Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

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

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

Anne Laurie is a fucking hero in so many ways. ~ Betty Cracker

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires.

You know it’s bad when the Project 2025 people have to create training videos on “How To Be Normal”.

Narcissists are always shocked to discover other people have agency.

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

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.

We can’t confuse what’s necessary to win elections with the policies that we want to implement when we do.

In after Baud. Damn.

This chaos was totally avoidable.

Republicans got rid of McCarthy. Democrats chose not to save him.

Giving up is unforgivable.

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

SCOTUS: It’s not “bribery” unless it comes from the Bribery region of France. Otherwise, it’s merely “sparkling malfeasance”.

It’s a good piece. click on over. but then come back!!

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

Oppose, oppose, oppose. do not congratulate. this is not business as usual.

Museums are not America’s attic for its racist shit.

The press swings at every pitch, we don’t have to.

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

The arc of the moral universe does not bend itself. it is up to us to bend it.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Late Night Open Thread: Louie Louie

Late Night Open Thread: Louie Louie

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Take (cold) comfort: Your company’s holiday party may be excruciatingly lame, but at least it doesn’t feature Gohmert on guitar. Or, it is to be hoped, cheez whiz as the main hors d’oeuvre…

Reader Interactions

74Comments

  6. 6.

    David ⛄ 🎅The Establishment🎄 🦌 🕎 Koch

     McConnell says Trump fueled ‘candidate quality’ problems in 2022

    “Our ability to control the primary outcome was quite limited in ‘22 because the support of the former president proved to be very decisive in these primaries.“

    To paraphrase Mark Felt famous quote: “Forget the myths the media’s created about the White House Mitch McConnell. The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.”

    Mitch could have been rid of Dump by impeaching him, thereby disqualifying him. But no, now he’s stuck with him.

  7. 7.

    piratedan

    just remember, while we find these “candidates” appalling on a national level, back where they are running… well, we just better remind our collective selves to not take anything for granted… sure, the voters rejected Kari Lake and Herschel Walker, but these loons still managed to have a million people vote for them.  Sobering shit that is.

    until the propaganda spigot is shut off, we have to continue to reach out and convince more people to vote and convince them that it will always mater.

  8. 8.

    Jim Appleton

    That video (yeach!!!1!!, but I’m glad it’s there) is a shameless bookend to the irrelevance of who, sadly, so many of our neighbors think should run things.

  10. 10.

    Another Scott

    Meanwhile, as we build the pie higher… Phys.org:

    Voting districts are redrawn following each census in the United States. In most states, new district maps are implemented by the state legislature. This makes the process prone to manipulation by the current majority party, or gerrymandering. Although the Supreme Court has ruled that gerrymandering violates the Fourteenth Amendment, it has not established criteria to evaluate cases, making the practice difficult to identify and correct.

    Researchers with the Institute for Computational Redistricting at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have proposed an alternative redistricting procedure in their article “A Bisection Protocol for Political Redistricting” published in the INFORMS Journal on Optimization. Their bisection protocol takes input from two major political parties and results in quantifiably fairer district maps by several common metrics.

    The bisection protocol begins with one party dividing the state into two halves of equal population. The other party then divides each of those pieces in half. Parties continue dividing the resulting pieces until the required number of districts is reached.

    According to the article’s lead author Ian Ludden, the bisection protocol draws inspiration from the “I cut, you choose” method of fair cake cutting.

    […]

    A Bisection Protocol for Political Redistricting.

    Interesting, and a clever way to make things fairer (at first blush).

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  11. 11.

    eclare

    The video of that “party” is so weird.  Did they intend to mock parties by serving Cheez Whiz and Mountain Dew?

  12. 12.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    Those House Freedom guys sure look like a pack of middle age guys who still think they are teens.

  14. 14.

    Amir Khalid

    I’m surprised that whoever hosted this didn’t think to organise some wine, and pay a caterer for some decent canapés and finger sandwiches.

  16. 16.

