Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

Battle won, war still ongoing.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

“woke” is the new caravan.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

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

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

Not all heroes wear capes.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

Prediction: the GOP will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

No one could have predicted…

The words do not have to be perfect.

Consistently wrong since 2002

Usually wrong but never in doubt

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

You are here: Home / Politics / GOP Death Cult / Wednesday Morning Open Thread: Preaching to the GOP Q-Choir

Wednesday Morning Open Thread: Preaching to the GOP Q-Choir

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To start your morning, a story that doesn’t suck:

Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin plans to support young people through education and sports with the $8.6 million in GoFundMe donations that unexpectedly poured into his toy drive fundraiser after he suffered a cardiac arrest in the middle of a game last week.

He will also use proceeds from the sale of new T-shirts, emblazoned with “Did We Win?” along with his hands in the shape of a heart, to raise money for the trauma center in Cincinnati that treated him. Hamlin, who live-tweeted through his team’s victory over New England on Sunday, tweeted Tuesday that he has returned to Buffalo but is still in the hospital being evaluated.

The 24-year-old has teamed with The Giving Back Fund, a nonprofit that helps athletes and celebrities manage their charitable giving, to host the “The Chasing M’s Foundation” Charitable Fund. GoFundMe representatives told The Associated Press the crowdfunding platform will soon transfer the donations that have come in since Hamlin’s injury Jan. 2 to the new fund. Chasing M’s is Hamlin’s apparel company…

At the opposite end of the spectrum, Kevin McCarthy’s Republican Q-Caucus…


Tom Nichols never intends to go back to the Republican Party:

… There are some on the center-right who are hoping that the GOP has learned its lesson, and will restrain its fringe and finally leave Donald Trump behind. Ross Douthat, for one, wrote over the weekend—in a column that was hopeful to the point of fantasy—that the fight over the House speakership was “the old world come again,” a return to “the G.O.P. ancien regime with all its dysfunctions, stalemates and futility,” and that Trump, although “hardly finished,” has lost much of his grip on the party.

Good luck with all of that. A more authoritative voice, the new House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, also had a few things to say. The new House Republican majority, he tweeted on Sunday afternoon, would move in its first week to pass legislation to defund “the 87,000 new IRS agents,” establish a committee on the “weaponization of the federal government against citizens,” end Strategic Petroleum Reserve oil sales to China, and, in a nice flourish, hold “woke prosecutors accountable.”

The new House Judiciary chair, Jim Jordan, will lead the committee on “weaponization,” virtually guaranteeing that its hearings will turn into a festival of prancing nonsense that is unlikely to do very much but enhance Jordan’s visibility while he tears into U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement agencies at the expense of American national security. (Jordan has also dropped unsubtle hints that he intends to impeach Joe Biden.)…

Of course, the Senate and the White House remain in the hands of Democrats. This fact could make the House GOP even more prone to performative nuttery, because most members know that most of the time, indulging the fringe is unlikely to have real-world legislative consequences. If Biden continues true to his political form, he’ll likely ignore most of what goes on in the House. Biden is 80 years old; his political career spans a half century of American history, and the antics of the extremists will probably remain in his peripheral vision, if he notices them at all. (The exception here is Jordan, who has made noise about going after Biden’s son Hunter. But even if those hearings take place, they are unlikely to have any major impact on policy over the next few years.)

The good news is that most of the U.S. government remains in the hands of functional adults. The bad news is that the House is headed down the rabbit hole to its own Wonderland, where things will become “curiouser and curiouser,” and its members will have to placate their extremists by believing “six impossible things before breakfast” every day.

Preaching to the GOP Q-Choir

(Jack Ohman via GoComics.com)

Reader Interactions

274Comments

  2. 2.

    bbleh

    There really is a “death spiral” feel to this.  It’s bad for them both individually and collectively in the long run, but they just can’t resist the short-term thrill.

    I guess as Napoleon reportedly said, don’t interrupt your enemies when they’re making a mistake.  But I hope to hell the Biden-Schumer-Jeffries (+Pelosi) brain-axis has a plan for how actively to turn it to maximum advantage for the Dems, rather than just letting them make a mess of the place and worrying about cleaning it up later.

  4. 4.

    JML

    It’s interesting. The Democrats lost the presidency in 1980, 1984, and 1988 and responded with a real reckoning in where their policy focus was, their messaging, and how they oriented themselves as a party. (YMMV on how good some of those changes were, but they did it) They looked seriously at how to appeal to suburban voters and win elections. The Republicans lose and their response is to double down on their extremism. Maybe the problem is that the democrats didn’t manage to win a 3rd term in a row.

    I mean, it’s always the democrats fault for any political dysfunction in Washington DC, right?

  5. 5.

    Baud

    @JML:

    Yes, I think the problem is that they are still in the hunt, mostly because of structural issues.  This isn’t the FDR or Reagan situation, yet

  6. 6.

    Chris T.

    Someone should sneak in the SWAT-ization of city police forces, into the “weaponization” hearings, just to watch the Republicans try to backpedal.

  9. 9.

    Baud

    I love that, despite the current anti-woke “working class” posture of the GOP, their main policy agenda is  the same as Newt Gingrich’s from the 1990s.

  10. 10.

    Baud

    @Raven:

    The Federal Aviation Administration said flights are resuming now at New Jersey’s Newark Liberty and Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airports and will resume at other airports at 9 a.m. ET.

    Update 4: The FAA is making progress in restoring its Notice to Air Missions system following an overnight outage. Departures are resuming at @EWRairport and @ATLairport due to air traffic congestion in those areas. We expect departures to resume at other airports at 9 a.m. ET.

    Hopefully soon.

  11. 11.

    Jeffro

    “Education & The Workforce” just has that “freedom fries” ring to it, doesn’t it?

    Either that or sort of a EAT IT LIBS WE R RENAMING THINGS SINCE YOU TORE DOWN ALL OUR THE STATUES!!!1! vibe

  12. 12.

    Soprano2

    They seem to care more about creating video clips that will get them on Fox News than about actually governing. One of new House members seems to believe that voting on a bill to defund new IRS employees is the same as actually stopping the funding. The place you work, how does it work? 🙄🙄🙄 I hate the characterization, but some of these people are clueless idiots.

    As for “Workforce” instead of “Labor”, aren’t they the ones always whining about change? Historically it was “Labor”, which means work. How does that leave people out? It’s dumb.

  13. 13.

    Raven

    @Baud: Yea, my sis lives about a mile from LAX so, if the whole thing crashes, I won’t be stuck in the airport. I think I’m going to go.

  15. 15.

    Ken

    Now taking bets on the most deranged conspiracy theory for the cause of the FAA outage*.  Unfortunately we probably won’t hit peak nuttiness. Now if it had happened last Friday, when those two GOP congressmen were out of town and had to fly back for the vote…

    * The real cause will be one of (A) computers haven’t been replaced since 1977, (B) cyberattack, or (C) squirrel in the wiring.

  16. 16.

    Baud

    @Ken:

    Now taking bets on the most deranged conspiracy theory for the cause of the FAA outage*.  Unfortunately we probably won’t hit peak nuttiness. Now if it had happened last Friday, when those two GOP congressmen were out of town and had to fly back for the vote… how quickly David Sirota attacks Pete Buttigieg over this.

    Fixed.

  17. 17.

    Tom Levenson

    @Ken: Porque no los tres?

    1977 computers easily hacked by a Russian designed animatronic squirrel bearing packets of code written in Fortran.

  18. 18.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Baud: It’s partly because of structural issues, but the fact is, today’s Republicans are still far more popular than Republicans in 1944 or Democrats in 1984. We can try to break down why that is; I think it’s a combination of things. But it’s not all constitutional inequities.

  19. 19.

    Baud

    @Matt McIrvin: Is there a poll that confirms that, or are you basing it on election outcomes?  The Dems obviously still had the Dixiecrats in 1944, and still controlled Congress in 1984.

  21. 21.

