The perch has normally been occupied by apolitical women, but in Averie Bishop’s case, the pageant queen has used it to push back against the far-right policies supported by Texas’s White male leaders. https://t.co/HDGMoQuIz0
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) July 1, 2023
Something good to start off the morning — the kids are okay [gift link]:
The day of the school shooting that killed 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde, Tex., last year, Averie Bishop posted a TikTok video, sobbing. “These things happen all the time and nothing changes,” she said.
After the Supreme Court overturned abortion rights, following her home state’s own restrictions, she posted again: “When you live in Texas and all you wanted was a hot girl summer, but now you have a ‘no reproductive rights’ summer.”
In March, she posted about the need for comprehensive sex education and mourned the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the abortion precedent abandoned by the court. In May, she posted videos touting the need for affordable health and reproductive care…
Her platform — diversity and inclusion — represents much of what Texas has been outlawing. In June alone, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) signed laws banning diversity offices and training at state universities, “sexually explicit” books at public schools, drag shows and gender-affirming care for youths.
The first Asian contestant to win the crown in the pageant’s 85 years, Bishop is an avatar for a rapidly diversifying state, one that despite its historic image is now majority minority, a change that is remaking cities, rural areas and political alliances, if not state leadership.…
For Bishop, being Miss Texas — a year-long role that ends Saturday — not only meant becoming a visual symbol for the state’s newest and least visible residents, but also having her legitimacy constantly challenged despite her rhinestone-studded crown and satiny white sash. Texans tell her they’re surprised she won, or that she can’t be Miss Texas because she’s not blond. Often, she said, older White Texans will ask, “Are you really Miss Texas?”
“It’s the ‘really,’ in that sentence, ‘Are you really Miss Texas?’ like, ‘What do you mean ‘really?’ I’m sitting in front of you!’” Bishop said…
When it first happened soon after she won, Bishop said, “I was quick to be offended. Like, ‘Excuse me, how dare you? I worked very hard. I won this legitimately. I’m here to serve the state.”
“After it happened a couple of times I thought to myself, ‘You know why? It’s probably because these people just have not received the opportunity to see someone in this space that looks like me,’” she said.
Texas had a White majority until 2004. Since then, people of color — Latinos in particular — have driven the state’s growth, which has brought diversity not only to cities but to rural areas like Fairfield. Texas’s more than 30 million residents now are 40.2 percent Latino, 39.8 percent White, 11.6 percent Black and 5.1 percent Asian, according to the latest Census Bureau figures. Latino Texans are expected to make up a majority of the state’s population in the decades to come.
As a child, she was the only Asian student in her public school classes in Prosper, near her hometown of McKinney. Her father was a conservative White bus driver, her mother a Filipina maid who had immigrated to the United States after responding to his newspaper ad looking for a wife. Her 24-year-old brother joined the U.S. Army after high school and taught her how to handle a gun.
She attended Dallas’s conservative Southern Methodist University and returned there for law school. She interned at a law firm in New York and for Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.) in Washington, but always returned to Texas…
As Miss Texas, she’s traveled more often and farther than her predecessors, about 70,000 miles, speaking in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York, Connecticut, Ohio, Wisconsin and even England. She’s addressed scholars at Oxford and the national Cattle Feeders Association. She has driven more than 45,000 miles across Texas, cycling through seven cars from a pageant sponsor. Along the way, she has met with a Texas that looks more like her than the state’s political leadership.
“She’s a hero,” said Autumn Keiser, a spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas who tracks Bishop’s posts. “To be representing this so bravely, that is huge.”…
Read the whole thing — it’ll lift your spirits!
======
Of course, then there’s this…
Justice Sonia Sotomayor
“Today, this Court stands in the way and rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress.
It holds that race can no longer be used in a limited way in college admissions to achieve such critical benefits.
Entrenched racial inequality remains a… pic.twitter.com/JlWUD2DOox
— James Aymann (@AymannJames) June 30, 2023
Today, as you turn to figuring out your student loan repayments and the Justices head off to vacation, remember:
Give a Justice a fish and they eat for a day;
teach them to fish and they eat for a lifetime appointment. pic.twitter.com/1U9TrWHjfa— Pete Strzok (@petestrzok) June 30, 2023
both alito and thomas (at a minimum) have behaved in ways that would have seen them fired from private sector jobs and blacklisted in their industries. the only way to fix this is to get a strong senate majority in favor of hammer and tong court reform. https://t.co/p2UGWc9h1S
— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachi) June 30, 2023
Since I’ve been commenting on this, I should note this too: I’m glad they’re moving on this and not just ceding everything to the corrupt court! I remain extremely skeptical that the corrupt court is going to let this stand, but they should be made to strike it down. https://t.co/hOOWCekkRO
— The Fig Economy (@figgityfigs) June 30, 2023
Run on the lawless Supreme Court. For every office, run on the lawless Supreme Court. https://t.co/f8ICj7DHNv
— The Fig Economy (@figgityfigs) June 30, 2023
i know it was very hard for you people when segregation was struck down, abortion and contraception became legal, and gay people could marry https://t.co/pKOB0ij90C
— ??richard "tricky dickgirl" nixon?? (@GrayAthene) June 30, 2023
This week we remember:
Except for Mitch McConnell, 6-3 Scotus supermajority would be 5-4 Dem appointees.
—McConnell stonewalled Garland nominat made 7 1/2 mos before 2016 election
—Rammed through vote on AC Barrett 8 days before 2020 elec.
And every GOP Senator stood with him
— James Fallows (@JamesFallows) July 1, 2023
Baud
Don’t Mess with Miss Texas.
NotMax
Media mention.
A kind of fun unpretentious little Western found on Prime, Gunless.
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone 😊😊😊
OzarkHillbilly
Blech.
Jeffro
I have…major questions…about this Supreme Court.
BUT: the AQI seems to be much better today, so I’m going to get outside a bit and enjoy it! Have a good one. =)
Kay
The Higher Education Act route is solid, IMHO, and I’m glad they’re trying it. This isn’t a bad fight to have heading into an election year.
Biden has been great on student loans, honestly. It’s been a real focus of his administration. He’s already waived billions and billions in debt and added more gemerous repayment plans and terms. There is no President since the advent of student loans who has been better.
JPL
Blech is right.
Kay
I’m headed to NY to see friends who are renovating a barn (to live in) and then on to see my grandaughter. She has “soccer practice” which should be entertaining- she’s not yet three years old. She’s tall and really strong – maybe she’ll be good.
Her cousin in Denmark is not yet TWO and is already kicking a soccer ball at daycare. Trying to kick and falling down. They start so young!
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
Baud
@Kay:
So cute.
OzarkHillbilly
@Kay: Any day with a grandchild is a good day. Enjoy.
Betty
I am happy to see James Fallows reminding us of one of the major villains of our times.
Baud
@Kay:
I’ve determined that Biden’s problem is that he’s too good. About 27% of Dems are unnerved with being unable to look down on the president for not meeting their standards.
lowtechcyclist
There was a lot of talk in the overnight thread about how expanding SCOTUS would be seen as political no matter how it was done.
One way to at least reduce the extent to which it would be seen as political would be to increase the number of Justices by one in each of the next four Presidential Administrations. That way the voters would have a chance to weigh in on who was nominating the additional Justices, and since the White House has tended to bounce back and forth between the parties over time, voters might accept the notion that it was likely to be politically neutral in effect. And even assuming a Biden win and a Dem Senate in 2025, it would just turn a 6-3 conservative majority into a 6-4 conservative majority. So unless Thomas or Alito kicked the bucket, it would take until 2029 or beyond to really matter. (And even that would just be putting Roberts back in the driver’s seat.)
