i’m running for president for one reason, and that is the same reason willie sutton robbed banks https://t.co/A37VjGMbj6
— world famous art thief (@famousartthief) April 21, 2023
“I’m not a paid assassin. When you’re waking up for your 45th morning at the Hilton Garden Inn in Manchester, you better think you can win, because that walk from the bed to the shower, if you don’t think you can win, it’s hard.” https://t.co/DVY0VPi63b
— Josh Dawsey (@jdawsey1) April 20, 2023
Chris Christie says "I'm not a paid assassin" for Trump.
No, Chris.
You're a fucking volunteer.
— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) April 21, 2023
I think it’s worth remembering that Christie got COVID helping trump prepare for the 2020 debates. https://t.co/QwFmwDwtFZ
— Molly Jong-Fast (@MollyJongFast) April 21, 2023
And Politico is happy to let us know that Hawley-ing Arse has not given up his dreams…
Perfect combination of art, hed, and publication for the subject. No notes. https://t.co/Vo8Vsmr6Wr
— The Mall Krampus (@cakotz) April 21, 2023
Wish I’d had as much influence over the antitrust views of my former colleague (@HawleyMO) and former student (@LucasKunceMO) as @matthewstoller has. Gotta give the dude credit for knowing how to sway people. https://t.co/1PecWKEmdZ
— Thom Lambert (@profthomlambert) April 22, 2023
Short Version: He's a spoiled little richboy who wants to suck up to Josh Hawley and JD Vance
— Environmental Services Weedle (@PartyWurmple) April 21, 2023
NotMax
This week, on That’s
IncredibleDeplorable!….//
gene108
Christie has badly miscalculated. The number of Manhattan based news show producers isn’t enough for him to win any elections.
Outside of these producers, everyone else hates him.
Baud
Do I have to click on the links to Politico to understand what those last tweets are about?
Aussie Sheila
@gene108:
This. The ‘never trump’ lane is filled to the brim with well known and tested voices. He will be spending time explaining why he was once for trump, before he was against him.
Flopsweat, despite the promise of bully on bully action.
Anne Laurie
TL, DR: Matt Stoller, who ustabe a ‘leftist’, has joined a right-wing think tank to assist them in persuading the ill-informed that ‘There is no difference between the parties’. The fact that only *one* party says this — and not the progressive party — should tell Mr. Stoller something about his new paymasters, but that would mean admitting he’s less interested in the general welfare than in promoting his own brand<sup>(tm)</sup>.
Josh Hawley is mentioned in the article as one of the Powerful People who is very interested in Stoller’s arguments… which is why some people are saying that this beat-sweetner is less about Stoller, Bog-Standard Ustabe, and more about the ongoing ambitions of Josh Hawley, et al.
Shalimar
@Baud: The article is about how Josh Hawley really has broad appeal because noteworthy leftist Matt Stoller supports him. Instead of being about what an asshole Matt Stoller is because he supports Josh Hawley (and lots of other reasons, pick your own past story about Stoller)
edit: or what Anne Laurie (who read the whole thing instead of getting disgusted after 2 paragraphs like I did) says
Baud
@Anne Laurie:
@Shalimar:
Thank you both.
As with Greenwald, I’m proud and feel vindicated in having dismissed Stroller many moons ago.
Baud
I wonder if I could make same extra cash as a disaffected leftist.
Balloon Juice left me!
Shalimar
@Baud: You definitely have the skill and talent to do it. And it probably wouldn’t be too hard to find issues you disagree with other leftists about each week. But can you stomach the ass-kissing fascists like Josh Hawley and Clarence Thomas you would also have to do to get paid?
Baud
@Shalimar:
Ay, there’s the rub. I have brilliant ideas — What if the rich really are genetically superior? — but I don’t have the EQ to fit in socially with these people (or any people really).
rikyrah
@Anne Laurie:
Stoller has been a grifting clown since Obama won😠
rikyrah
@Baud:
Me too, Baud
Juju
@Shalimar: You made it through two paragraphs? Wow, I’m impressed.