    Geminid

    @bbleh: It seems to me that Biden, Schumer, Jeffries and company have two main tasks:

    1) limit the damage done by the radical Republican House majority, and

    2) use their messaging platforms to “shape the battlefield” of public sentiment on which the 2024 elections will be fought.

    I thought of this yesterday morning when someone said that Jeffries could not do “jack shit” while his caucus is in the minority. But thats only part of his job, I thought. What Jeffries and leadership partners Clark and Aguilar do in front of reporters outside the House chamber is very important work, and so far they’ve been good at it.

    I guess other tasks will be to maintain party unity among electeds, and unity and morale among the rank and file.

  22. 22.

    Amir Khalid

    I wouldn’t read a Ross Douthat column with a 10-foot pole. It’s nice of Tom Nichols to let us know that Douthat’s as full of, um … it as he ever was.

  24. 24.

    Ken

    @Delk: etymonline says “labor” dates from 1300, and “workforce” is from 1947. So yeah, dumping the term that’s been used for centuries in favor of one recently made up.

  25. 25.

    Steeplejack

    It’s not just the House.

    On her first day in office, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders has signed an Executive Order banning CRT, ending decades of oppression for white Arkansans.

    — Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) January 10, 2023

  31. 31.

    SFAW

    Until a couple of years ago, Mrs. SFAW wondered why I hated Rethugs so much. Them doing stuff like this opened her eyes as to why.

    And were there a Just God, every time a Rethug used “woke” the way GHWB used to utter “L-l-l-l-l-iberal,” there would be a smoking hole where said Rethug (formerly) stood.

  32. 32.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Ken: The idea that the term “labor” ignores the dignity of work is bizarre. For that matter, the idea that Marxism ignores the dignity of work is bizarre–at least classical, Karl Marx Marxism. Whether you agree with the labor theory of value or not, it’s all about that.

  33. 33.

    jonas

    The word “labor” ignores the “dignity of work” and is something “out of a Marxist textbook”? These people are fucking nuts.

    Marxism is virtually entirely predicated on the notion that work is inherently “dignified” and central to giving peoples’ lives meaning. It’s just that bourgeois capitalism destroys that by alienating workers from the true value of their work via wage labor.

    As with evangelicals and the Bible, it would help if people bandying about Marxism and the like had actually read anything by him.

  34. 34.

    Quinerly

    Good morning! Any BJers in the Silver City, NM area? JoJo and I are heading that way in about 5 weeks. Will be in the area for 10 days. Our 2 week Arizona Christmas trip put me back in my traveling frame of mind. Planning a Death Valley trip for February, 2024 and a month in Montana  for September, 2024. Have a great day!

  35. 35.

    Baud

    @Matt McIrvin:

    @jonas:

    When conservatives talk about the “dignity of work,” what they mean is the right of employees to freely contract with employers over the terms and conditions of employment, without interference from the state or the collective.

  38. 38.

    Matt McIrvin

    @jonas: If they complained that Marxism ignores the dignity of bosses, or the dignity of the stock market, it’d at least bear some relation to reality.

  39. 39.

    jonas

    @Baud: ​
     

    right of employees to freely contract with employers over the terms and conditions of employment

    With the implicit understanding that it will be the employer dictating the terms of employment and never the other way around. So correct — except for the “freely” part.

  40. 40.

    Amir Khalid

    @Tom Levenson:

    A 1977 mainframe computer has roughly one elebenty-zillionth* the processing power of a 2023 phone. It needs to be replaced because, one, you’re screwed if it malfunctions because no one knows how to fix them or write FORTRAN code anymore; and two, you can’t easily build new functionality into the system.

    Oh, by the way: Porque means because; if you want to ask why, it’s por que. I’m sorry, but I seem unable to stop myself pedanting at people

    * I believe this number is accurate.

  43. 43.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Baud: Thereby putting all the advantage of collective organization on the employer’s side, which is very convenient.

  47. 47.

    Miss Bianca

    @Tom Levenson:

    1977 computers easily hacked by a Russian designed animatronic squirrel bearing packets of code written in Fortran.

    Tom, have you ever thought about laying off the academic writing for a while and pitching scripts to Pixar? :)

  50. 50.

    NotMax

    As it’s open thread –

    Recently sat through the previously unseen Seven Thieves (1960) for the promising cast. Edward G. Robinson, Rod Steiger, Eli Wallach, Joan Collins, Alexander Scourby, Sebastian Cabot. Included, for now, on demand via FXM on Sling with the added Hollywood package (which I do have anyway in order to gain access to TCM).

    Unfortunately generic and journeyman heist flick. Watching Ms Collins writhe onstage in a revealing costume to a saxophone for what seems an eternity, however, is sumthin’ else.

    ;)

  52. 52.

    kirbster

    Judging by the insane overreaction to the classified documents story by GQP members interviewed by the CBS Evening News last night, I’m expecting a bill of impeachment to be filed and co-sponsored by every member of the House Freedom Caucus by the end of the week. Since Joe Biden was not President at the time the files ended up in a locked closet six years ago, will he be retroactively impeached as Vice President?

  55. 55.

    Quinerly

    @Geminid: yep. Lots of Billy the Kid stuff that way. I’m very stoked about this trip. This is the last area of NM I haven’t explored in my 12 years of “driving around and looking at things and talking to strangers” out here. I might do a day trip to Deming and NM wine country….that will be the only part that won’t be new. Hitting back roads around Datil and Pie Town either going or coming. That will also be new to me. Closest I ever got to that area was a little north of there….Ramah, El Morro, and the wolf sanctuary in Candy Kitchen, NM. I have been in a traveling fog since 2020. I feel like the fog has lifted. And that’s a good feeling. I think Silver City will be fun. Off season, no tourists, locals wanting money to be spent….plus, a college town.

  58. 58.

    Baud

    Never in recent history, perhaps, have so many Americans viewed the Supreme Court as fundamentally partisan.

     

    Public approval of the nine-justice panel stands near historic lows. Declining faith in the institution seems rooted in a growing concern that the high court is deciding cases on politics, rather than law. In one recent poll, a majority of Americans opined that Supreme Court justices let partisan views influence major rulings.

  59. 59.

    Origuy

    My 10:00 flight from San Jose to San Diego is delayed By 1:22. I think I’ll go to the airport anyway. They have WiFi there too. And food.

  60. 60.

    Eyeroller

    @Amir Khalid: FYI plenty of people still know how to write Fortran (correct spelling) but it would never have been used for an application like this.  COBOL is nearly as old and was used for “business” applications (it’s even in the name) from a very long time ago.  Fortran is and always has been a scientific programming language.   Fortran predicts the weather among other things.

    — A Fortran programmer

  61. 61.

    Ken

    @Fester Addams: I love Human Resources Day!  Watching the hilarious mandatory training videos, filling in the Health Care Plan “Choose Your Own Adventure” forms, seeing if you can get a perfect score on the mandatory quizzes without reading the HR manual first. (Pro tip: “Should you accept the gift from the client” is always a “no”.)

    Just an all-round day of fun, and practically a day off work. You’re certainly not doing the work you’re actually paid for.

  62. 62.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Amir Khalid:

    I wouldn’t read a Ross Douthat column with a 10-foot pole. It’s nice of Tom Nichols to let us know that Douthat’s as full of, um … it as he ever was.

    Yeah, it’s safe to assume Douthat hasn’t suddenly gotten better.  The talent pool for right-of-center columnists must’ve been awfully thin for Douthat (and several others whose names slip my mind right now) to get an elevated perch like the one he has.

    And of course, those elevated perches have to have ‘balance’ so they’ve got to have a certain number of right-of-center columnists, even if the highest and best use of their columns is to wrap fish.

  64. 64.

    MisterDancer

    @Matt McIrvin: @Baud: Yeah, Matt, I’m confused as hell by your comment, too.