It would still be worth doing, because even Roberts as a brake on the more radical five would be better than nothing, since apparently the Court’s image matters to him. And with any luck, the right obituary could flip the Court.
lowtechcyclist
@Betty:
Gotta admit, that’s another obituary I’d take great pleasure in reading.
ETA: Mitch of course, not Fallows.
Geminid
@Kay: Soccer is a great youth sport. Kids need to run and move around.
It’s no wonder that soccer is the most popular sport world wide. I remember how I used to think that was kind of strange, somehow deficient. A very obtuse take.
Suzanne
Now, we’ll just show you disappointment in a different way: refuse to patronize their businesses, refuse to make friends or go to church with them, refuse to hire them, make them feel unwelcome in your neighborhood.
Suzanne
@Kay: OMG, Spawn the Youngest has been doing soccer. It is H I L A R I O U S. She has been learning how to take turns, not use her hands on the ball, and make friends!
One day, she just wasn’t feeling it, and she kept running over to us, saying, “I need to stay hydrated”. She was three.
Gin & Tonic
@Suzanne: Silverman would be proud.
Geminid
French police made 1300 arrests last night, as protests of the police killing of a 17 year old continued through a fourth night. The teenager’s funeral is being held today.
Judicial authorities have placed a preliminary charge of voluntary manslaughter against the police officer who shot the youth.
Baud
@Geminid:
I thought regular police in Europe didn’t carry guns.
Admittedly, I haven’t followed this story in any great detail.
Suzanne
@Baud: The last time I was in Italy was about six years ago now, and I saw plenty of carabinieri with guns.
Geminid
@Baud: A lot of French police must be carrying guns; the TOI article said that last year 13 people were fatally shot by police during traffic stops in that country. This teenager’s death was the 4th such incident so far this year. Generally, it’s minorities who are targeted.
Baud
@Suzanne:
Maybe it’s just bobbies in UK?
Baud
@Geminid:
Thanks. That’s good context. The one excuse US police have for their behavior is the ubiquity of guns. Not sure what’s going on with French traffic stops.
Geminid
@Baud: The 17 year-old’s mother has spoken to the press. She is an Algerian immigrant. She said that while she wasn’t making the accusation against French police generally, she believed that racism was a factor in her son’s killing.
Baud
Dammit.
MomSense
@Baud:
Soooo much racism and Islamophobia in France. Add cops with guns and Voila!
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud:
@Suzanne:
The same in Spain. More than a few with assault rifles.
Suzanne
@Baud: I would hazard a guess that some of the police forces carry and some do not. The last time I was in Italy, we stayed in their embassy district, and there were carabinieri lining the streets, some standing at alert with semi-automatics. Not handguns. There had been a bombing or something in Istanbul a few weeks previously, so I think everyone was at high alert.
geg6
@Suzanne:
Exactly this. It’s what I’ve been doing, to the maximum extent I am able, since 2016. I hate them and make no bones about it with the only exception being at work.
twbrandt
I was in Oslo andStockholm earlier this month, and the police presence in both cities was very low-key. They weren’t the ubiquitous presence you see in lot of American cities. Most of the cops I saw in those cities carried sidearms, though.
I also very few, remarkably few, obviously homeless people in those cities. The Swedes and Norwegians provide housing to all who need it. The few I did see seemed to be immigrants.
JPL
@Kay: Carter tried the sport when he was three. More often than not, he would sit down in the middle of the field.
OzarkHillbilly
@JPL: “Why are all these people chasing a stupid ball? Screw that.”
Another Scott
@lowtechcyclist: Thanks for your perspective.
I think there are several problems with the SCOTUS that demand a comprehensive approach to solve, and the quicker the better.
I don’t think any of those things is going to happen as quickly as we like, but it would be quicker than 1 seat every 4 years (which wouldn’t address the other issues as well).
Of course, I don’t know, but my feeling is that this state of affairs cannot continue and therefore it will stop. Whether that is via deaths or retirements of current justices, or a change of heart by younger ones, or impeachments or whatever, I have no idea. But the RWNJ SCOTUS is badly out of step with the country, they are usurping legislative powers that they have no right to take, and they are a danger to American self-government. It’s not just a matter of them making decisions we disagree with – they are way out of their lane and must be brought to heel.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
Suzanne
@geg6: Word. Like, I do not have to do anything for the benefit of bigots and racists and sexists. I moved across the country to get away from those people and their control.
They are free to have whatever beliefs they want and to exercise them in their own lives, but the moment they step on my rights, they can get fucked by the Dildo of Consequences, which, in this scenario, brings on “Negative World” even faster.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@Suzanne:
Ordinary carabinieri were strolling carelessly down the street, the handle dangling perilously away from the body when I was there. Had I wanted to take it, I could have.
Now, the paramilitary dudes guarding large crowded spaces were some serious, watchful, zipped down folks. They were another matter entirely.
Betty Cracker
Today is the first day of scallop season — woohoo! My dad is supposed to organize a scalloping trip, so I need to call him today and bug him about that because he has a boat that is better suited to that purpose than ours, and he is better at finding spots with abundant scallops than we are.
Scallops are the only seafood I really enjoy catching. I occasionally go on fishing excursions with others, but I don’t do any fishing myself — I read or look for birds instead. But scalloping is fun because you jump in the water with snorkel and fins, and bagging the tasty mollusks is like an easy game.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
Lincoln had this to say about the Taney court:
Suzanne
@Another Scott:
Why do you feel like it cannot continue?
I mean, I find it intolerable, but I don’t see any specific impetus to change it. I’ve been living with an intolerable governance situation my whole damn life. My first presidential election was Bush v Gore, and I thought something like mass protest would happen to drive Bush out in shame. But no, he finished two fucken terms. Trump got to finish a term. I think we’re stuck with what we’ve got until Thomas and Alito are dead, and FSM willing there is a Democrat in office when that happens.
JPL
@Betty Cracker:Whoa! I’m jealous.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@twbrandt:
I was in both those places and Helsinki earlier this month.
No homeless seen in Helsinki or Stockholm. No pandhandlers in either city.
Oslo, different story. Nonetheless, by current Denver standards, Oslo had nothing of what we see here.
Helsinki slightly different in that my friend their lives in a flat in a traditional “working class” neighborhood (her words) that backs up to a tiny park. It, and a place a block away in another direction from her place, are one of Helsinki’s well know “shooting up” areas. Yeah, I recognized the type but it was an experience unlike what I see here on a daily basis in Denver. Helsinki is another place that provides housing.
In all three cities, virtually no police out. My friends in all three cities and they say that’s normal.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Suzanne: My building had a bbq last night, and as Mr DAW and I were leaving, we walked past a table talking about how they all watched Tucker Carlson and now they would watch the “new guy.” We were both so horrified. What is wrong with these people? They are well-off, comfortable, old white people. They literally have everything they need. And they still respond to that hateful vibe that Fox, and particularly Carlson, gives off. Whoever called them sore winners was right.
Gvg
@lowtechcyclist: first there is a good work related reason we need 13 as I understand it, for each district and it should be made clear that there should be further expansions in the future, not stay 13 forever. But we don’t have to do all 13. Only I say we should do 2 right away and say it is catch up for the Republican and McConnell cheating and lying to deny the Democratic Presidents their normal picks. We should also pursue the bribe taking corrupt justices and remove them from office if the evidence leads to that conclusion as a separate matter because we have seen in the past where ignoring corruption leads. If people say that is political, say, the republicans always made it so, then pretended it wasn’t. But this is what is best for the country.
We can’t hold back on the chance that we might also have to replace the corrupt Justices because that is unlikely due to vote margins, and that really is a separate matter. It would not be a factor if those guys weren’t taking bribes. They made the choices. Admittedly it does make us madder, and more determined and probably our voters too, but what can you expect? Thomas and Alito and Leo at least seem to have not factored in that the public opinion does indirectly get to have a say and they are making a lot of people really mad.