Anyway
Which part of the grifting horseshoe does Larry Elder belong to? Is he likely to draw any votes away from Biden/ Harris?
p.a.
I’d say the Stoller/Taibbi wing of “progressives” could hold their convention in a phone booth, but the yutes don’t know what that is…
Baud
@p.a.:
What’s a phone booth?
lowtechcyclist
@p.a.:
You sound like a broken record when you talk about stuff like that. ;-)
Another Scott
Supposedly Melon is forcing blue smudges on every account with more than 1M followers.
I’m sure Melon is loving the attention, but he’s continuing to set money on fire.
As one does when one is Melon.
(via nycsouthpaw)
Cheers,
Scott.
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
“Walking to the shower is hard” is gonna really appeal to the sloth vote
Baud
@Another Scott:
So he’s charging people for blue checks and is now diluting the value of the blue check?
Sanjeevs
NYT has a story about GOP ballot measures to prevent a repeat of Kansas where ballot measures were used to protect abortion rights.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/23/us/republicans-abortion-voting.html
Baud
@Sanjeevs:
Republican voters are such sheep.
OzarkHillbilly
@Anyway:
He’s a black conservative talk radio personality. He’s not gonna damage anybody beyond a few suckers who send him money and I doubt we will ever need more than one hand to count them.
SiubhanDuinne
@p.a.:
@lowtechcyclist:
This is where I came in.
OzarkHillbilly
They will try, but I don’t think it will fly, regardless of the wording.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Baud:
I have zero idea what that value might be. As I understand it, any fool with $8 can buy one.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Sanjeevs: Arkansas’s actions are even more appalling than usual
trnc
Which would make him the mastermind of the plan for DT to murder Biden by expelling as much of the virus as he could by literally not shutting his yap for the entire debate.
lowtechcyclist
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
If Elmo wasn’t forcing it on people, it would be an easy way of distinguishing tools and trolls from other users.
Of course, soon enough there will only be tools and trolls on Twitter.
Anyway
@OzarkHillbilly:
Thanks. Our system encourages grifters and they seem to come out of the woodwork every four years …
Dorothy A. Winsor
@lowtechcyclist: I’m still horrified at what Musk has done to the site. I’m still on there because my editor says I have to be, but I used to find it a lively source of entertainment and information. It was especially good during a breaking story when people on the ground used their cell phones to show what was happening
OzarkHillbilly
@Anyway: I say that in the hopes that the organizations that supported the Medicare expansion, the legalization of Marijuana, and fought against the Right to Work for less, will once again step forward with informative ad campaigns. The GOP was on the wrong side of everyone of those fights and voters told the to go fuck themselves. If people in this state actually paid attention to what was going on in Jeff City things might actually change for the better. But, woke Lieberals and all that.
Ken
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I was visiting family last week, and on the drive back, the “classic rock” DJs were talking about what a stupid idea the new blue check system is. So I’m pretty sure the idea is doomed, if it’s penetrated to that level of the public.
NotMax
@Ken
Cyan-ide poisoning.
//
sdhays
@Baud: Well, the blue checks actually have zero value if actually notable people aren’t part of the pool. No one gives a shit that you’re the real @incel3943, as opposed to the real Stephen King or Beyonce etc. If everyone who has a blue check is just a stupid schmuck who shelled out $8/month for the privilege, it’s worthless.
But if it means that the person might be “notable”, then it means you’re paying $8/month to blend in with actually notable people and have a chance to become actually notable before people realize you’re just dumbass with $8 more dollars a month than you know what to do with.
Kay
@Sanjeevs:
I think one of the mistakes we made re: abortion was the widely held, sort of “sophisticated” belief that the people in power on the Right “didn’t care” about abortion- that it was just a wedge issue to use to get the economic policy they like. I probably said it at one time- almost everyone did- it was the conventional wisdom. Basically – “it’s not WOMEN, silly, it’s MONEY”
We were wrong. They really and truly dislike and distrust women and will do just about anything to control them, up to and including forcing 10 year old girls to carry the children of a rapist.