    MagdaInBlack

    @Amir Khalid: Oh no, that would be “elitist.”  These are just common folk, no upscale lib food for them.  I am a bit surprised there’s no cheeseball. ( Tho Gohmert might pass for that)

  17. 17.

    Ten Bears

    I have had some trouble with this notion some people have that you can just pick a cornfield up out of Iowa and put it back down on Mars and everything will be groovy. Doesn’t work that way. Every good reason presented to go to Mars is a good reason to go to Luna, the moon; every bad reason presented for not going to Luna are the bad reasons to go to Mars.

    But everybody looked …

  18. 18.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @MagdaInBlack: I am a bit surprised there’s no cheeseball. ( Tho Gohmert might pass for that)

    Yes, And were the marshmallow jello, were is the ranch dressing to offset the  spicy cheese-wiz?

  24. 24.

    MagdaInBlack

    @Ten Bears: My question is : If we have all this knowledge and technology to terraform a planet to make it livable, why don’t we use it here to keep this one livable ?

  27. 27.

    sab

    @lgerard: If I was idealogically Republican and politically active I would certainly leave the US and move to the UK just for the improved parties.

    Since I am not Republican I am happy I am here.

  28. 28.

    MagdaInBlack

    @lgerard: Reading that tells me this is just another “own the lbs” thing. We really do live rent free in their heads. They’re such silly people 🤗

    And it should have been Wonder Bread, if they wish to be authentic.

  32. 32.

    ColoradoGuy

    Compare Mars with the Gobi Desert, and the Gobi Desert is better in every way. 1G gravity (this is a big deal, people born on Mars can never return to Earth). Breathable air, for free, no processing required. Only hours away from civilization (by air). No perchlorate poisoning the soil. The Gobi Desert is an oasis of water compared to Mars.

    The Moon is a little worse than Mars, but not by much. The biggest problem is the very long day/night cycle, with extreme temperature swings.

  33. 33.

    David ⛄ 🎅The Establishment🎄 🦌 🕎 Koch

    @sab: I’m in Australia where everything is upside-down.

     

    Not only that, its already tomorrow down here, while in North America its still yesterday.

  34. 34.

    Martin

    @MagdaInBlack: The problems aren’t technological. Hell, we knew how to prevent climate change a century ago – back when we weren’t causing it.

    The problems are economic and political. Not that we don’t have enough money, but we don’t know how to tell the people that make money off of emissions that they’re no longer going to. And we don’t know how to tell Americans that they need to cut emissions by 75%, and that means we can’t have everyone rolling around in a truck (even an electric one) and running a space heater on their patio. That message causes you to lose your election, even if it’s an unavoidable fact.

    Mars substitutes technological problem for political/economic ones. Those are easier to discuss and think about, even if they don’t solve the problem. As a species we’ve decided that discussing things is an adequate substitute for doing things. And when shit goes sideways, we discuss who is at fault for things going sideways.

  35. 35.

    Martin

    @ColoradoGuy: No, the biggest problem is you can’t transit 8 billion people to Mars, under any scenario. The only people that find Mars to be an interesting puzzle to solve are the ones delusional to think they’ll make the short list to go there.

    None of them will make the short list to go there.

  39. 39.

    MagdaInBlack

    @Martin: Thank you for saying what I knew in my heart. It’s mostly a rhetorical question, because I know its lack of will to do whats necessary, because some folks would make less money and some folks would be inconvenienced.

  41. 41.

    Martin

    @opiejeanne: That’s conceptually easy – just inject a few lunar masses of iron at 5000K into the core of Mars and add a lunar mass in orbit to generate tidal forces in that molten iron to spin up the magnetic field.

    We should start by melting down all of the cars.

  43. 43.

    Martin

    Heh. Just saw that the $39K F-150 EV has had its price raised for the 3rd time to $55K.

    We ain’t gonna consume our way out of this, folks.

  44. 44.

    Chris T.