Suzanne
Change of topic: Mr. Suzanne and I were discussing the terrible Court decisions this week, and we got to the topic of “Obama-to-Trump” voters, and how much we were seething with rage at them.
There’s a couple of broken records in the BJ comment section who like to pin the blame for HRC’s 2016 loss on “Berniebros” and leftists, but that’s not what the data indicates.
So they’re just SoCons who want their Social Security and Medicare.
Rusty pitchfork time!
OzarkHillbilly
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Hate is addictive.
Suzanne
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
What’s wrong with them? An almost unbelievable sense of entitlement: this expectation that everything would stay just like it was when they were kids…. forever.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Suzanne: Entitlement is right. The things they’re upset about usually don’t affect them at all, but they are driven to police them anyway.
Baud
@Suzanne:
I blame Bernie Bros but I don’t only blame Bernie Bros.
Geminid
@Baud: The election result in 2016 was multiply determined, with a multiply determined set of bad guys.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@Suzanne: I spoke to a man yesterday who is 57 years old, just gotten his disability approved, mishandled some estate money he’s supposed to be handling (but expects a substantial inheritance from) and is dead ass broke.
He always carries a gun on his person, has another in his truck and god knows how many at home.
Guarantee that he votes accordingly.
Suzanne
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Many conservatives need, nay, demand, group approval and they want to create a social cohort in which they are comfortable and esteemed. That leads them to all kinds of exclusionary shit and the impulse to police other people’s behavior (all while engaging in plenty of shit themselves, just privately). That, to me, is the root of their terribleness.
SiubhanDuinne
@NotMax:
That looks delightful!
zhena gogolia
I can no longer even click on the tweets. I get a “Retry” button.
Betty Cracker
@Suzanne: Yep. Unfortunately, the country is so polarized that the dumbest assholes in America determine the outcomes.
Suzanne
@Baud: From what I have read, the vast majority of the people who were pro-Sanders but then voted for Trump, or who sat out the general election, weren’t leftists/progressives or Democrats. They were the “chaos agent”, “shake things up” people.
Suzanne
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: I knew plenty of people like that in AZ. Scared shitless of everybody and everything, carried guns everywhere. And yet so out of shape that they couldn’t run 50 yards or do five push-ups.
NotMax
@SiubhanDuinne
Surprisingly so.
Fair warning though, there is one very brief off-screen act of brutality that is nevertheless jarring.
kalakal
@Baud: In Europe the countries where police don’t regularly carry guns are Ireland, Norway, Iceland & the UK.
In the UK you’ll see very heavily armed* police at airports, courts, embassies and such like.
*assault rifles, machine guns & such as well as handguns
JPL
@Suzanne:And what can go wrong with that view, hmmm? What bothers me more than anything is the lack of common decency. That’s part of the woke society, I guess.
Baud
@Suzanne:
That’s really a question of labeling, which we’ve always struggled with.
Steeplejack
Ah, just remembered to tune in to Stage 1 of the Tour de France (on NBC now). I’ve missed the dulcet tones of Phil Liggett. Gorgeous scenery, of course.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: Yep. I wish we were better at consensus labeling. The confusion causes a lot of unnecessary hard feelings.
Geminid
@Suzanne: Some of Sanders’ primary voters may have then voted for Gary Johnson, who in 2016 had an exceptional vote total for a Libertarian candidate. Sanders supporters were often typed as very liberal, but my impression is that they were an ideologically diverse group. A generally anti-establishment impulse was a motivator for some, and misogyny was another.
Suzanne
@Baud: Leftists and progressives have a pretty coherent political philosophy (whether or not you find flaws in it, they have one) and a view about how that should be enacted in policy. Chaos agent people generally do not have either of those things, and they just want things to be different than they are. IMO, that’s a critical distinction.
On the 2020 election, from the Upshot:
schrodingers_cat
Socially conservative and economically liberal describes Bernie Sanders himself. Case in point are his views and votes on guns and immigration.
Commenters can decide for themselves who is a broken record.
Jackie
AL, thanks for front paging the Miss Texas, Averie Bishop article! I read it last night and made a mental note to keep track of her and see if she DOES get into Texas politics. I hope she does!
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
Labels mean a little less to me now. In an age of fascism, you’re either pro- or anti-fascist. And if the latter, you’re voting blue.
Suzanne
@Geminid: I agree with you here: Sanders’ voters were not just leftists or progressives, not at all. And the data indicates that it wasn’t the lefty people who defected or sat the election out in protest.
Baud
@Suzanne:
The big question for me is whether leftists and progressives will speak out and stand up to the chaos agents, or stand mute and be complicit.
Baud
Besides the question of who voted for whom, the other people of the puzzle is how negative messaging affected turnout.
Steeplejack
A friend and I have been racking our brains trying to think of a vituperative name for the Supreme Court. Got it last night, thanks to Chris Hayes, of all people—the Extreme Court.
Suzanne
Bernie Sanders, who supports abortion rights, separation of church and state, gay marriage, and affirmative action…. is not a social conservative LAWL.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: For some reason I am the subject of this commenter’s incredibly nasty personal attacks. When people can’t argue with substance they resort to name- calling.
They probably want to drive me away from commenting on this site. This morning I was just lurking and decided not to comment until I saw another attack.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: The candidacy of RFK Jr. may complicate that binary a bit since he’s running as a Dem. He doesn’t have a snowflake’s chance in hell of being the nominee, but he’s attracting chaos agents across the spectrum.
Suzanne
@Baud: I was much more active with progressive groups in AZ than I am here in PA, but everyone I had contact with in those groups (as well as in my local LD Dem group) was loudly and vehemently anti-Trump.
JPL
@Betty Cracker: How soon before he endorses trump or Ron?
Geminid
@schrodingers_cat: When I was researching Sanders in the lead-up to the 2020 primaries, I saw an interesting take on his views on gun control. A reporter for one of Vermont’s political journals, possibly Seven Days Vermont(?), was interviewing a guy who back in the 1970s and 80s ran in the same lefty political circles as Sanders.
“Bernie’s a Trotskyite,” the man explained, “and Trotsky always said it was a huge mistake for the working class to give up their firearms.”
From the other stuff I read , this sounds like something that Sanders would have believed. Sanders was a strange bird back then. He still is.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
Good example. I have no problem disavowing that “Democrat”. That’s what I want other groups to do with bad people who appropriate their brand.
@Suzanne:
Most progressives and perfectly good people. I’ve never questioned that.
schrodingers_cat
I have a couple of Bluesky invites so if any juicer wants to try out Bluesky and wants an invite you can dm me on Twitter (and tell me your BJ nym if it is different than your Twitter handle)
Suzanne
@schrodingers_cat:
I called you a broken record, because you’ve been saying demonstrably incorrect things for, like, seven years, and you bring it up when it literally makes no sense. You perseverate on Bernie Sanders as if he is a factor. He is not. You could have taken twenty minutes to Google sometime in the last few years and you would find heaps of data and analysis that indicates that you are wrong.
I can be much nastier, if you like.
I would like you to stop saying harmful and untrue things. Keeping progressives in the coalition is critical if we, you know, want to win anything ever again. And knowing who the real enemies are is an essential part of that effort.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
Guys, I found the best story on the intersection of helicopter parenting, religion and law EVER:
https://www.sltrib.com/news/education/2023/06/29/utah-teen-had-sex-school-heres-why/?fbclid=IwAR0hzfjM05PChPIPnx9fOuQavxehbPhz29Y6PVsdKHcRFpz0w2V7imlW5cM_aem_AdUO2z4p4c4KynWCpsrNpuYRf6mF1–TV_pAlurHqlq7MuFkW8M-uITScyX96LMv6Tg
Ksmiami
@Geminid: killing an Arab … ref:the cure-Camus
Chris Johnson
@Geminid: Vermont and New Hampshire are rural and have loads of legit hunters. I’ve had venison in my freezer and I’m not even a hunter. Vermont also has a tiny population with no huge cities, which makes a lot of things easier. And Vermont has respectable healthcare for an American state, and that includes mental health care. We are an unreasonably easy argument for ‘see, you can have guns and not blow up in violence’: of course we can, we’re on easy mode.