    The GOP of 1944 is a different animal in many ways than the one today. It’s not quite Apples and Oranges — the overtures from GOP members to the Jim Crow bloc were going on in that era, too — but I can’t suss out your meaning, given the key differences in the party compositions back then.

  69. 69.

    Soprano2

    @kirbster: What’s funny about that is that by overreacting so much they’re admitting that what TGF did is really, really bad. I don’t believe they think about it like that, though. ETA – did any of the news people ask them about TFG and his documents?

  70. 70.

    NotMax

    @Baud

    The fourth school of umprisim.

    There are balls and there are strikes and I calls ’em as I sees them.
    There are balls and there are strikes and I calls ’em as they are.
    There are balls and there are strikes and I calls ’em but they ain’t neither ‘tll I says so.
    There are balls and there are strikes and I calls ’em to please my overseers.

  72. 72.

    Matt McIrvin

    @MisterDancer: Mostly that, even though the Republican platform may be unpopular, I can’t conceive of one of our presidential candidates winning with the kind of broad landslide that FDR or Reagan managed. 1936 might be a better example for FDR–the winner actually getting 60% of the popular vote. There seem to be just too many voters who will never under any circumstances vote for the Democrat, and we’re stuck forever in this game of inches.

  74. 74.

    Citizen Alan

    @Matt McIrvin:  It’s really quite simple. The GQP is the party of reactionary white supremacy. And while their numbers are diminishing, white people remain the single largest voting block in the country.  Imagine that it’s 1932,, and somehow, stock brokers represent the majority of the electorate. The New Deal would never have happened.

  75. 75.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Baud:

    I don’t know.  How many followers does he have?

    I don’t know. I never see anyone quoting Sirota on Twitter, even just to tear him down.

    Until people here started talking about him over the past few weeks, I’d pretty much forgotten he existed.  And I was actually a bit of a fan of his, back in the mid-’00s.

    I guess the real question is, does anyone outside of his far-left bubble pay any attention to him?

  76. 76.

    frosty

    @Quinerly: Have a good Road Trip(s). We leave for Key West in two weeks via Autotrain and not trailer. I’m starting to plan some shorter camping trips for the summer and fall: Maine, southern Virginia, Michigan.

  77. 77.

    Soprano2

    Good morning! I went to the pain doc and got good news – they’re going to give me an SI injection without making me do PT because of how much I already exercise; also, I could probably tell them what the PT exercises on the printout they gave me are! Appointment scheduled for the 24th, so pretty quick actually. If I get a second injection it won’t be for 6 weeks. Last time I got a second one two weeks later, but I probably didn’t actually need it.

    On another note, today one of my dogs is wearing a “Cone of Shame” because he has a drain from surgery he had yesterday to remove a growth the size of a grapefruit! He’s a big dog, but I was surprised at how big that growth was. In December it had grown 3 cm since May, so our vet recommended we have it removed even though it’s not cancerous. I seem to remember someone had a suggestion for something better than a cone. He has to wear it until Saturday to make sure he doesn’t pull the drain out. Poor guy, I feel sorry for him. When I left the house he was lying on the couch looking kind of dejected.

  78. 78.

    Quinerly

    @Miss Bianca: we still need to get together when you come Santa Fe way again….which reminds me…..I need to message Cheryl. She came to my new home for a party I gave back in the summer. She and I need to get together. My door is open to you. Come see me!

     

    I had several good AirBnB options in Silver City at very good prices. Kinda was hard to choose. I guess it’s pretty popular in the summer, so lot of getaway type set ups. All hosts said most stuff in town open in February….possibly limited hrs or just Thurs-Sun. Considering we are there 9 nights, stuff not being open won’t be a problem….plus, college town and hospital there. I haven’t been this excited about exploring a new area in a long time.

  80. 80.

    SFAW

    @Eyeroller: ​

    Fortran (correct spelling)

    As opposed to “FORTRAN”? Or did Amir have an actual misspelling of the name? Pedanting over all-upper-case-versus-initial-caps might not be a hill you want to die on, since although it’s (currently) appearing both ways, it was all-upper-case for many years.​​
     
    ETA: Now get offa my lawn.

  83. 83.

    Geminid

    @Quinerly: Silver City has a new Congressman. Most Representatives do not make much news on national  sites. The local paper will probably have some Gabe Vasquez stories, though.

    He strikes me as a very promising politician. I think Vasquez is in his late 30s. A former Las Cruces City Council member, and a Notre Dame grad.

  84. 84.

    WaterGirl

    @Baud: I wonder if the Rs who are part of that majority think it’s a good thing!

    I would like to see a poll on whether people think it’s a good thing that the Supreme Court is now ruling based on partisan politics.

  85. 85.

    Baud

    @lowtechcyclist: Hard for me to say. Most of the cast of deplorables we talk about on this here blog, I suspect, are not widely known.  I personally hadn’t heard of Andrew Tate before he was arrested, and he’s apparently far more popular than Sirota.

  87. 87.

    Steeplejack

    @SFAW:

    Back in my day is was FORTRAN (“formula translation”), but they officially changed it with Fortran-90, according to Wikipedia.

  88. 88.

    frosty

    @Quinerly: I’ve been to Key West a few times. First with my grandparents when I was five. I remembered some of it! Once in my twenties, and two other times during Snowbird Road Trips in the last few years. We decided to splurge and get a cottage for two weeks and leave the trailer at home this time.

    When were you there last? Have you been to Dry Tortugas?

  89. 89.

    Origuy

    @SFAW: The ISO standards committee made Fortran the official spelling years ago. Also Cobol, which I used to be on the committee for.

    Now my flight is delayed two hours. Not sure if I should rebook my taxi.

  92. 92.

    Quinerly

    @Geminid: how exciting! I have been reading about him but didn’t realize the Silver City connection. I’m sure you know pockets of RWNJs in Southern NM. I learned the hard way on an extended stay in Las Cruces and Deming area right after Trump was inaugurated. Lots of ranchers who thought Trump was their lord savior.

    The picking process for the AirBnB was kinda fun. I was messaging hosts in Silver City asking questions. Mostly town and JoJo related. All 3 hosts that I was considering and I were sending out signals to each other as to where we stood politically without flat out asking, of course. It seems like we were all passing each other’s little tests.

  94. 94.

    Dangerman

    “Individuals who contribute to the workforce but aren’t part of Labor”

    WTF does that even mean other than a cheap shot at Labor/Marxism?

    Also, did these assholes ever take an Economics class?

  98. 98.

    mrmoshpotato

    New: Rep. Buddy Carter confirms to me that his Fair Tax Act will get its first-ever floor vote as part of speaker talks. Bill abolishes IRS, eliminates tax code, replacing income taxes with consumption tax – rolling back pieces of GOP tax law

     

    It was a demand of the 20 holdouts

    Unholy hot stupid mess, Batman!

  99. 99.

    Quinerly

    @frosty: never made it to Dry Tortugas. Has been on my bucket list. Late 1990’s was last time I was in Key West. Met an old boyfriend who had an old fraternity brother who was managing a resort/hotel. I’m not a resort/hotel kinda chick, so that kinda tainted the stay. The frat guy manager moved us around from suite to suite each night since we weren’t paying. All and all it was kinda funny. I thought it had lost its charm then because so commercialized.

    Did you get one of those cottages at the Truman Annex?…I think that’s what that area is called. I have St Louis friends who were renting a cottage there for the month of February for years until he got diagnosed with Parkinsons. They loved that area.

  100. 100.

    Soprano2

    @mrmoshpotato: I always wonder, who do the abolish-the-IRS people think is going to manage the taxes the federal government collects regardless of what they are?

  101. 101.

    Jeffro

    @kirbster:Since Joe Biden was not President at the time the files ended up in a locked closet six years ago, will he be retroactively impeached as Vice President?

    And as long as we’re doing that, shouldn’t we really be impeaching Obama retroactively as well, for bringing Biden aboard?

  103. 103.

    mrmoshpotato

    now that GOP is back in control. GOP committee leadership says the term labor “is something out of a Marxist textbook” & “creates a sense of enmity between employees and employers”

    JFC!  These sentient shitstains!

