thousands of jobs blown away, years worth of interactions, friendships, all of it is currently listing and on fire in the middle of the ocean and there’s unlikely to be any help coming any time soon, and musk might just open fire on anyone who tries
— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachi) November 10, 2022
incredible that the exact moment it would be funniest to let Trump back on twitter is also the moment that no one would believe it was really him
— Dorothy Fortenberry (@Dorothy410berry) November 11, 2022
Red… wave bye-bye, Kev!
No reaction from the McCarthy crowd as Fox News calls the Pennsylvania Senate race for Fetterman pic.twitter.com/Tkqv5Vlku7
— Joseph Zeballos-Roig (@josephzeballos) November 9, 2022
— Jack Edward, Festive Duke of the Winter Wonderland (@SnackMerritt) November 10, 2022
You know things are going great because there are conservatives getting mad at libertarians, that’s always the sign
— Jane Coaston (@janecoaston) November 9, 2022
Here's Fox News' midterms meltdown, summed up in 40 seconds: pic.twitter.com/JBcZm70XFk
— Kat Abu (@abughazalehkat) November 10, 2022
A couple of the blog’s favorite chewtoys, made very sad…
It’s hard to believe, but woke Biden convinced me, a lifelong Thatcherite and strong believer in the genetic inferiority and superiority of the races, to vote Republican. pic.twitter.com/IAUw1zrMo5
— Bad Gays (@badgayspod) November 8, 2022
JFC we're still doing 'Trump is a moderate' pic.twitter.com/nEQXzY68ib
— Lord Businessman (@BusinessmanLego) November 9, 2022
Also McArgleBargle:
"Why Democrats should be blackmailed into electing Republicans for me" https://t.co/83KfykaRd8
— Fred from Oleksandrivka (Satire) (@LesserFrederick) November 10, 2022
To be clear, the "meddling" in most cases consisted of running ads calling the MAGA candidates extreme and tying them to Trump, which actually made these candidates *more* attractive to the GOP base. https://t.co/uSz5Fdv1om
— James Surowiecki (@JamesSurowiecki) November 9, 2022
Wherever would low-info Republicans have gotten such a cynical idea?…
Alex Jones & Roger Stone are concerned that a lot of Republicans didn’t bother voting because they now think all elections are rigged. pic.twitter.com/VVNlZJ5fvf
— Ron Filipkowski ???? (@RonFilipkowski) November 10, 2022
lgerard
The trump meltdown and the Musk meltdown should provide enough entertainment for some time. At least until the War on Christmas starts in earnest
sab
All sorts of hardworking folks from central and south america want to immigrate here, and we decide instead to take in the Murdochs and Andrew Sullivan
ETA And Elon Musk!
Mai Naem mobile
Dave Wasserman has seen enough. He called Arizona for Kelly. Now only if I could get the stupid ‘Mark Kelly means open borders’ ad out of my brain. I’ve seen/heard this ad a million times this fall. Beyond the policy stuff, I am glad somebody who looks as weasely as Blake Masters is not representing me.
Mai Naem mobile
@sab: don’t forget Musk.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
I just had the trippest job interview ever. My old job was relocated to Chicago, and it was ya’ right, Chicago is no tech center, so I will take the severance package, replied to one want add, thinking, well this is a warm up, I really need to polish my resume since the last time I interviewed was in 2014. Get a call back the next day, then a second phone interview, the in-person one was today. They seem oddly enthusiastic about me, their HR seems to not to know how to interview and today in person was supposed to be 20 minutes at the end of the managers work day, before a three day weekend for Veterans day, ended up going two hours were it felt like the manager started training me on the product. So..erm, I guess they are going to higher me. But I have never had a interview were the company acted like that, usually with us techs they are more cagey.
And it helps it’s full benefits, none of this temp nonsense and at lest a 30% raise from the last job lol
sab
@Mai Naem mobile: Jeez yes!
ETA Or more correctly, YIKES NO!
smike
Hard to keep up with these guys, but evidently the evil leftists are playing some eleventeenth dimensional level chess tricks on them. So how are they going to avoid this trap in the future? Someone should ask them.
p.a.
Ugh! One of those nights.
They didn’t even try the usual “we have a mandate” bullshit after Tuesday. Even their magat cult wouldn’t fall for it.
Tony Jay
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Bloody Woke leftists and their sinister Conspiracy of Prosperity.
Joe Falco
@p.a.: The media enablers will do their level best to twist whatever small gains the GOP secured into a narrative that Biden must abandon the entire Dem party platform and devote the next two years to carry out the Republican agenda. I would say that should supply DougJ with enough material for his Pitchbot shtick for a while if Elon doesn’t blow up Twitter first.
sab
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Hope you get it!
sab
OT I was at my wits end for food inspiration, and husband suggested bubble and squeak. New and exciting to him, old news to me. That got me thinking fondly of littlebritdifrent ( sic?) who never posts anymore but hopefully still lurks.
mrmoshpotato
BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Obviously, these assholes never read
The Boy Who Cried WolfThe Assholes Who Shrieked Rigged.Shalimar
@Joe Falco: Media enablers are already helping Republicans with their election lies. I haven’t opened the articles, but my Microsoft news homepage includes breathless headlines whenever a Republican pulls ahead in any count anywhere. Maybe the actual stories point out how the process works and what votes are still out there to count, but I doubt it.