I was as much a Liz Warren fan as a Bernie fan: it seemed like the chaos agents targeted her super hard, like it would not be OK for an effective leftist to win anything, only the sincere but feckless Bernie. I still like what he said, it just isn’t as easy as he painted it. I voted for Hillary as he asked me to do, and tried my best to sway others.
Had I known that Hillary’s Russia hawkishness would turn out to be fucking well founded and the most important thing of the 2000-twenties, I would have been volunteering for her, not Bernie. Maybe not: I didn’t know what would happen to Ukraine, and might not have believed Hillary if she’d told me it would.
I remember some posters as being hell on Warren (as bad as the chaos agents), hell on Bernie, etc. to the point that I would have to just not say anything and let ’em rage. To the point where there was no difference if they were sincere, or if they were Russian trolls planted there to do exactly that and divide the coalition. For all practical purposes, some folks have such a need to purge the hippies that they don’t function any differently from troll armies.
I can just about name the trolls on the left by now. Ukraine is the litmus test, as they’re run out of Russia, so it always comes back to Russia, and America needing to have civil and race war. Very specific troll agendas attained in various ways.
Downpuppy
@schrodingers_cat: Not this morning. Twitter has been down for 2 hours.
Geminid
@Betty Cracker: I talk politics some with customer of mine, and she really likes RFK Jr. Jane is a Range Rover Republican who reads Epoch Times.
We were talking about Kennedy the other day, and I warned her that there is a very disturbing story about his first marriage and his divorce around ten years ago that may enter the discourse around him at some point. I did not say anything about his old felony conviction for heroin possession.
JPL
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: hahaha
The Does also argued the school district breached its duty of care toward JD, “causing him emotional distress.”
sab
We have a karate school in my neighborhood, and I always wondered who the customer base was. Turns out it is autistic kids. My granddaughter is now a student. My other step-son’s wife the occupational therapist says that they recommend it for all their kids. Formality and respect and manners along with the board breaking.
UncleEbeneezer
@Suzanne: It’s not about who BernieBros voted for on 11/8, it’s what they did to continually push up Hillary’s negatives right up to the finish line. Sharing anti-Hillary propaganda straight from Putin and spreading BothSides, “Well, they’re BOTH terrible” bullshit, encouraging or defending Stein voters and people who decided to not vote. A lot of voters wanted nothing more than an excuse to screw over Hillary, and the vast majority of hardcore BernieBros I watched, were happy to help.
Ruckus
@lowtechcyclist:
Would one have to add 2 per year to keep an odd number of justices so that it is less likely to have a deadlocked court?
I have wondered on occasion over my adulthood, if it is possible that our system is broken or if it is just that we have a percentage of humans in the human race that are so selfish that they can’t stand to see anyone the doesn’t look and talk exactly like them get anywhere outside of poor, neglected, trash. They look at this country, this world and see that those that don’t look like them, that are not as racist, sexist, ageist as them are a blight on their shitty world that rotates on the stick up their collective asses. They basically refuse to see anyone that isn’t their “equal” should be allowed to be human, to be educated, to have medical care, to live.
Seems like a rather crappy way to live in a world with instantaneous world wide communications, effectively world wide trade, and actual sharing of the concepts of humanity with all humans.
Danielx
Just got offered free tickets to see Bonnie Raitt this evening . Decisions, decisions…
schrodingers_cat
@Downpuppy: If Twitter is down send it to my blog email’
[email protected].
Suzanne
@Chris Johnson:
Yes thank you.
Progressives are an essential part of the Democratic coalition. We win when we all swim together. And I am a longtime believer that more Democrats leads to better Democrats leads to better governance.
schrodingers_cat
@Geminid: Interesting! Vt senator looks and sounds like many a campus radical who holds Marxist luncheons.
Jeffro
Jamelle Bouie: Elena Kagan has had ENOUGH
good! haven’t we all??
Jeffro
@Danielx: omg you have to go!
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@JPL:
This tweet:
https://twitter.com/sltrib/status/1674538915552804867?s=20
“Utah County parents who discovered their son was having sex with his girlfriend during school hours sued Alpine School District. A judge ruled against them, and the parents now say they are ‘considering other options for relief.’”
Mom, Dad – try the school parking lot. It worked for the kids….
Danielx
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg:
Heard about that. So two teenagers get caught screwing in the back seat and it’s…the school’s fault.
Also too, the emotional distress cited is 100% due to parents turning the whole deal into a court case. If I was that kid I’d be looking into legal emancipation.
narya
@Suzanne: I want to see the 303 Creative person go bankrupt.
Another Scott
+1
* – Wikipedia:
(Emphasis added.)
We’ve been here before. The path forward is clear, and we have options if the SCOTUS does not change course.
Eyes on the prizes.
Cheers,
Scott.
Suzanne
@UncleEbeneezer:
Sure. But the data indicates that those people weren’t primarily the leftist and progressive part of his voter base.
They’re the people we also call “libertarians” and “dumbass independents” and “no political philosophy” and “IGMFY” and “NO STEP ON SNEK”. And also a few “Republicans”.
Jackie
@JPL: In many ways he already has. He spoke at a Moms for Liberty function recently – who are def NOT a Democratic organization! His poll ratings aren’t from Democrats!
Maybe he’s angling for the VP spot with either one.
Danielx
@Jeffro:
I know, I know! But I got shingles vaccine booster yesterday and am hammered.
twbrandt
@Danielx: Go!
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@Danielx:
Ten years from now it’ll be “why doesn’t our grown son come around to let us see our grandchildren?”
Fair Economist
@lowtechcyclist:
The Right will *call* it political regardless of what it is. Same as calling Biden a communist.
At this point we have to expand the Court simply because the majority is so blatantly biased, incompetent, and corrupt. Tax breaks for their donors? Canceling anticorruption laws that would apply to them? Accepting fake cases for major alterations to American law? Insanely specious reasoning? Ignoring black letter law? You can’t have the rule of law when the highest court is so lawless.
Ken
@JPL: The one time I went to a kiddie soccer game (my nephew was about 4 at the time), there were three sit-downs. The rest of the kids were — well, although I never saw the ball, it was easy to tell exactly where it was: at the center of the pack of kids.
Really the funniest part was the coaches yelling “Spread out! Pass the ball!” from the sidelines.
Suzanne
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: LMAO. The number of LDS classmates I had in high school who went and got abortions…. H I L A R I O U S.
Baud
@Another Scott:
Massive win for Dems, even though FDR hadn’t fixed everything yet.
schrodingers_cat
Also, if anyone has questions they would like me to address about India’s polity, past or present you can also send them at the bloggy email.
Have a great Saturday!
OT non-political stuff: I kayaked for the first time this Thursday. It was fun. I kept going in circles but still. It was lovely to be out on the water.
Also I am looking for suggestions for pet insurance for our new kitty. Thanks.
Jeffro
@Danielx: hydration + Advil + Bonnie Raitt tickets = a great time!
Jeffro
@Fair Economist:
Exactly this. The chips, as they say, are down. Let’s deal, Dems!
Geminid
@schrodingers_cat: Sanders kept his Marxist beliefs on the “down low” once he became a Congressman. This was a pragmatic approach to keeping the best job he ever had (depending on how you look at it, it was also only the second job he’d ever had).