Kay
@Sanjeevs:
OTOH I wouldn’t call it done in Ohio just yet. We’ve had some success with ballot measures. It will be deceptively worded and described and they will schedule it for low turnout but low turnout for us also means low turnout for them. “Stealth” measures – an actual tactic- rely on one side being higher turnout than the other.
Llelldorin
@Kay: I think that was true at an earlier stage of the Republican Party — back in the 1980s, when the “people in power” were a different group of people.
Part of what’s made the Republican Party so much worse over the last few decades is that an entire generation has grown up for whom the culture-war Republican Party is Republicanism, and they’re now winning offices. For them, misogyny wasn’t a way to get the yutzes to vote to support free trade — it was the point to the Republican Party.
Kay
@Llelldorin:
Maybe. I suppose the current GOP is MORE culture war driven than the past although Reagan was quite the culture warrior himself. I think he was a flat out homophobe, for example. I don’t think there was any economic wedge there. He just hated gay people and didn’t care if they died.
The attitudes toward women come out not in “support for abortion” surveys, specifically, but instead in surveys about general attitudes about womens rights. The anti choice voters are also the voters who have the most negative views about women. That’s true for male and female anti choice voters. The old “ladies against women” dynamic is still operating.
Llelldorin
@Kay: Fair. The culture war was always there — the modern Republican Party didn’t spring full-formed from Pat Buchanan’s forehead in 1992, after all. I just don’t remember it being the entire point to Repulbicanism the way it is these days.
BruceFromOhio
At first I laughed, then I was angry. Now I’m just sad. We can do so much better than this.
BRyan
@Kay: reminds me that I encountered a woman in the parking lot at the local (suburban Cleveland, OH) library who was collecting signatures to put women’s reproductive rights on the ballot. When she very politely – and, it seemed to me, with some trepidation – asked me “would you like to sign a petition to get women’s reproductive rights on the ballot?“, I said “oh hell yes!” and she seemed pleasantly surprised. I suppose I’m not in her anticipated demographic…. So we had a short discussion about what kind of reaction she was getting with her petition, and she said most people are pleasant, even the ones who don’t agree with it, and not counting the woman who told her she had called the police on her. (That happened at a location other than the library, but she boogied anyway – she didn’t want to stick around and see what the police were likely to do with that call.) I’d have been equally uneasy in her position; not only a controversial topic she was collecting signatures for, but she was black in a massively majority white upscale neighborhood. So many kudos she gets.
Kay
@BruceFromOhio:
They try to align with conservatives over and over again and they always get screwed. I remember during Obama when the dopes on the Left thought they could form an alliance with Grover Norquist. Literally every four years since I was 20 I have been reading these stories. It has never once worked.
It’s funny how so many modern Lefties have no concept of “solidarity” or “group action”. It’s all “one man joining with one other man to save the world!” Christ. An olde timey union organizer would weep at this view of the world.
Eolirin
@Kay: The abortion issue was a deliberately constructed panic pushed onto Evangelicals by their leadership to help undo desegregation and the elimination of tax exempt status for white only Evangelical schools.
It was never really about money, or at least not just, but it didn’t start out about women as such. The reason it was able to get the support it did was because that community is anti woman though, and it’s since taken on a life of its own. So it’s definitely genuinely about women now
You just can’t separate out its roots in white supremacy either. These fights are fundamentally entwined.
Kay
@Eolirin:
But that assumes abortion was their only anti women issue, and it wasn’t. They opposed every single advance for women. You can’t “separate that out” either.
Kay
@Eolirin:
I don’t have any objection to including the history – it’s true that evangelicals were not always anti -abortion and only became so with school intergration but I think if we’re doing that we need to be comprehensive because religious fudnamentalists haveoppsed every single advance of women.