Amir Khalid
I’ve always known Sully was a silly person. Now I know he’s also a bad person.
Amir Khalid
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Either they were desperate for someone — anyone! — to take the job, or you’re the best candidate who replied to the ad. Either way, congratulations.
mrmoshpotato
@Amir Khalid:
Why not
Zoidbergboth?Frankensteinbeck
A responder somewhere in those tweets raised an interesting point: People who vote Libertarian when a Republican is on the ballot may not be the same kind of Libertarian as Rand Paul. We should not assume their votes will go Republican as a second choice.
Baud
LOL. The media gambles with our future every day in the way they report the news. Tell us again about the red wave and how voters only care about inflation and crime.
PBK
@sab: She did an On the Road series about two weeks ago…lovely pictures of her trip to Scotland.
Chetan Murthy
@Frankensteinbeck: Aside from Radley Balko, I’ve never seen a Libertarian who wasn’t a neofeudalist. I don’t think they’re reachable. But maybe you have examples?
Immanentize
@Chetan Murthy: The old truths are the best truths:
“Libertarians are just hard Republicans who smoke pot.”
raven
@Immanentize: How’s it going?
Elizabelle
Joe Biden: “Democracy is on the ballot.”
Andrew Sullivan: “You’ve left me no choice but to vote Republican.”
Sad!
Immanentize
@raven: Ok. I’m a bit disoriented, finishing up my Mom’s bills etc. And I’m up too early — You?
Chetan Murthy
@Elizabelle: Sullivan’s hatred overcame his self-preservation instinct. Which is surprising (in a way): this summer he was pretty shocked to find himself at the business end of the MAGAts’ outrage cannon (as a gay man).
Frankensteinbeck
@Immanentize:
Sure, but those are the ones who vote Republican. I’ve never met anyone who votes Libertarian. Has anyone here? Are they like Greens, deluded followers of grifters and devoted to spurning the party that reflects their values most closely? How do they vote when there’s no Libertarian on the ballot? Do we know? The grifters do deliberately aim at siphoning liberals. This is the fringe of self-styled Libertarians, not the majority I know. Do they just not vote if it’s only Democrat/Republican? Didn’t the Johnson voters split both ways? I don’t think we can just say they’ll switch to Republicans in a situation like the Georgia runoff.
Kay
All of Tulsi Gabbard’s candidates and state ballot ssues lost, with the exception of Chuck Grassley.
She launched a You Tube channel November 1st, probably assuming she’d cash in on the big GOP wave.
I think she’s too late to profit from the antiwoke panic – that market is saturated and looking at election results it seems to me it’s a very limited market even best case, when it was still fashionable.
Raven
@Immanentize: Not bad, great Keys fishing trip! Now I’m resisting turning our rental into an air bnb but I’m losing!
Immanentize
@Frankensteinbeck: I agree with you. I knew a number of self-styled libertarians in Texas. Many were just Republican poseurs. But some had a definite if quirky world view. They were not racist, didn’t want anyone to be their boss (unless they paid them enough), were live and let live, good fences make good neighbors types. In short, old style Yankees. But there really aren’t many candidates, if any, that matched their club rules. So they voted for the person they thought would ignore them the most. Ron Swanson’s all.
Immanentize
@Raven: so good about the fishing — did you get any time in John Pennycamp? I love that park in the water.
Hoping the back/leg thing is improving.
Baud
Andrew Sullivan is like a past his prime rocker who’s coasting off of his early work. His support of Republicans should be as newsworthy as Mitch McConnell’s.
Steve in the ATL
@Immanentize:
I’ll drink to that! Um, of course I was referring to coffee. Sure.
Steve in the ATL
@Raven: you ready to watch the cowbells get silenced?
Steve in the ATL
@Baud: hello Cleveland!
Lapassionara
@Kay: I laughed out loud at this. What a joke she is.
raven
@Immanentize: No snorkeling but we did fish the reef, wreck and offshore. We did three trips in four days and had a great time with my brother and my old pals. I’m still working on the physical stuff. I had an injection before the trip and it helped. thx
Kay
Alito and Barrett took a gloating victory lap on overturning Roe at the Republican Lawyers Club event:
I wonder why most people think they’re political hacks? Could it be that they only appear at GOP/far Right events?
Baud
@Steve in the ATL:
Huey Lewis will never be past his prime!