In some ways, Sanders is throwback: a Henry Wallace Democrat. But unlike Wallace, Sanders did not make an Independent run for President. Some of his hard core supporters still hold that against him.
Ruckus
@twbrandt:
I also very few, remarkably few, obviously homeless people in those cities. The Swedes and Norwegians provide housing to all who need it. The few I did see seemed to be immigrants.
Gee, taking care of those who can’t, aren’t, won’t participate in normal life of working, paying taxes, living in a home seems like such a burden on the rest of the population. I mean really, if one can’t pull their own weight 24/7, 365, 80 yrs, they should be shot, or starved so that they don’t impinge on all the hard working atomitrons that do. Shouldn’t they?
Some days I look back, in my eighth decade (Thanks Steeplejack!), and I wonder, for all the work, all the effort, this is it – breathing and working? To be retired and thrown aside because our usefulness is no longer profitable? Or looking at those that don’t quite “measure up” to the standards of the profiteers as losers, as a cost unit. Have we thrown humanity out the back door into the alleyway of life for the all mighty unit of currency, of profit?
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@Suzanne:
Louisville was a high liberal Catholic population town (so no clinic protests at that time) and it was pre-HIV when I came of age.
Literally nobody gave a damn what you did, so people were raw-dogging all over and if somebody got preggers the clinic was cheap and there was no stigma. Reckless sex with badly chosen partners of the moment were kind of a rite of passage and learning experience.
I feel kinda bad for kids now – the current climate is a lot less fun.
JPL
@Ken: What was frightening is that one team knew what they were doing. I’m not sure how many practice hours they had to put in, but obviously a lot.
Bee Girls
@Danielx: Last year, a friend of my husband’s offered us his two tickets he couldn’t use last minute to see Bonnie. Venue was an outdoor amphitheater at a winery two hours from home. Mavis Staples was also on the bill. We cancelled on grandkids and sped away. Bonnie Raitt is always worth the effort to haul ourselves to her show.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg:
Oh to be young.
kindness
I don’t understand the complaint that increasing the Supreme Court to whatever is wrong because it would be seen as political. God damn right it’s political. This is like the abortion issue. Democrats/progressives need to own it and say outright yes we are increasing the size of the court to right it’s terribleness right now. It is a winning argument. The idea that you will hide and ignore an issue so as not to offend people who for all practical purposes aren’t going to vote for you anyhow is insane.
raven
@Bee Girls: I saw her at Red Rocks with Hornsby on keys and her dad sang a song with her!
Baud
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg:
The good old days are gone-orrhea.
O. Felix Culpa
@Suzanne: I agree with this statement AND I will say that in my corner of the grassroots political world, some BernieBros did most actively undermine Hillary and the Democratic Party both before and after 2016. One can call them chaos agents, but they called themselves leftists and progressives.
ETA: These self-described leftists and progressives sucked up considerable organizational time and energy with vicious attacks on local Democrats and the party, which continued well into TIFG’s administration.
StringOnAStick
@Suzanne: There’s two levels of cops in Italy. The regular traffic police weren’t armed the last time I was there, and I never saw a Carabinieri who wasn’t armed and usually with something assault rifle like.
Geminid
I was interested to see that money from the American Rescue Plan Act is still being allocated. On my way home from work yesterday I heard an interview with a Staunton, Virginia city official. He was talking about improvements to Staunton’s flood warning system that utilized $80,000 from the city’s ARA money.
And this morning I ran across this report from Arizona radio station KJZZ:
The American Rescue Plan Act was passed only two years and five months ago, but it seems like ancient history now.
Maxim
@Suzanne: And a sizable contingent of Russians posing as same.
Maxim
@Suzanne: My home town was heavily LDS (and SDA). When I was in high school, it was well known that the LDS kids were the biggest partiers around when the sun went down.
Ruckus
@StringOnAStick:
When you have a higher ratio of cops to citizens the need to arm them with weapons of war is reduced. But the more that ratio changes to a lot larger number of citizens to cops, the ratio of good citizens to cops changes also. There will be more good, law abiding citizens but there will also be more not law abiding citizens. And more often, times that cops have to be involved in someone’s life.
schrodingers_cat
@kindness: Right now Ds don’t have the votes. So Biden is wise in not committing to a strategy that can’t be implemented. First we need to get more Ds elected to both houses.
StringOnAStick
@O. Felix Culpa: I worked with someone who was visibly angry about the GOTV calls she was getting for Hillary, spitting “I’ll never vote for her!”. She spent her time with lots of Boulder modern day young hippies who thought Bernie was the One True Leader Who Had Earned Their Vote (you know, morons). When I told her that Bernie had said he wanted his supporters to vote for Hillary, her demeanor completely changed to a slack jawed “he did?”, and she then voted for Hillary. It was cult like and I don’t think I will ever forget it.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@twbrandt:
My only comment on squalid homeless encampments in American cities is this – you can have a vibrant urban core that’s attractive to residents, businesses, entertainments and tourists, or you can have a pack of aggressive shitty homeless panhandlers and encampments.
You can’t have both, regardless of your good intentions or your expectations that people will tolerate stepping around piles of shit, seeing blowing trash, watching people shit in the streets or gibbering addicts screaming at them over money.
Mr. Bemused Senior
What is the point of having a society? To me, the purpose is to provide an environment where people can just live their lives, reasonably free of a constant struggle just to survive.
The result in any election is the sum of individual decisions by many voters. In the 2016 election there was a confluence of factors. Misogyny, Russia, Comey, on and on. At root, though, there are a lot of people who are predisposed to support someone like Donald Trump. They live in this country. In some sense, society has failed these people. The 2008 economic collapse is just one example of such a failure.
Hate is a basic human emotion, we are all capable of it. Why, though, is it so prevalent lately? I think the question answers itself: our society has a severe problem.
Geminid
Rabbit Rabbit everybody!
The computers over at Twitter have decided to celebrate the new month by going on strike. Twitter’s lenders and equity investors are probably celebrating by slamming their heads on their desks and moaning, “Muskrat Muskrat.”.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
The multiple did impress me.
trollhattan
@Danielx: Lucky.
She came through town a couple months ago and put on her typical pro’s pro show. Her usual excellent band as well.
Baud
@Geminid:
It’s the Twittageddon!
ETA: They should have put WaterGirl in charge.
Ken
That’s cheating!
trollhattan
@Geminid:
None of the workarounds for viewing Tweets in a browser are working for me, so I’m effectively locked out and oddly, not scrambling to sign up either. Guessing that’s a few folks who now won’t be driving revenues over there, despite the schoolyard tactics to gain subscriptions.
schrodingers_cat
Twitter is working fine on my browser on my laptop.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
The tweets in the OP are still showing up.
ETA: I couldn’t get to the sign up page going to Twitter though.
raven
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: “seeing blowing trash” Say what?
O. Felix Culpa
@StringOnAStick:
Yes, and I want to be careful to say Not All Bernie Supporters, but some were definitely cultlike Bernistas and did measurable harm, in my lived experience.
kindness
@schrodingers_cat: I agree this current Senate and House couldn’t increase the size of the courts because the numbers aren’t there. I’m saying that Democrats run on the issue going forward rather than hide from it. And we don’t need 60 Senate votes if a new Senate starts out with rules that eliminate the filibuster and unanimous consent. Run on it as a reason to elect more Democrats.
Geminid
@schrodingers_cat: Interesting. I looked up German military commentator @tendar around 6 am and Twitter was working fine. I haven’t gotten anything but a “Retry” prompt since then.
lowtechcyclist
@schrodingers_cat:
And where does he stand on women’s reproductive rights, or LGBTQ rights? Does he take the ‘socially conservative’ side of those issues?
Piece of cake.
Bee Girls
@raven: Lucky you all around! Her concerts always have more going for them than her wonderful music. Her back and forth conversation with her audience, her presence and quality as a person and an artist…I am always thrilled to be where she is.