I also, frankly, have grown really tired of the insistence that an ideology that is passing laws to control womens bodies is somehow “not about women”. I think it’s odd that every time I raise it I get some variation of “this is not actually about women but is instead about tax cuts or segregated schools”. Oh, okay. Forgive me for my ignorance. I thought women bleeding out in bathtubs was “about women”.
Kay
@BRyan:
Yeah she is super brave. I’m doing some work with access and the women I’m meeting are scared. They think they are vulnerable to some kind of state action- a political prosecution if anyone finds out they are doing this work in Ohio (a state with reduced rights for women) so it’s just crazy secretive. The work is legal- no one is breaking any laws- but they’re not concerned about a legit prosecution but instead about a trumped up, fake one. I respect their fears though. How the fuck do I know what’s going to happen. I can’t honestly assure them of their safety. There may be political prosecutions. Maybe the safeguards are necessary and we all really do need burner phones.
J R in WV
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
They elected Possum Queen to be the leader of their whole state !!! You need not say any more about Arkansaws at this point in history!!!
Well, except that they actually appear to be following P Q as their fearless leader also too,,,
Back when we traveled between WV and AZ quite a bit, I tried to route the ground travel to avoid the more RWNJ territories between here and there. It is nearly impossible to avoid fascist territory unless you keep north clear into Colorado. You can avoid TX but for a quick pass through the panhandle, which can be done without stopping in TX more than once for refuel. Oh well.
We are well into selling the winter camp, which was featured in a couple of On the Road posts back when it was being built. A good tidy job, very tight, R42 roof, easy to heat, solar panels for off grid…
Built it with structural insulated panels, which are two pieces of flat board with a thick slab of insulating foam between the two sheets of (usually) Oriented Strand Board. The panels slide together with tongue and groove and glue, leakage is so close to nil even high winds don’t cause chilly problems. Surprisingly sturdy once all the 90 degree angles are completed.
The roof panels were manufactured for the job, urethane foam inserted between the sheets of OSB — that shit isn’t ever coming apart !! I think nothing is stickier than urethanes…
Anyway, hope some of you handy guys appreciate the somewhat novel construction technique. Second or third day it started to go really quickly. We had a backhoe to encourage the T&G sliding together, but wasn’t really needed 90% of the time.
Urethane glue is a good lubricant until it sets up, after all… You bolt a 2×6 to the concrete pad and the panels fit over those sleepers, with lots of glue and screws. Very tight structure once completed, you fill all the crevices etc with expanding Urethane foam to finish the seal.
Water girl, there are photos of the construction out there, perhaps a link to one of the OTR pieces about the construction?
Ruckus
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
It was entertaining and could be a very slight bit educating. One had to sometimes plow through a bit to find anything with a educating bend but it was there. But since the man/child with the car company paid for it with the obvious goal of destroying 44 billion dollars it seems to be sinking faster than the Titanic.
Kay
@Eolirin:
If any time I said “Ronald Reagan and the conservative movement were homophobes” and pointed to the fact that they joked about AIDS and did nothing to stop it that was met with “well, ACTUALLY it was about free trade” I think gay people would be justified in saying “ok, but it was our bodies” and wondering where there was a kind of rush to erase or deny that.
Ronald Reagan can be a homophobe and a racist and a free trader and we can talk about comprehensive theories. But there were still a lot of dead gay men.
Ruckus
@Kay:
We were wrong. They really and truly dislike and distrust women and will do just about anything to control them, up to and including forcing 10 year old girls to carry the children of a rapist.
This. Rethuglicans have been trying for decades to get everyone to decide that there is only one way to be human. Their list of desired qualities is thin. It isn’t to be a woman, they are supposed to be birth vessels, says so in some book. You have to buy the correct version of the book, look very hard for that passage, squint really, really, really hard, eyes tightly closed to even find it, pay money for someone to read it to you (remember – eyes tightly closed!) and sure enough, there it is. Of course by then you have your eyes welded shut so you can find that passage and you become another vessel full of stupid. Aw, the rethuglican party…..