Mostly because he never had a prime, but still….
raven
@Steve in the ATL: Man I was in the 600 level Saturday and it was incredible. Kirbs has them peaking and I don’t think they’ll let up. I have a plane reservation for LA if we happen to go. My sis lives about 3 miles from So-Fi!
Baud
@Kay:
Nicer than bodily autonomy.
Amir Khalid
@Elizabelle:
Interestingly, Sully’s Thatcherism and racism make him of an ilk With the Tory Thatcherite racists of Indian heritage who now hold power in Britain.
raven
@Baud: Walkin on a thin line . . .
lowtechcyclist
@Chetan Murthy:
They never think the leopards are going to want to nibble on their faces. Even when they’re right there on the menu that the leopards have been posting far and wide.
Immanentize
@Amir Khalid: Ahh, but they are old school chums even if they wear their old school ties as belts now.
Kay
@Baud:
Ha ha ha. Silly protestors. Don’t they get that she has a lifetime appointment?
Baud
@Kay:
No one knows their place anymore. Not like the Framers intended.
lowtechcyclist
@Baud: Huey Lewis had a prime, but it was only about three songs long. “Power of Love,” “I Want a New
DuckDrug,” and I can’t remember what the third one was.Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
Heart of Rock and Roll. Hence the reference to Cleveland upthread.
Steve in the ATL
@lowtechcyclist: ironically, his best song was years before his prime—“working for a living”
raven
@lowtechcyclist: Just for Vets Day!
Don’t you know me I’m the boy next door. . .
Steve in the ATL
@Baud: I was actually quoting “Spinal Tap” but that’s ok. Anything that leads to a dissection of Huey Lewis’ career is destined to be another Balloon Juice classic!
Steve in the ATL
@raven: nice! And I hope Kirby really sticks it to KY in a couple of weeks after that BS at the end of the game last year.
Kay
@Lapassionara:
November 8, Tulsi is barnstoring the country on behalf of far Right candidates and issues
November 10, looking at results, she becomes bipartisan.
Tulsi Gabbard
@TulsiGabbard
·Nov 10
Republican or Democrat, I don’t care—just do your job. People are struggling and need you to actually work for us, not a partisan agenda. That means working together to deal with inflation, out-of-control immigration, crime, big tech/media, deep state & warmongers run amuck.
She’s too slow to be a successful Right wing grifter. The “anti woke” grift was too crowded and losing steam by the time she climbed on.
Baud
@Steve in the ATL:
Oh, sorry. Missed the reference.
Steve in the ATL
@Baud: it’s fine! Now let’s get back to our Huey Lewis thread: did you know he went to prep school at Lawrenceville?
Baud
@Kay:
I look forward to her opposition to the GOP hearings on Hunter Biden.
Steve in the ATL
@Baud: she had me at deep state!
Kay
I love the pompousness and self regard of “The Federalist Society”. Trumpet blare!
I guess the Republican Lawyers Club is too low brow, if entirely accurate and much clearer.
Ivan X
@lowtechcyclist: I’m not even a fan, and never was, and I even can rattle off three more titles than that and could probably cough up one or two more if I thought about it. Not doing so to spare those who would rather forget.
Kay
@Baud:
I hadn’t realized she was an immigrant hater. Have the antiwoke pundits and influencers added that to their political platform?
Aloha!
raven
@Steve in the ATL: I thought you mean in Gwinnett County!
Chetan Murthy
@Immanentize: That would work in an old-style world where nobody’s way of life could affect their neighbor’s. But that’s not today’s world, and hasn’t been true for at least 50 years. Are they also 100% fine with decriminalization of all drugs?
There’s that trope, “economically conservative, socially liberal”, right? Or as someone put it, “likes the causes, doesn’t like the effects”.
And if they’re libertarian, where do they stand on antipoverty programs? On wealth taxes? On inheritance taxes?
Once upon a time in America, there was so much open land to be stolen from Native Americans at the barrel of a gun, that any white American could just up sticks and move out West; in that time, sure, you could say you were a libertarian (again, at the barrel of a gun) and maybe it had some meaning. But not today, where everyone’s economic activity impacts everyone around them.
Baud
@Chetan Murthy:
Truth.
@Kay:
They’re right wingers. They hate what the collective hates.
raven
@Chetan Murthy: One of my favs from Nanci Griffith
And the gold she lay cold in their pockets
And the sun she sets down on the trees
And they thank the Lord
For the land that they live in
Where the white man does as he pleases
Citizen Alan
I I hate that facile bullshit trope. If you are socially liberal and fiscally conservative you’re a Democrat!. Because the republicans have not been socially liberal or fiscally conservative at any point in the last 50 years.
lowtechcyclist
@Ivan X: Oh, I can rattle off more titles (the “I can’t remember what the third one was” was an attempt at humor) – I even have his Sports album – but I just don’t think his stuff has held up that well. Other than “Power of Love,” most of his stuff really sounds pretty ordinary to me now.