Jim Appleton
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: You demonstrate how we treat homelessness as a moral failing. We make it very hard for folks in that hell to climb out, and blame them (or local governments not equipped to do much more than whack-a-mole) for loss of utopia.
Scandahoovians treat it as a societal problem with solutions that work.
Ken
My sympathies.
schrodingers_cat
@O. Felix Culpa: Wasn’t Orange T’s winning margin smaller than votes that Jill Stein got in at least a couple of the mid-western states?
BS called PP “the establishment”. I certainly didn’t imagine all that did I?
trollhattan
@Geminid:
Win PC: Nitter is borked in Chrome–redirect works but no content is shown–and Firefox goes straight to the sign up page, same with Edge.
BeautifulPlumage
@zhena gogolia: I found this in the Wonkette comments section: https://syndication.twitter.com/srv/timeline-profile/screen-name/#########. Paste in the url and replace the #s with the Twitter handle, for example https://syndication.twitter.com/srv/timeline-profile/screen-name/MollyJongFast to see a page of recent tweets. It is limited, and you can’t follow threads, see quote tweets, etc, but you can still see what folks are tweeting.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@raven:
Open dumping of trash on the ground. It is really disgusting.
Citizen Alan
@UncleEbeneezer: I will hate the Bernie crowd forever for their conduct during the 2016 DNC convention.
Mike in NC
Lindsey Graham invited Fat Bastard to attend a July 4 event today in some little hick town in South Carolina with a population of around 3000. Supposed to be miserably hot and humid there, so here’s hoping he brings his usual chaos and lunacy. Marge Greene was also planning to show up. The cops have no idea how many MAGAts will be there.
O. Felix Culpa
@schrodingers_cat:
Relying on my unreliable memory, I think you are right in both cases. That said, I don’t know if any studies were done to identify the makeup of the Stein voters and what percentage were Sanders supporters or had been swayed by Bernie’s and/or Bernistas’ attacks on Hillary.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@Jim Appleton:
Here’s the problem – If you live, work in or operate a business or service (including hotels and tourist attractions) an area of any city where the homeless aggregate in high numbers (like my office), their presence tends to make things unpleasant for everyone, and legitimately cause reactions ranging from mere irritation to disgust to genuine fear because of the aggressive behavior involved.
Thats not a formula for successful urban spaces, and the normies react to that in ways none of us like. “Sure, Rudy Giuliani was a fuckup and an authoritarian asshole, but he got rid of the squeegee bums and was instrumental in making Times Square vital again” is something I’ve heard more than once.
schrodingers_cat
@O. Felix Culpa: I knew 2 such people IRL both women
schrodingers_cat
@trollhattan: I am using Chrome.
Subsole
@Suzanne:
Part of the reason Bernie catches so much stick is that so very many of the loudest, wrongest, and most nakedly cynical people in that little Red-to-Brown pipeline did a rotation through one of his presidential runs.
I have mellowed a (very little) bit on the man, but great gods below, the people he hired did not inspire confidence in his leadership abilities.
Kayla Rudbek
@Kay: my sibling enrolled my nephew in a soccer club at about the age of three, and my nephew wound up distracting the other players on his team with wanting to go check out drains instead of playing with the ball. The coach told him to stop instigating that.
Timill
@O. Felix Culpa:
MI, WI, PA. Figures are at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidential_election#Results_by_state
Another Scott
@BeautifulPlumage: Oooh. Thanks.
nycsouthpaw
7veritas4
Oryx
Since it’s using the birdsite’s own stuff, it might be harder for Melon to break it.
Thanks muchly.
Cheers,
Scott.
Geminid
@kindness: I think that going forward, some Democrats will run on the court expansion issue. I’ll be interested to see how Reps. Schiff, Porter and Lee treat this issue in their Senate campaigns. California is often a leading indicator.
I expect it will be the blue state and district Democrats who take the lead on the issue. Purple and red state Democrats like Senators Tester and Brown might center more traditional issues instead.
My Congresswoman, Abigail Spanberger, probably will not make court expansion a part of her platform when she runs for reelection in her D+1* district. I doubt if the issue would bring her new voters, but it could put off Independents, and I think they hold the balance of power in the Virginia 7th CD.
* That is the rating given by the Virginia Public Access Project, and it gives a lot of weight to results in the 2021 Governor race. Spanberger won by over 4% last year, but she had a fairly mediocre opponent. Spanberger is a hard worker and a good fit for the district though, and I think her margins will increase over the next few cycles, and maybe approach 10% by the end of the decade. Especially if Republicans here can’t get out of their radical rut.
mali muso
@BeautifulPlumage: Thank you VERY much for that hack! It works for now at least. :)
Citizen Alan
@Suzanne: Pregressive are a part of the Dem coalition. Nina Turner is not. Brianna Joy Gray is not. David Sirota is not. Cornel West is not.
BeautifulPlumage
@Another Scott: you’re very welcome. And thanks for the links…I don’t remember all the handles for folks I like, this helps!
dmsilev
@Geminid: I’d say I feel sorry for Twitter’s new CEO, but she did agree to take the job knowing full well that Elon Musk still exists so she kind of deserves whatever stress comes with.
O. Felix Culpa
@schrodingers_cat:
I knew a number IRL too, both men and women. A nasty, mendacious lot. That said, one of my closest friends and best organizers was a Bernie supporter and got involved in politics because of him. But she’s a super smart person who is grounded in reality, so is committed to doing what actually helps get progressive goals enacted. I wish I had dozens more like her.
BeautifulPlumage
@mali muso: you’re welcome! I was having withdrawal symptoms so was glad to stumble on it.
Jim Appleton
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: I do work in an area so afflicted.
Yes, it is a problem.
Other countries don’t have it, and we could learn from those examples.
Dorothy A. Winsor
Just saw a very nice video my niece took of a flag raising at the Gettysburg Battlefield. Apparently, it’s the 160th anniversary. Niece’s husband (James Hessler) is a docent there. He’s produced a couple of well-written books about the battle, including one about Sickles that I thought was especially good.
Kelly
I’ve been kayaking for 40 years. Always lovely to be out on the water. The first tip I always offer to beginners: Use your core muscles in your torso to drive the paddle. It’s a twist from the waist to your shoulders. At first it’ll make the going in circles worse but once you get it working you’ll have more power and endurance. Lean the kayak a little towards the side your stroking on to compensate for the thrust that is driving you in circles.
O. Felix Culpa
@Timill:
I am aware of the high level breakdown, but do those stats tell us how many Bernie supporters voted for Johnson or Stein instead of Hillary? Sorry if I missed that in the link. It would also be useful to know how many Bernie supporters and others influenced by them sat out the general and didn’t vote at all. It would be helpful to know both statistics to determine impact.
gwangung
@O. Felix Culpa: I knew a couple, as well….one was a BIPOC woman…dunno how they reconciled their world view with some of their fellows, who were strikingly sexist and a bit racist.
I did know they had a habit of using tools they had no understanding of, claiming things for it that were contradicted by the tool’s own documentation….
trollhattan
@Another Scott: Weird, but it functions. I’ll start a .txt file of Twitter IDs to copy and paste in–don’t think I want to add a giant pile of new bookmarks, but we’ll see how long this latest mess goes unresolved.
Is he leaving the car and rocket bidnezes alone while stroking his ego ruining Twitter?
Maxim
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I assumed that was three times in a week, not in a day.
Geminid
@schrodingers_cat: A few months ago I compared the 2016 Stein and Johnson vote in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania to the vote in 2012. I think It was about twice as high for both candidates, maybe higher for Johnson. I recall that the Stein “overvote” of 2016 likely would not have made the difference in those states but the larger Johnson “overvote” could have, especially combined with Stein voters.