Kay
@Ruckus:
They’re having open discussions now about how women having the right to vote didn’t “benefit” the country. It’s their gross grifters, the big mouths with the you tube and Rumble shows, admiitedly, but as we know from experience its just a short hop from “fringe” to “the US Senate” on the Right.
Ruckus
@Kay:
Have known a number of gay humans, even been related to one for quite a few decades and have seen the hate and intolerance and what it does to someone who is not trying to change or bother anyone else in any way, even after the assholes decide they have to interfere, because it’s none of their damn business. I really do not have any idea why they can not accept that not everyone has to live by some code that makes zero sense to anyone with one molecule of not actually so common sense.
Bill Arnold
@Another Scott:
Sad! Now Block The Blue will have to morph into Block the Blue unless they have more than 1M followers, in which case block if they are boring or an asshole.
Ruckus
@Kay:
That hop is so damn short it’s like the two sides are glued together….
Bill Arnold
@Sanjeevs:
Re the text linked by the NYTimes, the Missouri bill as of this morning at least includes the following, emphasis mine:
Bill Arnold
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
What a $Paid is buying is amplification, and to a lesser extend long tweets and a short ability to edit. But mainly amplification. There is a reason that a sea of paid (mostly RW) bluechecks show up first on long politically active threads on twitter; they are paying to be loud; and the twitter algorithm boosts them towards the beginning of threads. And they are also paying for a higher probability of appearing in feeds and searches.
Eolirin
@Kay: Kay, I’m not saying it’s not about women though am I? I both say it’s absolutely about women now, even if there were different motivations than that for making it an issue originally. Women weren’t bleeding out when they started making this an issue, right? Because abortion was still legal for decades after that.
So those motivations matter in historical context because they’re an important part of how we got here, and back in the 80s and early 90s it was easier to see the push for anti abortion policies as cynical because it was, but recognizing that doesn’t diminish the effects we’re seeing now that the Evangelicals have completed their take over of the party, and now that they’ve actually managed to knock down Roe.
People weren’t wrong to think it was about something else at points in this fight, because it was. That doesn’t mean that’s still the case. Or that it was ever true for just the Evangelicals and fellow travelers, but they weren’t the dominant force of the Republican party until much later. The people who got this all very wrong weren’t paying attention to the fact that things changed. They failed to acknowledge the increasing radicalization of the Republican party.
And, like, I straight up said that the community they were pitching abortion as a wedge issue to were anti women from the get go, which is why it was successful at gaining traction. So I’m not sure why you’re telling me something I just said as if it’s a point I missed.
But those people didn’t take over the Republicans over night, and the reason why the party infrastructure was willing to take them in as allies, and why they ultimately folded to them matters. I’m not falling to acknowledge that they’re in control now, or the consequences of that. I’m only pointing out that racial animus is a core part of that alliance and can’t be ignored. It would not have succeeded otherwise. White Evangelicals are also white supremacists in addition to being anti-woman, and it matters.
You seem to have a real problem with allowing space for anything other than some generic concept of woman to matter in the context of discussing anti-feminists, and when it comes to intersectionality you seem to keep trying to shut down anyone trying talk about it in real terms, because the second any other group comes up in the context of these struggles you really aggressively attack it as just a way to take the focus off of women. It’s not. It’s just an attempt to not erase the existence of minorities.
Hell, you implicitly erase black women (and transwomen, in different ways) from women when you keep insisting that talking about anything “else” is an attack on women, even. Anti-black is also anti-woman. White supremacy falls twice as hard on black women.
It’s not like Dobbs was a magic tipping point. Black women have been dealing with a lack of access to abortion care and adequate maternal health care for longer than that. It’s been killing them for a long time. A large part of the reason US maternal mortality rates are so horrific is because black maternal mortality rates are pulling the average down; if we only look at white maternal mortality rates, they’re much closer to European numbers. But you constantly make it feel like we can’t talk about race and how that’s driving those disparities because then we’re not somehow not talking about women anymore.