Chetan Murthy
@Citizen Alan: In the trope, the “economically conservative” means “no social safety net, no public funding of education, etc”. That’s not Democratic. It’s “no such thing as public goods” and “no social insurance”.
rikyrah
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: 🙏🏿🙏🏿🙏🏿🙏🏿🙏🏿and congrats
Betsy
@Kay:
Hmm, a straight-up list of Republican right-wing hogwash and fear-factor fauxnews, plus all the isolationism in the face of international fascist aggression
Sounds very bipartisan.
Chetan Murthy
@Citizen Alan: Oh, I see the problem. It’s not “fiscally conservative” — it’s “economically conservative” where that’s defined the way my American history professor put it to me once back in the early 80s: “principally concerned with the rights of property”. Or in this case, solely concerned with those rights. Thats economic conservatism, in the last 50 years.
rikyrah
@Immanentize:
Did you decide to get the land and move?
rikyrah
Gonna say this again about the voting age:
26th Amendment!!😠😠
Qasim Rashid, Esq. (@QasimRashid) tweeted at 0:31 PM on Thu, Nov 10, 2022:
MAGA logic: Raise the voting age to 21 because people need maturity to make this important decision—also any untrained 18-year-old can get a weapon of war and a raped 11 year old girl should be forced to become a mother because reasons.
(https://twitter.com/QasimRashid/status/1590774124867375104?s=02)
rikyrah
Palmer Report (@PalmerReport) tweeted at 0:52 AM on Fri, Nov 11, 2022:
If the new owner destroys Twitter, he destroys himself financially. He’s way too over-leveraged. He’d lose his net worth, car company, everything. As unwell as he clearly is, he does have some motivation to keep Twitter at least vaguely functional. We’ll see.
(https://twitter.com/PalmerReport/status/1590960624657649664?s=02)
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
Eh, I’ve got whatever the opposite of a soft spot is for songs that basically turn into lists, going all the way back to “Sweet Soul Music” and continuing on through “Heart of Rock n’ Roll” and Mellencamp’s “R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A.”
In its list, in addition to Cleveland, “Heart” also includes rock powerhouse cities like Tulsa and Oklahoma City, IIRC.
zhena gogolia
@sab: Inorite?
Steeplejack
@zhena gogolia:
And super genius Melania Trump.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: ongrats! I hope it turns out to be a place you really like.
lowtechcyclist
@rikyrah:
He’s been acting in extreme opposition to his best interests so far, and he keeps on digging that hole deeper as he goes along.
Steve in the ATL
@raven: I aways confuse her with Patty Griffin, whose “Long Ride Home” is fantastic
ETA: though her catalogue is rather thin overall
Ksmiami
@Baud: fuck her. We will destroy their majority one way or another.
Steve in the ATL
@rikyrah: the proper way to ask that question is “have you bobbed your hair yet?”
lowtechcyclist
@Baud: Yeah, I clicked through to the McArglebargle piece from a source that gave the title but not the author. Saw who wrote it, and didn’t need to read any further.
Like Sullivan, McMegan was one of those people it seemed we had to reckon with back in 2004 or so because enough other people took them seriously (though most of us in the lefty blogosphere at the time couldn’t understand why). Now they’re just people we don’t need to bother with, thank the Lord.
I guess enough people still care what Greenwald says that his stuff needs to be held up to point and laugh at, but I’m good with just forgetting he exists too.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Sounds like you’ll be employed!
Steve in the ATL
@lowtechcyclist: how do you feel about “Truckin’” by the Dead? And consider that Raven will pie you if you answer wrong!
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@sab: Honestly Pitchbot is 90% of the reason I have a Twitter account so if Doug moves to a new platform that’ll probably be what I migrate to.
Brachiator
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Congratulations on the new job. Hope all goes well.
Sounds like a wild interview and introduction to the company.
dm
Was it here that I saw the Charlie Kirk tweet, “From red wave to red wedding“?
If so, I apologize for the redundancy, though if you’re like me, you appreciate reading it again.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@lowtechcyclist: He’s been shockingly efficient in destroying twitter.
ETA: Trump isn’t centrist. He isn’t anything. He’s a head that’s empty of everything except “me! me! me!”
Geminid
@Chetan Murthy: I think Libertarian voters may be a larger and more politically diverse set of people than the Libertarians you describe. They obviously won’t vote for either of the two dominant parties, but some may have no particular attachment to Libertarian principles.
Georgia has consistently been one of the Libertarian Party’s strongest states. I wonder if Georgia’s runoff system encourages people who are simply hostile to the two party system to come out and vote Libertarian for the sake of monkey wrenching.
Some of these might sit out the runoff because their work is done. Other Libertarians with a more positive commitment to the ideology may stay home also. The ones who do come back out will split and vote against the party they happen to dislike most.