  104. 104.

    Raven

    @Quinerly: My n my boys went fishing there in October. We stayed on Marathon and went to Key West for a couple of hours.  “The Story So Far. Books & Books @The Studios of Key West is the brainchild of a small group of local booklovers, led by George Cooper, who previously founded the Tropic Cinema, and his wife, the beloved writer Judy Blume.”

  108. 108.

    Nelle

    @Steeplejack: i just got a notice that the super majority (red red R) is rushing a school voucher program through without committee meetings or time for public comment this week.  This would, as I understand it, suck about 7,000 per student in private schools out of public school money.  At least half of the counties have no private schools.  I also haven’t heard of any standards or accountability for private schools.  They are also free to reject anyone that they want.  Some rural Republicans prevented it from passing in tge past; Kim Reynolds funded opposition to them and some of them lost.  This is her number one priority- gutting funding for public education in Iowa.  We also pay the highest property tax here of Aany place that we’ve ever lived.  Oh, and they seem to have removed the income cap off of parents to qualify for the funds.

    I’m thinking of starting my own private school,  dedicated to the Democratic party platform.  Bet we wouldn’t get funding…

  109. 109.

    Eyeroller

    @SFAW:  It’s always been the more correct spelling.  Originally it was written Capital F with the rest in small caps, which are not very widely used or available, so it went to all caps in most writing.  But it became official with Fortran 90 to write it “normally.”  It’s not an acrononym, it’s a portmanteau of Formula Translation.  Amir wouldn’t have any reason to know this so I was just pointing it out.  (COBOL is an acronym but apparently they changed that spelling also, since it’s now just a name and has been for a long time.)  Would you be less hostile if I’d said something like “oh by the way, the correct spelling is Fortran”?

  111. 111.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @BlueGuitarist: Twitter is abuzz with clips of Hannity interviewing the new House leadership (I think it is) in the Capitol. It’s the most diverse R caucus in history! Which is true, I guess. I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch any of them

    Aaron Rupar @atrupar

    Hannity claims that a room full of white people is an example of “more diversity in the Republican Party“

    The show also included this nugget from the new head of (I believe) the House Oversight, the man vowing to be the Inspector Javert of Hunter’s dick-pix

    Aaron Rupar @atrupar
    James Comer includes Ukraine in his list of US “adversaries across the world”

  112. 112.

    SFAW

    @Steeplejack:
    As a FORTRAN IV user (wrote my thesis in it, but can’t really call my work “programming,” because it didn’t work as well as it shoulda), I reject the woke spelling.​
     
    ETA: A former co-worker had a T-shirt which read something like: “Does anal-retentive have a hyphen?” He said he’d get three types of reactions:
    1) Quizzical looks
    B) People laughing because they got the joke
    7) People stopping him to explain/argue why it did/didn’t

  113. 113.

    Quinerly

    @Raven: I want to hear more!!!! Can I catch you on tomorrow’s morning thread? Today is my Albuquerque Costco day and lunch with a friend driving over from Moriarty, NM. I need to get going. I sometimes forget how fun the AM threads can be. Like the old days! Good luck with your flight today.

  115. 115.

    Yutsano

    So the House is for sure going to go cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs and divided government won’t yield crap for two years. This will be fun. As in not fun.

    Oh well. I’m going to finish packing and drive to Canada today!

  116. 116.

    Eyeroller

    @SFAW: I have a tee shirt “There are 10 types of people. Those who understand binary and those who don’t.”

    I also have an OLDE FORTRAN tee shirt (Bender from Futurama’s drink of choice).  All the letters are capitals there so it’s consistent with either spelling.

  117. 117.

    frosty

    @Quinerly: I don’t know where the Truman Annex is. We’re a block or two east of Duval I think. I told a friend we weren’t in walking distance, we were in knee-walking distance.

    My days of being attracted to bar-hopping all night are in my past, so I’ll just have to enjoy the weather and being lazy(er). We booked a trip to Dry Tortugas, so I’ll be able to check off another National Park.

  118. 118.

    SFAW

    @Eyeroller: ​

    Would you be less hostile if I’d said something like “oh by the way, the correct spelling is Fortran”?

    My, my, aren’t we sensitive.
    “Formula Translation”? Wow, thanks for nerdsplaining. Having first programmed in it 40-odd years ago, I certainly had no idea, because … oh, wait, I did know that. Dang!And is “COBOL” really an acronym? Or just an abbreviation that one can sort-of pronounce?As contrasted with “BASIC,” which really is an acronym.
    OK, time for me to toddle off to errands and work.​

  119. 119.

    SFAW

    @Eyeroller: ​
     

    I also have an OLDE FORTRAN tee shirt (Bender from Futurama’s drink of choice). 

    Haven’t watched Futurama much, so I missed that one, but I like it.

  120. 120.

    Raven

    @Quinerly: Yea, I don’t know when I’ll get home, it looks like the FAA has a handle on things but it will still be a long day/night. I will say that our trip consisted of three offshore fishing trips in four days!

  121. 121.

    jonas

    @Eyeroller: I also have an OLDE FORTRAN tee shirt (Bender from Futurama’s drink of choice).

    I love that gag. IIRC, Futurama head writer, David X. Cohen, has a degree in CS.

  122. 122.

    Soprano2

    @Nelle: Removing the income caps is the tell; usually they bleat something about how they want to help the poor inner-city black kids escape from terrible schools, but I guess in Iowa that doesn’t pass the laugh test.

  123. 123.

    mrmoshpotato

    I’m at a loss for words…

    Via bluegal

    Whoever filled out a cougar sighting report and wrote "your mother" under the description drop your @ we just want to talk— Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation (@OKWildlifeDept) January 9, 2023

  125. 125.

    gwangung

    As an aside, Asian American social media is off in Cloud 9 land over the twin wins of Ke Huy Quan and Michelle Yeoh at the Golden Globes last night. And the utter grace and appreciation of their acceptance speeches is totally winning hearts.

    And there’s no other person that the Asian American acting community identifies more with than Ke Huy Quan….

  129. 129.

    Geminid

    @Quinerly: I don’t know if you read Louis Lamour books. He wrote a gazillion Westerns and one of the better ones, Reilly’s Luck, has scenes in and around Silver City. At one point the hero falls in with a wary stranger on a trail south of Silver City. It turns out they know each from riding ponies around Silver City together when they were kids.

    They ride on to a hospitable ranch, and part ways the next day. A few weeks later the hero hear news that his old friend “the Kid” had been gunned down at Fort Sumner.

  131. 131.

    Ken

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: Maybe he means diversity of DSM-5 conditions?

    Or delusions — this group thinks Jewish space lasers are controlling people’s minds, these that over a hundred thousand children are ritually murdered every year in a New York pizza parlor, here are our traditionalists who think the world is 6000 years old…

  132. 132.

    Subsole

     

    @Soprano2: No one. That’s the entire point. No IRS, no taxes. That’s the pitch.

    You get to keep all your money, citizen! It’s all yours! You get to be free and eat cookies in bed and do whatever you want, always and forever! Mom can’t tell you what to do anymore, and neither can that jerk Todd, that she married. He’s not your real dad anyway. Stupid Todd…

    How are we going to pay for the army and the bridges and electric and sewer and the minting of money and all that other stuff?

     

     

     

     

    Man, don’t even worry about that right now…

  133. 133.

    Faithful Lurker

    @Geminid: The Louis Lamour books were an important source of entertainment during the year I spent in very rural China. There were 4 Westerners (Americans) on the campus of the university where I Was teaching English. One of the other Americans had a stash of Lamour books and I think I read them all. After reading them I passed them on to my Chinese students. It’s not easy explaining what a Remington (rifle) is to kids who’ve never seen a gun or blue eyes.

     

    @Geminid:

  134. 134.

    catclub

    @Soprano2: As for “Workforce” instead of “Labor”, aren’t they the ones always whining about change?

