diversity, their students get a poorer educational experience. High quality institutions recognize this fact and try to build a collective admission class where students can gain learning and perspective from each other’s lives and experiences.
James E Powell
@Kay:
What it really means is “connected gossip peddler”
Ken
Do they somehow help you get a grip with the pliers?
West of the Rockies
I think a super-massive apportionment of blame goes to Limbaugh, who made sport of ridiculing liberals, even chortling over their deaths. “Ted Kennedy has assumed room temperature. “
He preconditioned his wretched listeners for decades. Scads of hideous copycats gave followed.
The Moar You Know
@Jim Appleton: it is already literally in the term “Republican”. A republican form of government is just that; not a democracy.
West of the Rockies
@different-church-lady:
Who among as has not approached a Grinder date with a clawhammer through a shower of shattered glass?
Ruckus
@livewyre:
How much have humans evolved from the basic beings of thousands of years ago? And has everyone evolved to the same level?
To answer my own questions, first, some, not all that much. Second, not even close.
Soprano2
@Kay: For me it’s not just that, it’s this whole ridiculous idea that your test scores or GPA are the totality of what we need to look at to say whether or not you’ll be a success in college or in life. Colleges are trying to balance a lot of things; they want an interesting, engaged student body. They’re also trying to have a marching band and an orchestra and all kinds of sports teams and scientists and engineers and writers and all kinds of other people with varied interests in life. If you did what conservatives think we should, which is rely only on test scores and GPA’s, what kind of student body would they have? Not the one they want or that is desirable, that’s for sure! It’s crazy because there is NO WAY AT ALL to make everyone feel that the choices they make are “fair”, period.
Soprano2
@Ruckus: That’s what I was worried about, that I’d had a heart attack and didn’t know it. Turns out my heart is healthy other than this bundle branch block, which I might have had for decades and not known it.
Soprano2
@Ruckus: I’m of the belief that basic human nature doesn’t change no matter how much our culture or environment changes. That’s one reason I hate the “we were so much better when we were young than the young people of today”. No you weren’t, you were exactly the same!
Ruckus
@Kay:
As I’ve said here before, I get my healthcare from the VA. You can not spend much time at most VA facilities without seeing people with disabilities. Arm(s) missing, leg(s) missing, mental health that’s not so healthy, etc. One of the reasons I like the hospital over a clinic is that I get to see how damn lucky I’ve been in my life. It may not be anything for a TV show, but I’ve seen a hell of a lot worse. I’ve talked to some who are far worse off. I know people who served in war zones who will never be “normal.” I look at a lot of conservatives in a similar way with the exception that war zone damage is not self induced. Being a political idiot almost always is. At least in my experience.
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@Burnspbesq:
“Relaxin’ at CSUCI” doesn’t quite work. Camarillo is now CSU Channel Islands.
rikyrah
@Soprano2:
They have free speech.
What they want is FREEDOM FROM THE CONSEQUENCES OF SAID SPEECH.
Ruckus
@Soprano2:
Having lived, and hopefully observed life and living for nearly 3/4 of a century, I’ve noticed that the world has changed and a huge number of people had to change for that to happen. But a lot of people don’t/can’t change, they aren’t raised that way, the concept seems to be that they are fine the way they are. And it seems that those that refuse to change the most are the ones who need to change the most. They are the ones whose prior generations mostly were in the same position, they were those in prior OK generations/positions, who refuse to see that change and paying attention/growing up is something that one should be doing for an entire lifetime. They live always looking in a rear view mirror, rather than the road in front of them and sooner or later they will run into whatever changes lanes in front of them. This used to be less of a problem when the world didn’t have as many people driving down the road of life. Republicans are always looking in the rear view mirror, at life that was, because it is a known, which driving forward in time is really not. The real problem is that we have a lot more cars and drivers, they are all faster and the world turns at exactly the same speed.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@rikyrah: Thank you! people always say “I have the right to free speech”, and they hate when I say, “I have the right to take my time, my money, my companionship, my vote someplace else if I don’t like what you use your free speech to say” . I also have the right to say what I think, even if they don’t like it. I also have the right to call their lies, lies. They want a soapbox, a megaphone and a gag for their opponents.
Steeplejack
@🐾BillinGlendaleCA:
LOL. Bird’s Camarillo was Camarillo State Hospital, when it was a mental health facility. Very different experience.
Dopey-o
once clipped an article from the SF Chron about silent ischemic heart attacks. The headline was
The First Sympton Is Death
Ruckus
@Dopey-o:
Of those 80% that don’t know a sizable percentage is people that can no longer feel, think, actually have another heart attack. Yes, they are dead. But there are lots of people that have heart attacks that don’t kill them that they don’t know about until a cardio workup is done. And not all doctors know how to read a cardiogram more than in a general sense, ie a reasonably normal wave and rate. But there is a lot of info in the totality of the scan other than wave and rate. It is why there are specialists in medicine. Your general practitioner is basically an explorer looking for clues to then send you to a specialist as necessary. The VA takes this to a different level because it is more like socialized medicine than what normal citizens of this country see. Socialized can be/is better and I’ve used both extensively over my lifetime.