My feelings about the Georgia party are ambivalent. When Libertarian Shane Hazel held David Perdue below 50% and enabled Jon Ossoff’s runoff victory, I thought they were simply wonderful. But now that this asshole clown kept Warnock below 50%, they suck!!!
Argiope
@dm: As a midwife, I liked “The red wave turned out to just be mid cycle spotting”.
Chetan Murthy
@dm: I thought that was “dry-ass pussy” Ben Shapiro ?
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@Baud: In 1983 I think it was, Sports was huuuuge. Then he wrote the song for Back to the Future and disappeared.
Brachiator
Twitter frittered.
I remember when some tech evangelists described Twitter as a public utility, an essential service of society. Some suggested that it be formally supported by the government or regulated the way that other public utilities are supported.
Twitter and Facebook have both been popular and influential, and sometimes notorious. But Twitter has also given a voice to some who would otherwise remain invisible, people who lived under autocratic regimes and unstable governments.
Even if Musk totally destroys Twitter as he tries to force it to bend to his techno libertarian wet dreams, an equivalent service will probably take its place. The concept of what it can be is too valuable to lose.
Elizabelle
SO: Omnes put up a youtube link to Gordon Lightfoot’s The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald last night. That ship went down on November 10, 1975.
Song always haunts me. I’d never realized he was writing, in 1976, about an event that happened the year before. No cable news. I thought it had happened years or decades previously.
And the lyric: “The searchers all say she’d have made Whitefish Bay if she put fifteen more miles behind her.”
Is true. She just needed another hour under full power, but didn’t get it. The weather forecast on departure also did not adequately spell out the danger. (Although other captains stuck closer to shore.)
The ship appears to have broken into two parts on the surface, after hours in the storm, and sank rapidly. Never a mayday call. The captain had been on radio a few minutes before, reporting they were holding their own.
The storm was playing havoc with radar and communications of the day. The Fitzgerald’s radar was out. A nearby ship, the Arthur Anderson, had spotty radar at the time. But noticed the Fitzgerald had disappeared, and put out the call.
Again, haunted.
And interested in how that tragedy stayed somewhat regional news at the time.
Dorothy A. Winsor
Baud
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
👍
Elizabelle
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I feel optimistic about Nevada and Arizona.
And we have a real shot at Georgia.
I would love if it’s a razor thin margin in the House. No idea if there is a chance Democrats can still prevail, outright.
Brachiator
@Frankensteinbeck:
Good point. In the 2020 presidential election, the third party vote, including libertarian, largely evaporated. Reporting indicated that most of these votes went to Biden.
I don’t understand how some libertarians support Republicans when their Avatar, Ayn Rand was clearly pro-choice.
Ken
Plus the Republicans will be inventing a New Shiny Thing to keep their base agitated.
Though “woke”, like caravans and ebola, may be taken out of the box and polished for the 2024 elections. They didn’t use ebola this time, but I think four years will be long enough for any residual memory or shame about their COVID stance to make “OMG there’s a hideous infectious disease and DEMOCRATS are doing nothing about it” to be viable.
SFAW
@lowtechcyclist:
Any of his movies with Dean Martin.
dm
@Chetan Murthy: could be. Those “young” wingnut welfare types all look alike to me.
dm
@Dorothy A. Winsor: From your keyboard to God’s browser
Steeplejack
@Elizabelle:
My fantasy is that if, as seems likely, the GQP gets a razor-thin majority in the House, Nancy Pelosi (or her successor as minority leader) ends up effectively running things with the Dems and a small cohort of (relatively) sane Republicans, while Steve Scalise, Kevin McCarthy and Marjorie Taylor Green sit in different trees with their respective bonobo tribes and fling feces at one another and screech about Hunter Biden.
SFAW
@Chetan Murthy:
A/k/a “The Virgin Ben”?
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@Betsy: Waongers? Do these people even hear themselves? We don’t have troops in an active war for the first time in two decades and the guy who made that happen and was vilified for it… he’s the warmonger? Yeah right!
raven
@Steve in the ATL: Nanci was one of may favorites and I was very sad to read how embittered she became in her final years.
Geminid
@Kay: Gabbard may be setting herself up for a third party or Independent presidential run in 2024. She has elements of a good candidate. She’s glib, served four terms in Congress, is an Army veteran (a Lt. Colonel in fact), and already has a small but enthusistic base among tankies and the tankie adjacent that will collect signatures to win ballot spots. Plus she’s a looker.
If Gabbard goes that route the money will be there. Thiel and his ilk can see that financing someone who will peel off Democratic voters may be a good way to shape a Republican victory. The one Republican win in the last four elections was enabled by the unusually high 3rd party vote in 2016..
Baud
@Geminid:
Given what she’s done lately, it seems like she would peel off more GOP voters than Dems.
Elizabelle
@Steeplejack: I’d take that bet. May it happen.
All the more reason we are fortunate to have the years of experience of Biden and Pelosi and all the “out of touch” gray hairs (who actually are quite dialed in). And a younger group of leadership, learning from the masters.