     

    Maybe they want to give more rights to robots in the workforce.

  135. 135.

    Subsole

    @Kosh III:

    1. They’re Unwhite.

    2. That oil belongs to the GOP’s good friends in Russia.

    3. Lol pronouns, or somethin’. I dunno anymore. Neither do they.

  136. 136.

    Subsole

    @Nelle:

    Put a big gold-plated Jesus on it and you might.

    You could actually slide a pretty solid Democratic platform in under basic gospel teaching. You could also cherrypick Leviticus, come to that. Especially the chapters on debt forgiveness.

    Just gotta be subtle-like.

  137. 137.

    VOR

    @Nelle: IIRC Louisiana had a law allowing state funding of religious charter schools. But it hadn’t occurred to the authors that the religion in question could be something other than Christianity. Like say, an Islamic school.

    Reagan signed gun control laws once the Black Panthers started carrying long guns in public. These guys rarely think about the upper hand being on the other foot. (h/t to Hot Shots! Part Deux)

  138. 138.

    piratedan

    @Quinerly: In the Silver City Area I would suggest a drive into the Gila National Forest, while the road winds quite a bit, many of the overlooks are quite beautiful.  It’s not a place to do so much as see.  On the other end of the drive, puts you just a few miles short of Hatch, in case you need to stock up if you have a green chile fix that requires attention.

    I don’t have much use for Lordsburg or Deming, but depending on your agenda, the drive south of Lordsburg at Road Forks (NM 80 I believe) will take you down to Rodeo NM, which is on the east side of the Chiricahua Mountains, its quite pretty there, along the way there’s a neat little museum featuring critters of the Sonoran/Chiricahuan desert… if you continue on, that will eventually take you into Douglas, AZ.

  139. 139.

    catclub

    @Nelle: The report on NPR  of a wild new GOP school board that promptly fired the School superintendent ( after not mentioning that at all during the campaign) — had this (I think from the fired supe)  “This school board’s plan is to cause chaos in public education and push private and voucher schools.”

     

    I think he got it right.

  141. 141.

    Baud

    @Kosh III:

    Probably has to do with this.

    Today, the Biden Administration announced that it is releasing the next Notice of Sale to supply additional barrels of crude oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) onto the global market, building on the more than 125 million barrels of oil that have already been sold. A new analysis from the Department of the Treasury estimates that these releases, along with coordinated releases from international partners, have reduced gasoline prices by up to about 40 cents per gallon compared to what they would have been absent these drawdowns.

  145. 145.

    Renie

    Santos News: Nassau County GOP Group has called for Santos to resign.  This is major news in Nassau County. It has never happened before in their 100 year history.  They publicly stated they do not consider him to be one of their congressmen and he is not welcome in the party and will not be welcome at any of their events.

  147. 147.

    catclub

    @mrmoshpotato: ​
    &nbsp

    ;It was a demand of the 20 holdouts

    I really hate the coverage of the ‘a single member can call for the removal of the speaker’. Because it is actually ‘a single member of the majority, can call for removal of the speaker.

  150. 150.

    Soprano2

    @Subsole: Except they say they’re going to replace them with consumption taxes. Who is going to manage and collect those taxes? These people aren’t very smart.

  152. 152.

    frosty

    @Geminid: I’ve got a box in the attic with almost all of Louis L’Amour’s books. The Sackett Brand was my favorite.

    “Forty gunslingers  from the Lazy A have Tell Sackett cornered under the Mogollon Rim.”

    “They’re going to need more.”

    Then Sacketts from all over the west ride in to help their kin.

  153. 153.

    mrmoshpotato

    @Westyny:

    The beclowning will continue until morale improves?

    I don’t know.  I’ve never known with these Rethuglicans assholes.  And they’ve been a god-damned pile of shit since before I was born.

  154. 154.

    catclub

    @VOR: IIRC Louisiana had a law allowing state funding of religious charter schools.  There are at least two bad sides to this.  Besides funneling money to religious schools, it was also not subjecting them to any quality control or curriculum requirements ( which of course would infringe on religious liberty dontcha know).

     

    I think Kay can tell about giving charter schools free rein in Ohio.

  155. 155.

    Mike in NC

    @Renie:  It appears that Santos (or whatever his name is today) inherited the sweater vest collection that once belonged to Rick Santorum.

  157. 157.

    topclimber

    @Renie: There was a time the Nassau County GOP was probably the most powerful county machine in their party. They only lost a little clout when court cases revealed a forced dues donation (1% of salary) for any Republican office holder.

    Sen. Al D’Amato testified in court that this was a good thing, and it probably was..for the GOP. A 1% tax to basically assure lifetime employment and no accountability to the public, because the party would handle anything beyond acceptable levels of corruption and employee abuse–SOLD!

  158. 158.

    Brachiator

    @gwangung:

    As an aside, Asian American social media is off in Cloud 9 land over the twin wins of Ke Huy Quan and Michelle Yeoh at the Golden Globes last night. And the utter grace and appreciation of their acceptance speeches is totally winning hearts.

    Eons ago, I discovered Hong Kong action films. Bruce Lee movies were my gateway drug. Along the way, I ran across Supercop 3, featuring Jackie Chan and Michelle Yeoh. I was astounded by the stunt work, but also thought Yeoh was a very charismatic film personality and good actress.

    I looked for her films in specialty video stores in Los Angeles. I am so glad to see that she continues to work and to get more recognition for her talents. Loved her as an inspiring captain in the first episodes of Star Trek: Discovery as much as I admired her in Crazy Rich Asians.

  160. 160.

    BlueGuitarist

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist:
    @atrupar reports Ronny Jackson is fundraising on
    “Biden and democrats want to ban gas stoves in every home. including yours” and if they
    “come for my stove, they can pry it from my cold dead hands.”
    I vaguely recall the light bulb hysteria.
    Maybe easy bake ovens are next.

  161. 161.

    Brachiator

    @BlueGuitarist:

    Maybe easy bake ovens are next.

    Aren’t easy bake ovens all electric. The Democrats are trying to subtly control kids by getting them to go electric.

    Look out for Barbie’s Solar powered dream house.

  162. 162.

    BlueGuitarist

    @Renie:

    thanks for this!

    Maybe further investigation into Santos and Zeldin, and their FEC documents, with the same campaign treasurer with a penchant for anonymous line items at $199.99, will make it harder for Rs to hold  NY-03.

  163. 163.

    The Moar You Know

    The report on NPR  of a wild new GOP school board that promptly fired the School superintendent ( after not mentioning that at all during the campaign) — had this (I think from the fired supe)  “This school board’s plan is to cause chaos in public education and push private and voucher schools.”

    @catclub: I want to know how the fuck they rate NPR.  This exact same scenario happened to my local school board over the last two years and we could barely get local media to cover it.

    We got the majority back, barely, but the two goopers left are doing their level best to fuck it up for everyone. Fortunately, the new majority did what they should have done years ago and lawyered up, so they have been prepared for the bullshit, unlike the last few boards.

    There is a racial component that is going to prove rather interesting.  A bunch of conservative Chinese have allied with the GOP and are trying, among other things, to get a Chinese-only charter school established.  They’re telling the community it’s because the Hispanics are dragging them down and selling it to the Chinese community as “you won’t have to send your kids to school with those degenerate white kids”.  It’s gonna be a fun year.

  164. 164.

    Sure Lurkalot

    @mrmoshpotato: Like Baud, I didn’t know who Andrew Tate was before his troubles nor had I heard of Damar Hamlin.

    What a contrast.

    I hope Mr. Hamlin makes a full recovery and continues his good work helping people and spreading joy.

  165. 165.

    Geminid

    @frosty: I like just about all of Lamour’s books, some more than others. Passin’ Through is a good one. There are several volumes of short stories that are worthwhile.

