Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

You come for women, you’re gonna get your ass kicked.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

As long as McCarthy is Speaker, the House will never be in order.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

The republican caucus is already covering themselves with something, and it’s not glory.

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

Republicans want to make it harder to vote and easier for them to cheat.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.

It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

This isn’t Democrats spending madly. This is government catching up.

An unpunished coup is a training exercise.

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

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

The willow is too close to the house.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

We’re not going back!

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TGIFriday Morning Open Thread: All We Can Do Is Our Best

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  2. 2.

    Suzanne

    @Baud:

    I’m pretty sure I can do and have done less than my best. 

    Baud 2024 campaign slogan right here.
    Now to pick your song….

  3. 3.

    p.a.

    Is it something unique  to American fascism that the leaders it pukes out have been incompetent, or have we just been lucky so far?

  4. 4.

    LiminalOwl

    Lovely to see those poll numbers. May they perdure past the anticipated rise in oil prices from Saudis (and whoever else) putting thumbs on the election scale next spring.

  5. 5.

    different-church-lady

    It’s ambient, but it’s also tangible! And he could give shits. Two, in fact!

  6. 6.

    LiminalOwl

    @Baud: Did you see yesterday’s article on the recent “Free Staters’” fest in NH? Clothing-optional gun show, and one of the guys thinks libertarians should protest pants requirements as they do mask requirements? Sounds like a theme for your campaign…. (I can post a link to the Boston Globe article on request, but couldn’t find a way to evade the paywall.)

  7. 7.

    different-church-lady

    “the very quiet Republican lady”. Yeah, this sounds like a guy running scared.  😉

  8. 8.

    Suzanne

    @p.a.: That’s a really good question. Imma have to ruminate on that one for a while.

    My first thought is that the conditions for fascism to really take hold have to be fairly specific.

  10. 10.

    brantl

    “Baud 20XX, not pushing the limits, nothing’s going to break!” To the tune of California Dreaming.

  14. 14.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Suzanne:
    People say I’m no good and crazy as a loon
    ‘Cause I get stoned in the morning
    And get drunk in the afternoon
    Kinda like my old blue tick hound
    I like to lay around in the shade
    And I ain’t got no money but I damn sure got it made

    ‘Charlie Daniels, before he found Jesus or whatever the fuck he’s smoking nowadays..

  15. 15.

    Jeffro

    Biden: Coincidentally, a congresswoman, Lauren Boebert, the very quiet Republican lady?

    OH DON’T YOU TRY AND BE SNARKY AND FUNNY WITH US, YOU, YOU…MONSTER!!!

    -GOP

     

    They are soooo going to get their asses kicked next year.

  17. 17.

    Suzanne

    @Jeffro: I really miss Obama/Biden memes and I was hoping that there would be more memes out of the Biden era. Snarking on Boebert would be a good one.

  20. 20.

    p.a.

    @Suzanne: My first thought is that the conditions for fascism to really take hold have to be fairly specific.

     

     

    Whatever else is going on, conditions 1,2, and 3 are: get control of the security apparatus.  Looking at the FBI & local cops: 🫨

    Get a Flynn type at the head of the military, and then 🫨🫨🫨

  21. 21.

    Suzanne

    @LiminalOwl: When I was a teenager, the guy who was the leader of the Boy Scout troop at the church I attended was demonstrating how to clean a gun, and he shot himself in the leg in front of the troop. He was ex-military, too. Good guys with guns. Thank FSM one of the kids wasn’t hit.

  23. 23.

    Kay

    A little more on the rule change:

    Speaking at a union hall in Philadelphia, Harris praised the Biden administration’s economic agenda and pointed out that the new rule would be the first update in more than 40 years to the Davis-Bacon Act, which requires paying prevailing wages on public works projects. The Reagan administration changed the definition of prevailing wages in 1983.
    “Let’s agree these workers deserve our recognition and appreciation and they deserve something more,” Harris said. “They deserve a raise. … Many workers are paid much less than they deserve, much less than the value of their work … in some cases by thousands of dollars a year, and that is wrong and completely unacceptable.”
    The final rule transforms how prevailing wages, or the hourly rate of wages paid to workers in a given area, are calculated. It would tie wages to the wage paid to at least 30% of workers. The current standard for prevailing wages, set 40 years ago, is 50%. The Biden administration said this will help ensure workers’ prevailing wages aren’t dragged down by employers who pay low wages.
    The regulation also makes it easier for the agency to withhold funds from contractors to ensure workers are paid properly and protects workers from employer retaliation, Biden administration officials have said.

  25. 25.

    Spanky

    @Baud:

    I’m pretty sure I can do and have done less than my best.

    If you’re doing your best, what is left to aspire to?

  30. 30.

    Jeffro

    Also, GOP, you can look forward to more of this for the next 15 months: Republican candidate caught on tape favoring total ban on abortion.

    (oopsie!  ‘quiet part out loud’ and all that…)

    RICHMOND — John Stirrup has been playing up crime, taxes and other bread-and-butter issues while running for the House of Delegates in a purple Northern Virginia district, but the Republican didn’t mince words when two strangers separately buttonholed him on abortion.

    “I would support a 100 percent ban,” Stirrup told a woman who had approached him after a Republican primary debate May 18, according to a recording obtained by The Washington Post. In another recording, made June 20, he told a man he met outside a polling place that “I’d like to see, you know, [a] total ban.”

    Made surreptitiously by two abortion rights supporters posing as abortion foes, the recordings seem intended to pin Stirrup down on an issue that Republicans in some swing districts would like to sidestep but Democrats hope to make a rallying cry in Nov. 7 General Assembly elections.