    @Martin:

    … And we don’t know how to tell Americans that they need to cut emissions by 75%, and that means we can’t have everyone rolling around in a truck (even an electric one) and running a space heater on their patio. That message causes you to lose your election, even if it’s an unavoidable fact.

    Same idea that, when you tell your kid that, no, he can’t have birthday cake for dinner every day, you get fired as a parent. The only difference is that the fired-as-a-parent thing doesn’t actually take.

  45. 45.

    Chris T.

    @Martin:

    We should start by melting down all of the cars.

    Probably easier to crash some nickel-iron asteroids into Mars, but I do see how this would solve a different problem. 😈

  50. 50.

    Princess

    If anyone things this is their actual party, I have a bridge to sell you. This one is to fool their supporters and tease the Libs (us). The oysters and cocaine came later. The only reason these people went to congress is to get money and spend it.

  52. 52.

    Geminid

    I am glad that goofy Gohmert ended his congressional career with a hapless run for Texas Attorney General. Now he’s just a Texas problem, and there is one less Washington problem. What a buffoon!

  55. 55.

    StringOnAStick

    @raven: Truly a strange film; I saw it when it came out and I still have disjointed memories the what a confusing and emotionally uncomfortable experience that was.  I was barely out of my teens and found the film very hard to parse

  59. 59.

    Ripley

    @Martin:

    We ain’t gonna consume our way out of this, folks.

    A good portion of my work team are hardware/network/systems people, while I’m working end user software/service/workflows. I keep telling my boss “We can’t hardware this place into the 21st Century.”

    It’s somewhat shocking how adamantly people will cling to the notion that “different stuff! new stuff!” will somehow turn things around and make everything A-OK. Or doubling down on provably outdated processes. (“If we just… more!”). smh

  60. 60.

    Capri

    The GOP has a much bigger problem than bad candidates. It’s how they got those bad candidates – their voters prefer them to mainstream republicans.  It’s not like there’s a smoke-filled back room where they are selected. In the primaries the voters could pick between Average Joe and Nutso the Clown and they went for Nutso every time.  How are they going to change that?

  63. 63.

    Geminid

    @SFAW: Gohmert did not run for reelection. Instead he ran for Texas Attorney General and came in third. This will be his last week as an active congressman. His term will end when the new Congress meets.

  64. 64.

    Geminid

    @Capri: I think the only thing that will change the dynamic you describe will be Democrats thrashing the Republicans for at least two more cycles. Then the radicals might give up the steering wheel, but it could be a hollowed out Republican party by then.

  66. 66.

    Another Scott

    @Geminid: If I had to bet, it would be more along the lines of Planck’s principle:

    A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it …

    An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth.

    — Max Planck, Scientific autobiography, 1950, p. 33, 97

    Colloquially, this is often paraphrased as “Science progresses one funeral at a time”.

    Moscow Mitch will eventually be gone. Same with all the rest of the monsters. Different monsters will replace them. A common thread is that they will always want to win re-election, so they will attempt to find ways to rile up their voters, squeeze money from their supporters, and tilt the playing field to make that happen.

    Politics is people, with all that entails. And individual people don’t like change, while people as a group are changing all the time.

    Grr…,
    Scott.

  67. 67.

    Chief Oshkosh

    @MagdaInBlack: I am lucky enough to work with and have friends and family across a wide, wide socioeconomic and cultural range. Even my cousins who self-describe as “hicks from the sticks” would never serve Cheez Wiz and Mountain Dew at an office holiday party that is indoors (and that distinction is a real thing).

  71. 71.

    Kathleen

    @eclare: The “party” was the pretense for the real GQP knee slapper holiday event – videos of children dying from hunger and disease.

  74. 74.

    Ruckus

    @Viva BrisVegas:

    I wanted to visit Antartica for a while, a long time ago. But I found out how long I had to sign up for the military to even have a chance at going. Seemed just a tad excessive, time wise, especially with zero guarantee I would get assigned there.

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