    Lamour started out writing hard-boiled detective short stories. He also wrote an adventure series set in the pre-World War Pacific area. The hero, Pongo Jim, flies in and out of danger in his amphibious plane, saving endangered young women from predatory Japanese agents. Then Lamour turned to Westerns and never looked back.

    Louis Lamour did write a couple non-western novels later in his career. The Walking Drum is about a trading company making their way across what is now Ukraine (I think). The Haunted Mesa is set in southeastern Utah in the early 1960s. The narrator is caught up in strange doings centered on a mysterious mesa, involving travelers from a parallel world.

  166. 166.

    Renie

    @topclimber:  Yes I’m old enough to remember when friends worked for the County during the summer having to give part of their salary to the party.  Even today County and Town employees are given time off to go vote.

  167. 167.

    Renie

    The Nassau GOP is going to have, wherever possible, constituents go to House reps in the 4th CD and 2CD for assistance rather than Santos in the 3rd.  Anthony D’Esposito in the 4th and Andrew Garbarino in the 2CD have already agreed to this arrangement.

    Santos still saying he is not resigning regardless of what the Nassau GOP says.

  169. 169.

    JPL

    @Sure Lurkalot:  Odds are Hamlin will be at the stadium this weekend

    from the Washington Post

    “We have completed a series of tests and evaluations, and in consultation with the team physicians, we are confident that Damar can be safely discharged to continue his rehabilitation at home and with the Bills,” Jamie Nadler, a critical care physician and the chief quality officer at Kaleida Health, said in a statement released by the team.

  170. 170.

    Geminid

    @Renie: I saw a report that late in the midterms, when Republicans realized that several New York House seats were within reach, there was a flood of late money to all their candidates but Santos. They knew he was bad news.

    This was at a time when Republicans thought they would pick up at least twenty seats, so they were willing to write Santos off. They ended up with him anyway, and only a 4-seat majority.

  172. 172.

    Bill Arnold

    @Ken:

    * The real cause will be one of (A) computers haven’t been replaced since 1977, (B) cyberattack, or (C) squirrel in the wiring.

    From Reuters:

    Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg pledged a “process to determine root causes and recommend next steps.”

    The FAA is known for root cause analysis. If it looking to them like a glitch attack ( :-) ), that will drive them nuts.

  173. 173.

    The Moar You Know

     

    The Nassau GOP is going to have, wherever possible, constituents go to House reps in the 4th CD and 2CD for assistance rather than Santos in the 3rd.  Anthony D’Esposito in the 4th and Andrew Garbarino in the 2CD have already agreed to this arrangement.

    Santos still saying he is not resigning regardless of what the Nassau GOP says.

    @Renie: hate to be Captain Obvious but there’s gotta be something else going on we don’t know about yet.  The GOP flat-out does not give a shit about the kinds of misconduct that Santos (or Delover or whatever his actual name is) has been accused of so far.  So there’s something far worse that’s going to come up.

  175. 175.

    Soprano2

    @The Moar You Know: My husband spent 6 months of his tour in Vietnam training South Vietnamese officers in tactics and marksmanship (officers = mostly upper caste wealthy people). He told me the Asians he knew could be every bit as racist in their own way as white people. This is a really hard thing to get people away from, the idea that somehow other groups are hurting their group.

  176. 176.

    Scout211

    @catclub: That’s not how it is written in the House rules. Even when Nancy Smash and the Dems changed the rules to require a majority, it was a majority of either party could call for a vote to vacate. I posted the new rules a few days ago and it says “one member,” not one member of the majority party. I don’t think that would survive a legal challenge if it were written into the House rules.

  177. 177.

    Ken

    @Renie: Santos still saying he is not resigning regardless of what the Nassau GOP says.

    There is something about the phrase “Nassau GOP” that makes me imagine a man in a very expensive suit saying “Mr. Santos has become… a problem” to some subordinate. Possibly while petting a cat.

  179. 179.

    Ken

    @The Moar You Know: Maybe they’re just worried that when the investigation starts looking at who gave money to Santos, they’ll also ask “And who else received money from these people?”

  181. 181.

    Renie

    @The Moar You Know:  Quite possible cuz today we are hearing he claimed he was a star volleyball player at Baruch College.  LOL.  Nassau GOP is a really tight strong political machine.  I’m sure they are getting a huge pushback from donors and constituents blaming them for Santos.  Many of the politicians who spoke stressed the lies Santos said about his grandparents being Holocaust survivors and how it is a disgrace to all the Jewish families in his district and in Nassau. Nassau  is 20% Jewish.  The Chair of the GOP take responsibility for not vetting Santos properly but put some of the blame on the fact that Santos was referred by Queens County GOP and therefore, not having been part of the Nassau ‘machine’.   I got the feeling they are afraid voters may hold this Santos mess against their next candidate in the 3CD since I heard Santos say he won’t run for re-election.

  184. 184.

    Dangerman

    @JPL: Amazing.

    It’s been a little over a decade since I was CPR Certified. About time for a refresher I would guess just in case my PulsePoint app goes off (it never has).

  185. 185.

    Eolirin

    @The Moar You Know: The National GOP doesn’t. And the House isn’t moving to expel him.

    But if he’s in that seat in 2024 he almost certainly loses it. NY-03 isn’t quite so full of insane people as to get him re-elected and the party apparatus there recognizes it.

    Also I suspect lying about being Jewish and having holocaust survivor family members is a bridge too far even with the shift of the Orthodox community to the GOP; keeping the Orthodox jewish community on side is the only way they’re going to hold any of their gains in the state

    ETA: The effectiveness of the antivaxxer movement outreach to Orthodox Jews is quite possibly responsible for a significant portion of our underperforming in the midterms in NY. Possibly more than any other cause.

  186. 186.

    Eyeroller

    @SFAW: Womansplaining actually.

    Teasing doesn’t come across well in comments/email/etc., especially to those of us who are pretty literal about things.  Sorry if I was oversensitive.

    I’ve been programming in FORTRAN/Fortran for 46 years so I guess I have you beat there.  I still teach it occasionally and I am on the standard committee’s mailing list (though not on the committee itself).  I’m invested in it and would like to see it survive.  It has become a term of abuse and I see that all over the place.  Lots of “jokes” about how this or that software sucks so it must have been written in Fortran.  Actually C is much more vulnerable to attacks and memory errors.

  187. 187.

    Subsole

    @Soprano2:

    Agreed.

    But then, conservatism really has devolved into a collection of emotionalist excuses for funneling money up the ladder. So…yeah.

    It really is just naked Romanticist backlash to the Enlightenment at this point. Deep thought it ain’t. Deep thought is, in fact, anathema to it.

  188. 188.

    gwangung

    @Brachiator: I think the general tenor of Asian American social media is “What is taking Hollywood so long to join the party?”

    I mean, for Michelle, they got a James Bond movie AND Crouching Tiger, and it took THIS long?

  189. 189.

    JPL

    Something tells me that we don’t know all there is about Santos

    now this per NBC

    NEW: Speaker McCarthy says that Rep. George Santos, who is facing growing calls to resign, should not be seated on any top House committees.

  190. 190.

    The Moar You Know

    He told me the Asians he knew could be every bit as racist in their own way as white people. 

    @Soprano2: Having worked with mostly Chinese for close to a decade and having been there multiple times on business, all I can say is that what you just wrote is a gross understatement.  And you’ll note I do not say “Asians”.  They all hate each other just as much as they hate whites, Hispanics and blacks.  I mean it literally starts with “all others are subhuman” and goes downhill from there.

    I wish they’d be a bit more in your face about it.  It would do a bunch of whites a world of good to be told that they’re equal to blacks, both not even worthy of the term “human”.

  192. 192.

    comrade scotts agenda of rage

    @Baud: ​
     

    Thanks for this. Sirota is such a self-centered hack. On any given day, I don’t know who should get the higher tumbrel number, him or Yglesias.

  193. 193.

    Geminid

    @Ken: Santos may be caught up in the investigation of Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg. Around Labor Day, FBI agents spent several hours at Vekselberg’s Long Island home. They had a search warrant, and carried away a number of evidence boxes.