MSM though. Yick. What a mess.
Ken
I made a quick check of a couple of twitter accounts that have been ordering ALL the popcorn for their Musk-watching, and it looks like “Twitter Blue” is no longer available in the US. If you try to subscribe you get an error message. This may change of course, since as several people pointed out, it sure looks like they’re now treating the production servers as development.
Also pointed out: This may be related to the FTC’s increased attention. Or perhaps some of the companies that were spoofed (Eli Lilly: “Insulin is now free”) have expressed their displeasure.
Baud
@Ken:
I expect trademark lawsuits.
Geminid
@Baud: That’s right now. Gabbard is a facile politician. She can make that bipartisan patter right up to September, 2024 and then calibrate her rhetoric to pull in the left while tacitly leaving her conservative followers to the Republican candidate. She’s slick.
Frankensteinbeck
@rikyrah:
I think he’s trying to keep Twitter functional. He’s an entitled, spiteful prick. Unlike his successful purchases, he is motivated to actively and heavily manage Twitter, and in doing so is displaying what an incompetent he is.
SpaceX works because someone else runs it while Elon takes the credit. Everything Elon sticks his nose into on Tesla fails disastrously, like the self-driving bullshit and the cybertruck. Elon fired the people who would run Twitter for him. Twitter is imploding because what Elon thinks are genius ideas to save it are actually “put gun to own head, pull trigger” level stupid.
eclare
@Steeplejack: Don’t insult bonobos.
trnc
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Nice! I hope it works out.
Eyeroller
@Frankensteinbeck: I was never likely to buy a Tesla but now I certainly will not since “Elmo” decreed that from now on their cars will have a steering yoke rather than a steering wheel, apparently because race cars have steering yokes so they must be cool and better. It apparently doesn’t occur to him that there’s a reason no other car manufacturers have adopted a yoke. I saw a review and apparently one has to use the touchscreen to change gears and the reviewer said that maneuvering in a tight spot where the driver had to repeatedly back up and pull forward was horrible.
Tony G
Jesse Waters, right-wing hack, is an old man of … 44 years. So now he’s blaming “the kids” (voters under 40) — and, of course, single women). (HIs ex-wife is a single woman now, after he left her for a much younger woman.) These Fox News talking heads don’t have to have any shame, because they know that their audience constitutes some of the stupidest people on the face of the earth.
Steeplejack
@Frankensteinbeck:
Musk may be trying to keep Twitter functional, but I don’t think he can get out of his own way. Similar to comedian Ron White’s “I had the right to remain silent; I did not have the ability to remain silent.” Twitter leaves all of Musk’s considerable flaws exposed, and he is feeling it. Not everyone can burst into a Tesla board meeting and tell him he’s full of shit, but on Twitter the lowliest troll or shitposter can mock him in public, and I’m sure he’s seeing it all because he can’t stop himself from ego surfing. And he has fired or is losing all the competent people who could act as a firewall to his impulses and incompetence.
Steeplejack
@eclare:
Sorr-ee! 🙊
bjacques
Nevada come seven, come eleven, baby needs a new pair of shoes!
Aaannnddd…low-hanging fruit:
Their early work was a little too new wave for my tastes, but when Sports came out in ’83, I think they really came into their own, commercially and artistically.
Tony G
@lgerard: The War on Christmas seems to start earlier every year. Back in the day, it used to start with holiest of holy days — Black Friday.
Tony G
@Mai Naem mobile: Blake Masters can go back to being Peter Thiel’s pool boy now.
Tony G
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Great! Good luck. One of the many things that annoy me about “our great news media” is that they keep bloviating about inflation while neglecting to point out that low unemployment is giving workers, and job seekers, more bargaining power than they’ve had in decades.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
So old I remember when Democratic voter Andrew Sullivan called me a fifth columnist for being right about Bush and Iraq
Mo Salad
@lowtechcyclist: I liked Jason Isbell’s Tweets from Nov 2020:
“Biden could still pull off the historical sweep of every state Steve Miller has been to in Keep On Rockin Me Baby.”
And he did.
https://twitter.com/JasonIsbell/status/1324105627011002370?t=3R5L_r6ITFlCpvoDrygCNg&s=19
sdhays
@Eyeroller: The over-reliance on the touchscreen was the first signal to me, years ago, that I was never going to be interested in a Tesla. Textbook user interface/experience design failure, and they marketed it like it was something to be proud of.
And they keep going in the wrong direction. I’m surprised the steering wheel isn’t a touch screen too.
zhena gogolia
@Tony G: I can watch that 40-second clip over and over and over.
OverTwistWillie
Clearly Americans aren’t clapping hard enough for a return to the Reagan-Bush era party system status quo.
Quick! To the Deloren Marty!
Kay
@Elizabelle:
Great Lakes shipping is super interesting – to me and other weirdos. This is a good story. It’s a family business:
Great Lakes shipping people call ocean going vessels “salties” – such a cute word for giant ships!