Turnout for the Libertarian and Green Party candidates reverted to the party norms in 2020. I suspect that misogyny was one of the factors that contributed to the unusually high 3rd Party numbers in 2016
StringOnAStick
@O. Felix Culpa: Agreed. This was when we lived in the Denver area, and there was definitely a certain subset of what I have come to refer to as LDH, Latter Day Hippies; 20-30 something in age and trying, with the help of money (lots of trust fund $ in the bunch I knew) and whiteness, to recreate the 1960’s summer of love, etc. that they were too young to be there for in the first go round. Mostly concentrated around Boulder, CO but a significant number were/are in Denver. It has certainly led me to better understand the reaction to this sort of spaced out ideal that was the punk movement. This and the male Boomer chaos agent types are the ones from the Bernie followers that did the damage of amplifying attacks on Hillary to the very last minute of the 2016 campaign; I think most people who voted for Bernie in the primary voted for Hillary in the general and what people get hot under the collar about around here are really a pretty small subset of the many ways in which Russian and RW rat fucking made sure to deny Hillary the Presidency. Though I don’t want to leave out the women I knew who were never Bernie fans but fell for the Russian rat fucking and refused to vote for “that woman” too, so they voted for McMullen. Sometimes women can be the worst misogynists, must be a self loathing thing or something.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
ETA
Mai Naem mobileI
Guess TFG told Doug Ducey to look for ‘fraudulent’ votes in Arizona as well. https://wapo.st/444uGoP
I don’t know how this works but Maricopa County Attorney won’t go after TFG because it’s Rachel Mitchell. Yes, the same TFG impeachment Rachel Mitchell. I don’t know if AG Kris Mayes(D) can go after him but it would be interesting to have TFG deal with a court in yet another state and in Maricopa County at that.
O. Felix Culpa
@Geminid:
@StringOnAStick:
I guarantee you that misogyny was a factor, probably the decisive one in multiple demographics. Call me naive, but I had no idea how racist this country is until Obama and how misogynistic it is (including in so-called progressive/leftist circles and sadly also among too many white women) until Hillary.
StringOnAStick
@Kelly: I go with a pretty straight arms approach to help force me to use my core and that all important upper/lower body separation, otherwise you toast your lover back.
I gave up whitewater kayaking (many reasons, a couple of serious scares) and now I have a whitewater SUP though mostly I play in the easy parts of the Deschutes. You either get the arms and core right, or you definitely toast your lower back!
Dorothy A. Winsor
@O. Felix Culpa: Me too. Until 2016, I wasn’t aware of how many of my fellow citizens scorned me.
StringOnAStick
@O. Felix Culpa: Yep, right there with you. It was a real eye opener about what is behind a lot of people who will smile at you while voting to destroy you.
strange visitor (from another planet)
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: right. uh huh. and now there are no homeless people in nyc, right?
…and not for nothing, during the primary, commie doc brown and his sandernista supporters tried out all the lines of attack tang the conqueror settled on during the general; they said she was UNQUALIFIED. hell. HE said she was unqualified. she was a warmongering corporate whore. she was corrupt.
yeah. and TOO many of the nyc “more-lefty-than-thou” crowd who were manning the barricades in 2016 were ALL in on the “biden raped tara reade” bullshit that was an OBVIOUS ratfuck.
BeautifulPlumage
https://syndication.twitter.com/srv/timeline-profile/screen-name/acyn
Ahahaha Lindsey Graham being bood throughout his speech today in the GA county he was born in ha ha *snort* ha ha ha
trollhattan
@O. Felix Culpa: Standard line, then and since: “I’ll vote for a woman president, just not her.”
Okay then.
BeautifulPlumage
Test
Subsole
@Suzanne: He said Planned Parenthood is “The Establishment”. Which in Leftybro-ese means “the filthy perfidious cabal of
millionaires andbillionaires who rule everything and are keeping you, personally, from being happy”.That’s the thing, see. He might actually support our coalition and its goals. I dunno. Can’t read his mindwaves.
What I have seen, on two separate runs and several years inbetween, is that the instant someone disagrees on strategy, or doesn’t agree vigorously enough, or doesn’t endorse his candidate, or somehow offends the petulant little shitheel’s tender little shitheel ego, he immediately turns and starts ramming a dagger into everyone’s ribs. Typically, while we are rolling on the floor trying to grapple the gun out of some fascist asshole’s hands.
Yeah. Sure. Right. He supports workers*, and women, and minorities, and the gays. Until they piss him off. Then they’ll be “Establishment”.
*Hard-hatted white men who use their big greasy muscles to operate big greasy tools in a big factory. (The 25 year old Puerto Rican nurse serving 80 patients a shift? Eh, she’s not exactly a worker; she’s more The Help, when you look at it dialectico-praxistentially.)
@StringOnAStick: Nobody likes hippie punching, but some hippies are selfish, arrogant assholes who could probably be improved as humans with a good solid belt to the solar plexus (what my old neighborhood used to call a Learning Experience).
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: Oh come on. Who doesn’t enjoy stepping over a few used condoms on their way into work?
Michael
Love this. ❤️ thanks. Good 🌄 morning
VFX Lurker
Ditto.
BeautifulPlumage
And now for something completely different https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_zDXVw0aatQ
Randy Rainbow with Donny in the John With Boxes. The visuals are fantastic!
TW: bloated face and whiney voice of the sienna snuffleluffagus
Geminid
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I really could not say. There is a tendency to assume a Libertarian vote comes out of the Republican voting pool, but it’s not always that simple. It is hard to tell if a Libertarian voter might otherwise not have been a Democratic voter or a Republican voter. A large portion of them are not gettable for either party, I think.
The Libertarian vote was unsusally high in 2016, well over 3% and 3.5 million as I recall. I don’t think there was a surge in Libertarian thinking, and Gary Johnson did not become a more charismatic candidate (although I think he got more attention from the media).
There certainly was widespread animus towards Clinton, with a large component of misogyny.
And I think there was another factor that hurt Clinton: a widespread belief that she had the election sewn up. I think that may have caused some people who might have voted for her reluctantly in order to stop Trump to instead cast what they thought was a “free” protest vote. Like most of my theories, this is unprovable.
Looking ahead though, I do not think that next year’s 3rd party candidates will do much damage to Democrats even though they’ll surely be insufferable. We seem to be very cohesive now compared to in years past.
The Republicans are a different story, and they could lose more votes to 3rd party candidates next year than we do.
trollhattan
Found this re. Twitter on The Verge. Make of it what you will, including “Temporary emergency measure.”
Maxim
@Subsole: There was a video going around … must have been the 2020 cycle, not 2016. Multiple clips showing Bernie himself being rude and aggressive with women, verbally and physically. Not a nice guy.
I think he helped move the Overton window on income inequality, but he would have been an absolute disaster as president. Fragile ego, thin-skinned, my way or the highway. Unlike Biden, he hates almost everyone. He’s much more like Trump, in fact, just with different politics.
dmsilev
@trollhattan:
Putin’s ‘special military operation’ had more plausibility as a euphemism.
Baud
@Geminid:
Important point.
OzarkHillbilly
@O. Felix Culpa:
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Me 3.
Frankensteinbeck
@trollhattan:
Still sounds like “This broke, we can’t fix it because I fired everyone who knows why it broke, how can I claim it’s deliberate?” to me.
Kelly
@StringOnAStick: Yeah straight arms. I was strong enough to drag myself around with my arms. Took a couple rounds tendonitis to discipline me into learning proper form.
Jay
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg:
The unhoused cluster for security and services. Here, most are employed, often have several jobs, but arn’t paid enough or work enough hours to live here. In 2022, the “living wage” here was $24.08, that’s for a two income household. That pays rent, food, taxes, utilities, and basic services. So family income should be at least $100,000 plus a year just to afford the basics.