    Vekselberg’s cousin and “money manager,” Andrew Intrater, was Santos’s biggest financial backer when he ran last year. Some of Intrater’s money also made its way to Lee Zeldin’s campaign.

  196. 196.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Eyeroller: The first program I ever wrote for money was in FORTRAN 77.

    Actually, it was originally in VAX Fortran (which had all these nice structured-programming gadgets that F77 did not) but then they made me take out all the proprietary usages that were printed in blue ink in the manual, so the code would be portable. Fair enough. I think it would have been a lot easier to write in with a modern IDE that would prevent all the mismatched COMMON blocks.

  198. 198.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Geminid: Yglesias’s infuriating thing is his reflexive centrism; Taibbi’s is fake left-radicalism that turns out to actually be the straight-up MAGA party line. For my money that’s worse–Yglesias actually says something vaguely insightful now and then; Taibbi’s mind is just gone–but God damn if they aren’t both enraging.

  199. 199.

    kalakal

    @Matt McIrvin:

    think it would have been a lot easier to write in with a modern IDE

    It would certainly be easier than the punch cards that were my first Fortran environment

  200. 200.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Matt McIrvin: I think Yglesias is more reflexive contrianism than reflexive centrism

    Bernie Sanders can unify Democrats and beat Trump in 2020
    By Matthew Yglesias

    Mainstream Democrats shouldn’t fear Bernie Sanders
    He’d be a strong nominee and a solid president.
    By Matthew Yglesias

    I mostly know him through his tweets, because I don’t find his writing engaging and I lose interest in his long-form stuff, and I’m certainly not going to pay for it, and he definitely has a troll-y side.

  201. 201.

    Matt McIrvin

    @kalakal: Yeah, I was just barely young enough that I only ever knew interactive coding environments with a text editor of some sort. Though there were still punch-card systems in use at the time.

  202. 202.

    JPL

    @Geminid: It’s becoming apparent that the only vote they wanted from Santos was the one for McCarthy.   Now they have that, they can toss him aside before he embarrasses the republicans more.

  203. 203.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @kalakal:@Baud: Human Capital Day!

    Trying to remember now which Randian sent out a “Here’s to the job-creating CEOs!” tweet on Labor Day”? The incredible shrinking Scott Walker? Wee Marco?

  204. 204.

    kalakal

    @Matt McIrvin: It was awful, debugging was a print saying something like “type 26 error”. You then had to physically go through hundreds of cards looking for a hole one space out or similar.

    The first time I saw VI I fell in love, ditto EMACS

  205. 205.

    Geminid

    @Matt McIrvin: I think I went to high school in Fairfax County a few years before you did. I remembered a computer “lab” where the machines work witj paper tape. I think most of us did not pay much attention to this new technology.

  208. 208.

    sdhays

    @Anyway: That’s what I’ve been given to understand. I suspect that if they knew he wasn’t a citizen, they wouldn’t have seated him because the optics of that might be just catastrophic.

    I really do wonder about his “marriage”, though. I had read that he was out as gay in his late teens and he is most definitely the kind of guy happy to make some money engaging in immigration fraud. I mean, I don’t really care about his sexuality, and absent all of his other lies, I wouldn’t question. But considering he lies about everything and apparently truly is gay (rather than gay-ish?), it’s a question worth close scrutiny.

  210. 210.

    JPL

    @sdhays: Kevin needed the vote

    just saw this on mastodon

    Emptywheel responding to NY State GOP calls for Santos resignation:

    Shorter GOP: Let him stay JUST long enough for McCarthy to secure the Speakership, but not long enough for the legitimacy of that Speakership to be called into question with a potentially illegal vote.

  211. 211.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Geminid: My dad worked for General Electric’s time-sharing service and my very first experiences with a computer were mostly using his engineering account to teach myself BASIC and FORTRAN and play some simple games. They encouraged it, I think because they figured they were training the next generation of coders.

    I was using a thermal-printer terminal with an acoustic dialup modem most of the time. Since I didn’t have a screen, the text editor I had to use in that situation was comparable to ed, but it worked.

    By the time I went to high school, the computer lab had a bunch of early NEC personal computers, weird ungainly things. The best day was when they got hold of Turbo Pascal.

  212. 212.

    sdhays

    @schrodingers_cat: I read something, I think on Daily Kos, that showed that the evidence we currently have points to him actually having been born in the US. Not definitive proof, but enough for me (at least) to drop that question.

  213. 213.

    sdhays

    @JPL: When he was swearing people in, he didn’t need Santos’ vote anymore because he was already Squeaker. But you’re right, Qevin tends to think 20 steps behind rather than 1 step ahead.

  214. 214.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Geminid:

    @Matt McIrvin: I think I went to high school in Fairfax County a few years before you did. I remembered a computer “lab” where the machines work witj paper tape. I think most of us did not pay much attention to this new technology.

    I took a programming class at either GW or Georgetown in the summer of ’75, and we submitted decks of punch cards and of course only found out later whether our programs had run successfully or whether we’d made some programming error.  What fun, huh?

  221. 221.

    Baud

    @lowtechcyclist:

    and we submitted decks of punch cards and of course only found out later whether our programs had run successfully or whether we’d made some programming error

     
    Reminds me of WordPress.

  223. 223.

    Kelly

    I wrote my first code at our small rural high school in Basic on a PDP8 using a Teletype with paper tape and a roll of newsprint for the display. I only took up coding at the University of Oregon my freshman year because one of high school buddies Bizness major required CS101 and he wanted someone he knew in the class. I liked it and majored in CS. We had teletypes hooked to a PDP10 or punch cards to code the IBM360. Basic and assembler on the PDP10. Fortran and Cobol on the IBM360. At my first job they had just installed CRT terminals but I had to share with my cube mate.

  225. 225.

    Steeplejack

    @Brachiator:

    Yeoh was also great in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, of course.

    A personal favorite Hong Kong action movie: Tsui Hark’s Time and Tide (2000). Highly recommended. (Streaming on Tubi, I see.)

  226. 226.

    StringOnAStick

    @BlueGuitarist: I’m actively seeking to get our gas stove out of our warm, tired of the fumes hands.  If we could install a hood that could deal with the 13′ ceiling I would maybe change my mind, but I’d rather spend what that would cost on a Samsung induction range.

  228. 228.

    Kelly

    @lowtechcyclist: I walked into the University computer center one day and saw my name on a list with the note “A random sort has been performed on your deck please see the shift supervisor” The operator had dropped a tray of cards. They left them on the floor and had us come into the computer room where I was able carefully gather my deck off the floor. The operators were very apologetic and immediately ran my deck as many times as it took for me to get it right. Usually they’d run all the decks every 2 hours. The diagonal felt tip marker stripe on top the deck helped a lot.

  229. 229.

    Citizen Alan

    @JPL: McGimpsuit does not care in the tiniest bit about optics. Santos could be a NAMBLA member, and McGimpsuit would beg him to stay in the House just so they’d have his vote for close bills. Like motions to vacate the chair.

  230. 230.

    Soprano2

    @Raven: I heard a story once from a white executive who had spent a year working in Japan. He said that if white people want to understand the experience of black people in the U.S., they should live in Japan for a year. He said people crossed to the other side of the street when they saw him, and once a family in a restaurant actually got up and moved to another table to be away from his family. He said the way the Japanese treated them was eye-opening for him.

  231. 231.

    Gravenstone

    @JPL: should not be seated on any … committees

    Stop there Qev, it’ll save you a little future embarrassment as more trickles out about “Santos”.

  233. 233.

    Soprano2

    @The Moar You Know: I have heard this kind of thing from other people, too. They count their history back thousands and thousands of years, so I’m sure that’s one reason they feel that way. There’s something about human nature that promotes beliefs like this, they’re hard to fight against.

  234. 234.

    Brachiator

    @Steeplejack:

    Yeoh was also great in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, of course.