Steeplejack
kilgore trout, death to putiner:
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Steeplejack: If he wanted keep Twitter functional why didn’t he come in and actually talk to the regular worker bees and programmers and engagement staff and see what they think, instead of coming in like a bull in a china shop and throwing things around to see what sticks to the walls ( yes that was a train wreck of an analogy, not sorry! ) When ones first move is to fire half your work force with no actual knowledge of What They Do, I have a hard time believing one is a “genius” . More like Wiley Coyote, Super Genius….
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@sdhays: Ah touch screens, and when the touch screen starts malfunctioning do you have to open and close all the windows in the car, and then turn the car off and on… Touch screen to change gears?!
Steve in the ATL
@Kay:
They’re delivering bootleg fentanyl from Chinese factories?
Steve in the ATL
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone:
Rhetorical question or have you never seen a corporate takeover before?
Kay
@Steve in the ATL:
Pizza! They do Taste of Detroit deliveries. It’s cheap too.
Even people:
JML
@Geminid: Dems have already been burned by Tulsi and aren’t going to get fooled again. She’s fired out too much BS and got run out of the party for it, there’s zero appeal for democrats there and her positions are too confused for moderates either. GOP will only back her if she’s an option to clown the libs, which doesn’t work in a presidential. Thiel’s money might get her on the ballot as a libertarian or something, but that will harm the GOP more right now.
Immanentize
@rikyrah: hi! im getting the land, should close by the end of the month. But I’m not moving yet. I’m going to wait to sell my current place until the Spring. Then rent somewhere near the commuter rail to Boston for a while.
Kay
Very creative and public spirited, really. It’s educational. He’s up 60/40 too.
Tony G
@sdhays: When I become emperor I will ban the use of all touch screen controls in vehicles. They are a menace to human life even when they work perfectly — because using them requires the driver to take his/her eyes off the road for at least a few seconds to find the correct icon (whereas traditional controls can be — and should be — located and manipulated by touch alone while the driver watches the road.) At 55 mph a vehicle will travel about 80 feet in one second. So a lot can go wrong while the driver fiddles with his/her touch screen. A truly idiotic, dangerous design that should be outlawed.
Tony G
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Almost twenty years later, Andrew Sullivan is treated as a Serous Thinker.
Immanentize
@raven: yes, what happened? It sounds a bit like mental twists. Nancy was always one of the most gracious and fun artists in the folk scene according to folks who were also “recognized” but not “super stars.” Like Robert Earl Keen who I knew when I lived in San Antonio (he lived in Bandera). He thought Griffin was a Queen.
BTW, here’s one for you today, Raven (and all giving it a thought:
Drive On
Tony G
@Steve in the ATL: The worker bees are never talked to even in the absence of a corporate takeover. In forty years of “working” in I.T. I only ever laid eyes on my boss, and my boss’s boss. Anyone above that was invisible to me, and I was invisible to them.
NotMax
@Steve in the ATL
Delivery of bootleg rationality to Michigan up 300%.
:)
Tony G
@Steeplejack: Oh Christ, I’d already forgotten about Elon’s “carrying a sink” comedy routine from a couple of weeks ago. Is he still in seventh grade? Has he been left back for forty years?
OGLiberal
I read the Sullivan piece. Did he recently attend a few Qanon conferences?
“a policy of almost no legal restrictions on abortion (with public funding as well!); the replacement of biological sex with postmodern “genders”; the imposition of critical race theory in high schools and critical queer theory in kindergarten; an attack on welfare reform; “equity” hiring across the federal government; plans to regulate media “disinformation”; fast-track sex-changes for minors; next-to-no due process in college sex-harassment proceedings”
He says,
“voters are asked to choose between the extreme Left or the extreme Right”
Translation:
“I’m being asked to choose between a party that makes me feel bad for hating on trans people and one that wants an authoritarian theocracy that would like to negate my marriage and maybe even execute me for who I am….I’m going with the latter!”
Tool.
Elizabelle
@Kay: Reading this now. Great Lakes shipping is … something I know nothing about. Fascinating.
Elizabelle
From Kay’s article:
Nigel.
Kay
@Elizabelle:
My middle son is interested. He follows the ships online. He took me out in his tiny boat early morning to the Port of Toledo to watch them tow a skow that was disabled (electrical system) in. First they tried other things- bring people out to fix it, etc.
We waved to the crew on deck -rescued! – and they waved back. Then the wake of their huge vessel almost capsized us :)
Soprano2
@Elizabelle: There was no internet or cable news at the time. I was in high school and I don’t remember it. There was probably a story on the nightly news and a small article in the paper, nothing more. Sometimes I think those days were better.
Miss Bianca
@Immanentize: that pretty much sums up the only Libertarian I know personally, my pal D.