Inflation this year, rent, interest and food has jacked it up to about $120k to just get by.
Then you have the “social credit” issue, what you need to crawl back, eg first month, last month, damage deposit,………. and now they have added a “process fee”.
Right now, in our building, to rent a 580sq ft 1 bedroom, that’s $6650 upfront,
and minimum wage here is $17.58 starting in September this year.
One tactic municipal authorities use to try to “move them along”, is to not provide basic services, like garbage pick ups. On Robson St, (where the Versachi store is), garbage pick ups of the “street cans” is every hour, on East Hastings Street, where the unhoused cluster, once a week.
And then, there are the “sweeps”, where they kick them out at a moments notice, and city crews take all their tents, tarps, sleeping bags, sleeping pads, cook ware, stoves, lights, momento’s, spare clothes, food, and haul it to the dump.
And a month later, the encampments are back, because they have no where else to live.
schrodingers_cat
@strange visitor (from another planet): Yep all the fall campaign attacks against HRC were field tested in the primaries.
Geminid
@Maxim: As long as we’re Bernie bashing, I gotta say that his performance at the debate where he tried to shoot down the story that he had told Elizabeth Warren that a woman could not win was very discreditable. A better politician would dealt with this matter in a gracious way. Instead, Sanders made this sanctimonious argument that no one could possibly believe that he would say such a thing. When I heard that I thought to myself, “Yep, he said it.”
And then afterward, when Warren confronted Sanders and asked if he had just called her a liar on national TV, Sanders blustered and leaned over her while he jabbed his big fingers into her personal space. What an ass! Made me want to punch him in the nose.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Geminid:
Thanks for your answer? Geminid. Sorry for deleting the original comment. I felt like I was imposing
schrodingers_cat
Here is the paragon of virtue on Lou Dobbs on immigration
He was Dobb’s regular guest during the mid aughts and before.
Mai Naem mobileI
@Geminid: Hillary reminds some men of all the women who outworked them and beat them at work. They probably told themselves these women slept their way past them but deep down they knew the women outworked them. Hillary reminds some white women of the feminist women who also outworked them through school and work. Hillary even managed to have and raise a smart kid. It’s all just a bigger version of how Bill Clinton wasn’t accepted in DC because his poor hicktown single mother background didn’t stop him from going to an elite college and law school and becoming POTUS.
schrodingers_cat
More Trumpian rhetoric from the tribune of the masses
Kayla Rudbek
@Ruckus: my Neanderthal ancestors took better care of people than modern Republicans want to take care of people.
ColoradoGuy
The story about Bernie I’d like to verify is that he spent his honeymoon, in the early Eighties, in Moscow. That sounded so bizarre I wondered if it might be true. Is Bernie an actual no-joke, for-real Communist, or was it just academic curiosity? On a honeymoon?
It’s not like cold, gray, grim Moscow in the depths of decaying Communism was ever a vacation spot.
Geminid
@ColoradoGuy: That Russia honeymoon was one of many reasons I feared a Sanders nomination. It’s certain that the Soviets made videotapes, and they would have been dropped in October, 2020. Eeew!
Subsole
@Mai Naem mobileI:
Drives me up the wall.
Clinton was THE American story. He was the myth we tell ourselves about ourselves. Obama, even more so.
But who gets to be the Real True Authentic American Christian Patriots who fully and exclusively embody that good ol’ down-home hokey-doke peasant wisdom we all need to revere and emulate because it’s the only thing that’s really real?
Fuckin’ Ivy-league oil barons and California actors. Connecticut cowboy S&L scandal assholes. Willard Romney. Trump. Seriously. The average GOP preznit couldn’t be more aristocratic if they were an actual G-d damned French Marquis.
But they make people who think “hardhat and denim = virtuous b/c too stupid to lie” feel less insecure, so…ugh.
Yes, Beltway media. Keep soft-focusing the fascists. Daddy will finally have time to play catch with you and tell you how proud he is
any.
day.
now.
Assholes.
Roberto el oso
@kalakal: I had a long (10 hours +) wait between flights in and out of Gatwick, and I swear I have never seen so many cops with machine guns (and bomb-sniffing German Shepherds), with the possible exception of Buenos Aires in the mid-70s. Granted, this was before the IRA agreed to their own de-fanging, so the threat was still there.
Subsole
Also, while I am shitting on Bernie, I want to acknowledge something.
A lot of the anger he tapped into is fake-ass poseur coffe-shop proletarianism.
But a lot more is rooted in a genuine love and desire to see people do well. The article at the top of this post is evidence of that. Our own posters here like Suzanne are evidence of that.
I respect Bernie for activating younger generations. I really, really despise him and his advisors for peddling lazy sugar-pill solutions and introducing suspicion, hostility and division into a task that will require patience, trust and unity. I positively LOATHE them for doing this because ego and internet clout and patreon dollars were more important than harnessing everyone’s fear and hope and pain and anger and determination and kindness and empathy to productive ends.
You’re good people, folks. I wish the guy -and more importantly, his surrogates – had made it easier for us to work together. I mean we shouldn’t have to sit and relitigate this shit every time. But we do.
And it’s not even over policy, really.
It’s because frankly, the man’s fan club was abusively dishonest and cynical as hell, and I have seen a lot of denial and deflection, but precious little contrition or even acknowledgement of that fact. This place is rare in that regard.
Roberto el oso
@ColoradoGuy: Sanders is, in Barney Frank’s words, ‘a New Deal liberal who is squeamish about the ‘L’ word’. Occasionally his rhetoric wanders into lite-Socialist territory, but he’s not remotely a communist. The funny thing is that foreign policy was something he was (and probably still is) very very weak on, it just isn’t anything he appears to be interested in, and this has gotten him in trouble several times. His purported support of the Sandinista regime (after the ousting of Somoza, not in its 2nd, run-of-the-mill corrupt iteration) always sounded like an off-the-cuff stumble to me.
Roberto el oso
@Subsole: agreed … the cyclical re-litigation of the ‘Sanders question’ certainly has its grudge component, but is also apparently necessary, in order to separate the wheat from the chaff. The Sanders message, such as it was, was hopeful and idealistic but so light on policy details as to be useless, especially when contrasted with HRC’s approach, which was that of someone who not only had equivalently hopeful policies but also understood how government works and was therefore aware of all the possible obstacles which would thereby slow things down to an incremental plod that would still add up to forward progress in the end.
Sanders remains hard to read for me. At times he seems self-aware, but the team he assembled were so off-puttingly naive and aggressively patronizing that one had to question his judgment. And, as someone who presumably had some historical knowledge of collective movements, he nevertheless seemed clueless in regards to the cult of personality he had fostered, and, for the life of me, it’s hard to think of someone less suitable for a cult of personality … I mean among progressive/dem-adjacent folks, … the other side is awash with charlatans and creeps whose popularity will never cease to amaze.
Roberto el oso
@Mai Naem mobileI: “Hillary reminds some men of all the women who outworked them and beat them at work.”
Yes, this is very true (and I’d add that she reminded me of the many females who were smarter than me in HS & college) and this was possibly the Number 1 reason I was such a huge supporter of hers. And I expect she would be a blast to have a beer with.
Another Scott
@Suzanne: Because American politics is always stepping forward and being pushed back. It’s always a struggle, and the monsters have to struggle too.
Remember Nixon’s landslide, and W was unbeatable, and Turdblossom was crowing about the permanent Republican majority?
Yes, it’s different now. But it’s always different.
The SCOTUS is very reactionary now, and it’s horrible and unacceptable and people are being killed as a result, but it’s been so in the past. We will get through this and we will be a much better country afterwards.
Whether it takes 2 years or 2 decades, I have no idea. But it is a safe bet that it will happen. I’m doing my small part to make it happen quicker.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.