    Yep. Very soulful performance to go along with the great action work.

    A personal favorite Hong Kong action movie: Tsui Hark’s Time and Tide (2000). Highly recommended. (Streaming on Tubi, I see.)

    Thanks for the tip. I will check this out. I loved his 1986 action comedy, Peking Opera Blues.

  239. 239.

    sdhays

    @schrodingers_cat: Well, yeah. Don’t we already know that there’s actually a warrant for petty theft or something against him Brazil? He makes TFG seem like merely a dabbler in lies.

  242. 242.

    SteveinPHX

    @Quinerly:

     
    Managed to visit Silver City on St Pat’s Day a few years ago. Fun!
    Beautiful area of NM. Intend to get back this year or next.
    Have fun!

  243. 243.

    Cheryl from Maryland

    Good news from Virginia, the voters seem to have turned on the GOP.  Aaron Rouse, the Democrat, won a special election for VA General Assembly Senator with a platform explicitly pro-abortion rights (had a Planned Parenthood endorsement).  CF this article from BlueVirginia.  The VA district special election was to replace the GOP Senator who replaced Elaine Luria in VA Beach in November, only 2.5 months ago.  Now, this was a special election in January, so low turnout, but the district is home to Regent’s University (Pat Robertson [spit]) and a military base, so plenty of GOP base.  Virginia’s House has elections this year and is currently in GOP hands, so expect some fireworks.  This might be an issue for jackals to focus on in 2023 — if the VA House returns to D leadership, Youngkin will be diminished with a totally D legislature.  I’m happy to do some research for grassroots VA organizations.

  244. 244.

    sdhays

    @Citizen Alan: so they’d have his vote for close bills

    I have to disagree with you here. I don’t think Qevin cares about passing any bills. To do that, he would have to compromise with Democrats (because of the Senate and the White House), and he doesn’t have any power to even be seen fantasizing about that.

    He’s Squeaker now, but he isn’t part of the Republican “governing” leadership. Anything that passes through Congress will run through Schumer, Jeffries, and McConnell. He already burned his bridges by threatening the Senate Republicans for going ahead with this year’s appropriation before the new Republican House was seated, and then he burned the bridges again by demonstrating how smart they were to have ignored him last month.

  245. 245.

    Ruckus

    @Amir Khalid:

    Think of all the square footage and KW that could be spared if they exchanged that 1977 computer with a 2023 cell phone – and how much faster the work would get done….

  247. 247.

    eversor

    Do we have Christianity?  Is it remotely tolerated?  If so conservatives win.  That’s the catch and they know that, hence they keep going for religion.

    The only way out of ending any of this is the utter destruction of Christianity.  If you are not for doing that you are worse than a Trumper.   Christianity and full fascism or human rights.  Pick.  Because if you don’t say “end Christianity” you might as well march people into camps because you are that bad.

  248. 248.

    ColoradoGuy

    @Soprano2: I was in Japan from 1956 through 1961, and we got stared at a lot. My dad got so annoyed by this he carried a camera around and would pretend to take pictures, which made the starers scurry away. No open hostility that I remember, but Japanese are fond of a little boys, even weird-looking Westerners. Even at that age, I was quite aware we looked like freaks to them.

    The really open and crude racism was against Koreans. That was not subtle at all. Similarly, when our family moved to Hong Kong, the really visceral hatred of the local Cantonese people was against Japanese … memories of the Occupation by the Japanese Imperial Army were still fresh.

    Racism is different in mono-ethnic societies like Japan, since it is so closely tied with the creation myths of Shintoism, Emperor worship, and the island identity. China is Han-dominant, but that isn’t as narrow as the Shinto identity. China has also had an overseas diaspora for many centuries, while by contrast overseas travel for Japanese was a death penalty in pre-Meiji Japan.

  250. 250.

    M31

    @Soprano2: a black friend who had lived in Japan thought the racism there quite refreshing, in that it wasn’t about that he was black, it was that he wasn’t Japanese, so pretty equal-opportunity

  251. 251.

    Bill Arnold

    @The Moar You Know:

    But I’m pretty sure he just uses a crapload of makeup, and is human.

    OK, the host body appears to be human, and probably even a member of homo sapiens sapiens.

  252. 252.

    lowtechcyclist

    @eversor:

    The only way out of ending any of this is the utter destruction of Christianity.  If you are not for doing that you are worse than a Trumper.

    OK, I’m worse than a Trumper. Whatever.

  257. 257.

    DesertFriar

    @Quinerly:   If going to Deming, visit Luna Rosa Winery in Deming.  They have a restaurant in Las Cruces.  They have some of the best wines from NM.  Really like their Tempranillo.  Also the Deming Truck Stop (an actual truck stop) has a Punjabi restaurant that people have said is great.

    Disclaimer:  I have not been there, just reporting from what people have told me.

  258. 258.

    JWR

    Great. Another media chew toy.

    WASHINGTON — Aides to President Joe Biden have discovered at least one additional batch of classified documents in a location separate from the Washington office he used after leaving the Obama administration, according to a person familiar with the matter.

  259. 259.

    prostratedragon

    @M31:  A Chinese-American lunch companion told me  “We Chinese do not discriminate; we look down on everybody.” I thanked him for that observation.

  263. 263.

    El Muneco

    @Baud: “In one recent poll, a majority of Americans opined that Supreme Court justices let partisan views influence major rulings.”

    28% : “Yes, and this is terrible”

    27%: “YEE-HAW!!!!!”

  264. 264.

    Ruckus

    @The Moar You Know:

    All humans are shit and should have the ability to breath removed from them.

    Ahhh,,,, wait a minute, what’s that I see in the mirror?

    Most animals have herd instincts to some degree. Why should humans be any different? And if they are going to be different shouldn’t they recognize that some humans are going to be shit, just on general or statistical principles?

  266. 266.

    WaterGirl

    I have been working all day and just noticed that there hasn’t been a post since practically the dawn of time.  Did someone give everyone a time out?

    New thread up.

  267. 267.

    J R in WV

    @frosty:

    I’ve been to Key West a few times.

    I was in Key West from late 1970 until early 1972, back for a little while in 1973. I was in the Navy, and my ship spent nearly a year in overhaul until just before I was discharged. Wife and I loved Key West, we lived in the historic district and felt like we had plenty of money to spend. Great restaurants, great seafood, great diving and snorkeling, etc.

    We went back a few years ago, were disappointed, most of the great restaurants were gone, replaced by giant mess hall sorts of places, may new hotels and motels, cruise ships dumped tons of folks for the day at the harbor which was the Navy base back in the ’70s.  We scheduled a dive trip, it stormed that day so we canceled our participation. Really hot too. We never had A/C, really didn’t need anything but a fan.

  269. 269.

    J R in WV

    @kalakal: ​
     

    It would certainly be easier than the punch cards that were my first Fortran environment

    My first language was PL/1 running on a plug-compatible IBM/Amdahl mainframe, using punch cards because there were only 4 terminals for 300+ first year students. Still best friends with the guy who showed me how the punch card machines worked — he was a former IBM tech who worked on those machines, could repunch a card to fix a typo in seconds. Thanx Bob !!!

  270. 270.

    Quinerly

    @DesertFriar:

    Thread be dead. But if you check back….. Very familiar with that winery. Great people. The restaurant in Las Cruces is wonderful Italian. Thanks for piping in.

  273. 273.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Kelly: In the late 1980s a coworker at NCAR told me a tale of someone in the days of punch cards who’d used a construct in whatever version of Fortran he was using that allowed multiple statements per line, to end every single punch card with a GO TO to the next card, so they could be dropped on the floor without creating too many problems. Seems like an extreme measure.

  274. 274.

    Another Scott

    @schrodingers_cat: AFAIK, nobody questions his claim that he was born in Queens, NY and also has Brazilian citizenship through his parents.  So I doubt there is an issue there.

    He’s in plenty of trouble though!

    Cheers,
    Scott.

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