Immanentize
@Elizabelle:
Making Plans (on a boat?) For Nigel
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Tony G: I work in IT and I wish I were invisible…I have worked here a long time and my name comes up too often sometimes. A double-edged sword for sure. I have gotten a reputation for being too blunt, I’m just too old for subtle anymore. Part of the reputation for being blunt/confrontational/shrill is being female in IT. Oh well…
Immanentize
@Miss Bianca: I gotta admit I kinda like guys (and they were all man) like that. It felt very old-Texas to this transplant: grumpy but not unpleasant and would give you a beer.
Elizabelle
@Immanentize: XTC!
Soprano2
@Steve in the ATL: A long time ago I worked for a Champion International corrugated box plant that was bought by Stone Container. There were all kinds of rumors – they were going to fire us all and hire us back for half our wages, they would shut us down – but all that actually happened was they decentralized some functions so we actually got more employees. They knew what they were doing, at least on that front.
Immanentize
@Elizabelle: oh yes!
Mike in NC
Mark Kelly is the most famous American astronaut currently alive, so Republicans decided to run yet another shitbird ‘venture (vulture) capitalist’ against him. Like a replay of Obama vs. Rmoney. They never do learn.
Geminid
@JML: There are voters who vote for Democrats who are not Democrats. Independent (or Unaffiliated) voters are 30-35% of voters in most states. Some of them more or less consistently vote for Democrats but can defect to third parties, as many did in 2016.
There is also a small but loud cohort on the left who consistently try to undermine confidence in the Democratic party. Cenk Uygur, David Sirota, and Jimmy Dore are just a few of them. Right now they just have negative program of depressing the vote. A Gabbard candidacy would give them a more effective, positive program.
Gabbard could siphon off as few as two million Democratic votes and still turn the election. She’s a more atractive candida3re than Gary Johnson or Jill Stein, I think, and like I’ve said the money will be there.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Steve in the ATL: Oh yeah, I have, it was mostly rhetorical. I have seen New Broom syndrome before, just never to the extent Elon has taken it. I’m just watching in horrified wonder at the chaos he has managed to create in such a short period of time.
Elizabelle
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone: Disrupt the Broom.
Is not going like Elon anticipated. Moar popcorn.
@Immanentize: Saw them on that tour.
NotMax
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone
From hyperloop to hyperloon is but a short step.
//
Soprano2
@Kay: I wish more candidates would do things like that, most people have no idea about budgets. If we didn’t have dedicated taxes and fees people would try to put 90% of government’s money in police, fire, and fixing roads because those are the things we do that they see. I had my latest CamP Ambassador day on Wednesday (it’s a cool program our city has for employees, you apply and if you get picked you spend one day a month with your class learning about different city departments. I’ve worked here 29 years and can’t believe how much I didn’t know!) We had the Finance rotation; they have a Monopoly budget game that educates you about how they budget, how much money different departments have, and so on. I wish every citizen could see it. I’ve read about school boards doing this for citizens, too.
leeleeFL
@Amir Khalid: Do people still read Sully? I lost interest after the 2008 Obama election He started to revert to type pretty soon, and I never got why he brought his gay self here for freedom and then embraced people who embrace people who would gladly hang him in Gilead. Mind boggled, AMR?
Steve in the ATL
@Soprano2:
is that the Springfield box that is now part of WestRock?
Ghost of Joe Liebling’s Dog
@Tony G:
Thanks to Zoom, I’ve laid eyes on my last three bosses. Never met any of them though – they work thousands of miles away. (The company has just in the last few months paused the March Back to the Offices to the tune of Collaboration. I always wanted to know who I was supposed to collaborate with, at my office. I was the only member of my business unit who actually worked there … Divine Mystery, I guess.)
Gravenstone
To be fair, those were all cities bands would realistically visit during a tour in the 80s. Now you’re lucky to see bands that can fill more than a music hall outside the big metro centers.
Ruckus
@rikyrah:
He may have motivation but the job takes specific skills that he doesn’t look like he has a clue even exist.
Ruckus
@Mike in NC:
They never do learn.
Why the hell should they learn, they already know everything.
Just ask them.
Soprano2
@Steve in the ATL: Yes, it is!
pluky
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Chicago is no tech center? If not, it should be. Between the University of Chicago and UI-Champagne/Urbana one would think there is enough of an intellectual base, with a supporting finance sector spun off from the Chicago Board of Trade.
wenchacha
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: It was some time before his preference for using no condoms became public knowledge that I stopped caring what he had to say about anything. How long ago was that, anyway.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Soprano2: That’s a really good idea, I wish every high school did that.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@NotMax: Yep, Complete side note…I got so sick of Musk and his, We are going to colonize Mars bullshit. Yeah buddy, take a human biology or embryology class and come back and say that.
I did not thik he was going to implode Twitter quite this quickly though…it’s pretty horrifying if I let myself think about it. One super rich person can disrupt so many peoples lives…