It doesn’t take away from the struggle of women to acknowledge minorities are also being affected by the same forces that are attacking women. Or that the forces attacking women are also motivated by racial animus, and that the one battle can’t be fought or won without the other also being fought and won. You keep shutting down attempts to discuss women’s issues if they’re not being treated as if they exist in a vacuum. They don’t. They’re deeply interwoven with everything else. And the reverse is true.
Recognizing that isn’t an attack on women. It’s not an attempt to diminish the issues women are currently facing. It’s a recognition that those issues are not evenly distributed, that we can’t be for women’s rights while ignoring white supremacy, and anti-lgbtq bigotry, or even disability bigotry, unless we want to erase every woman that isn’t white cis and abled from existence.
When I’m talking about race as a motivating factor for anti-women forces, I’m not doing so to deflect from the impact anti-women policies have on women, I’m doing so because they also affect women. Things can be about women without just being about women.
This is one fight, and you keep making it two (or more).
Kay
@Eolirin:
Yeah, it did. It also was about school integration but it was always, always about women. You’re familiar with the Equal Rights Amendment? The federal titles for equity in education? The entire body of law on sexual harrassment in the workplace?
The religious Right opposed ALL of those things. You can keep telling me you’re also talking about women but actually you’re not. Not only that you won’t let ME talk about them without correcting me that it’s not about women.
Talk about whatever you want but stop demanding I accept your frame, definitions and limits for the discussion. I won’t.
I;ve read Kimberlé Crenshaw so your (continued) assumption I need a lecture on her work is wrong. I’ve read the workplace cases she based intersectional feminism on – the GM case, where black women could not get redress because they didn’t fit into the employment categories of “women” or black” but were BOTH. I understand her (really brilliant) theory that “black women” is a distinct category and issue. I agree.
I don’t think her work was intended to be used to jump into every discussion about women and insist it is not about women. I don’t think that’s what she wrote or intended, based upon her work.
So we’ll agree to disagree on intersectional feminism. We approach it and understand it differently. This ISN’T that simple.
Kay
@Eolirin:
Why do you insist I “don’t recognize” that black women have an additional burden – racism? I do recognise that. You will not find a single thing I have ever written to support your continued insistence that I “dont recognize it”.
What you want is for me to parrot your approach exactly. I won’t. I think there is much, much more room within this than you allow for and I got to tell you- I could set a timer between the time I post a comment on womens rights and the time someone then scolds me and tells me it isn’t about women. I think that’s interesting. Every single time.
Soprano2
@OzarkHillbilly: I think that will be challenged in court.
Kay
@Eolirin:
Also- I basically agree with you on the trajectory of the Republican Party but I’m uncomfortable with your dogmatic insistence that it’s truth. People have a lot of different opinions on what happened in the GOP and why it happened. I don’t really think you and I have a monolopy on “truth”.
Kay
@Eolirin:
It’s a small thing but it annoys me so here goes. I comment quite a bit on maternal and infant health in the US. It interests me. I would venture that I comment more on maternal and infant health than anyone else. I always include how black women are most harmed. Always. I just don’t need a lecture on that. There’s lot of issues I don’t follow or read – I don’t know shit about foreign policy or tech policy, among many other areas- but that isn’t one of them.
Kay
@Eolirin:
You don’t have to read my comments on maternal mortality or anything else, but if you’re not going to read them I don’t think you should assume I exclude the glaring inequity between white women and black women there, or need to be notified that it exists, because I don’t.
I don’t think it’s true that I “refuse to recognize” these things and I don’t think that my refusal to parrot and/or chant “ditto!” to this identical, rote recitation of “intersectional feminism” that is different than my understanding based on my reading- and I would argue far afield of the actual theory – is somehow “bad” and I must stop talking about it. The theory. Not peoples personal experiences. Obviously I don’t question or debate those.