    I think I’m going to look for a reporting job somewhere, it’s about to become the easiest gig ever.  “Sir, could you tell us about your views on Donald trump’s latest felony indictments?”  “Ma’am, could you tell us your views about reproductive rights?”  And then just run the same story over and over again: “When questioned, Republican candidate for X had ‘no comment’ ”

    Or maybe the GOP just needs to put abortion bans in its “rearview mirror” a la Vivek, eh?

  31. 31.

    Tony Jay

    @p.a.:

    I think it’s ‘so far’.

    Give the early 1920’s Klan more efficient leadership, keep it a going concern until the Wall Street Crash, then remove FDR and his influence from the scene, and you’ve got the ingredients for something very nasty indeed.

  34. 34.

    cmorenc

    A persistent RW talking point about Biden is that he + Hunter took millions from Ukranian / Russian oligarchs himself while he was VP – is there any shred of at least grossly distored, misleading fact or evidence behind this claim?  Of course, a go-to response of RWers/GOPers is projecting the kind of things Trump is accused of doing on democrats/Biden, but is there even a tiny, shriveled, grossly misrepresented / mis-characterized “there” to their claim ?  I would like to have a handy refutation next time a MAGA relative throws that claim out.

  35. 35.

    SFAW

    @Jeffro:

    They are soooo going to get their asses kicked next year.

    Can we wait on that shit until AFTER WE FUCKING WIN?

    Sorry, but I remember everybody getting all giddy in early November, 2016 — and leading up to then — about the upcoming Hillary Clinton Administration.

    And Susan Collins about to get creamed by Sara Gideon.

    And Cal Cunningham.

    And so on.

  36. 36.

    What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?

    @LiminalOwl: I’m waiting for one of them to be like “Who is the gubmint to tell me which side of the road I should drive on !?!?” Maybe it’s happened already and I just missed it.

  38. 38.

    Soprano2

    I really hope today is the last day I have to come to work to take a shower and get ready for work! The contractor says he thinks he will be done with the bathroom in my house today. I knew it was going to be a PITA because we only have one bathroom (lucky for us we put a toilet in the workshop we built or we’d be staying at a hotel!), so I’ve had no bathtub/shower in my house for over two weeks. I always forget something; today it was hairspray. LOL

  42. 42.

    David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch

    If the deep state can force you to wear pants then they can force you to eat broccoli

  43. 43.

    Kay

    David Leonhardt
    @DLeonhardt
    17h
    A critique of yesterday’s newsletter
    My response: Did abortion let Democrats win any truly surprising races in 2022? Say, in a Trump-won state? Or against a non-MAGA GOP nominee?
    When *abortion itself* is on the ballot, it does very well. Otherwise, its effect looks modest.

    The white male middle aged pundit denial that agency and autonomy for women is important is just so revealing. I had no idea it was this bad, that they were this rigidly conventional, that “womens basic rights” is a bridge too far for them.
    They will die on this hill. They cannot admit they were wrong to minimize it.
    Of course it’s the NYTimes. The worst political reporting on the planet. Just junk.
    It doesn’t really matter though. The response to pushing back womens rights 50 years didn’t come from media so it doesn’t matter if media doesn’t “believe” it exists. It isn’t a narrative. It’s votes.

  44. 44.

    eclare

    @Baud:

    Although if I look at where the economy/excitement is these days, gotta go with a Taylor Swift song.  “Shake It Off?”

    Her tour is expected to gross over 1B, not sure if that is domestic or worldwide.

  45. 45.

    JWR

    I heard a snippet on NBC about Joe Manchin running for reelection as an Independent. As long as he continues caucusing with the good guys, we s/b okay. Right?

  48. 48.

    WereBear

    @p.a.: Incompetence was RIFE in the Third Reich, which made Heydrich such a threat. He actually did get things done with ruthless efficiency.

    The assassins who sacrificed all to get him saved uncounted lives, I think. Because the rest of them spent more time backstabbing each other like on Dallas, the evening soap opera.

  50. 50.

    Ejoiner

    In the “Optimistic” words of Thom Yorke:

    You can try the best you can

    You can try the best you can

    The best you can is good enough

  51. 51.

    Jeffro

    @SFAW: How about if I get giddy and promise to work my ass off for Biden/Harris 2024?

    It’s important to enjoy the good times!  =)

  52. 52.

    Kay

    @Baud:

    They have to topple an incumbent R in a red state and replace with a D, exclusively on abortion.

    That’s the new goalpost. Like I said it doesn’t matter though- maybe it’s good. Maybe as they get further and further into this odd little rigid box they have put themselves in they’ll matter less and less. Media didn’t lead on abortion- they barely covered it. The response from the public happened anyway. We don’t need them on this. It exists organically regardless of their narrative shaping efforts.

  53. 53.

    SFAW

    @Kay:

    My response: Did abortion let Democrats win any truly surprising races in 2022? Say, in a Trump-won state? Or against a non-MAGA GOP nominee?

    Yes, Dave, you’re absolutely right. Dobbs had absolutely ZERO effect, as evidenced by the Red Tsunami in 2022, which allowed Mitch McConnell to re-ascend as Majority Leader, and gave Squeaker Kevin McQarthy a veto-proof majority.

    Moron.

  54. 54.

    Kathleen

    @Suzanne: Upside is that it will be easy to find correlation between number of guns purchased and size of (ahem) “appendages” if one were so inclined to do sociological “research”.

  58. 58.

    Kay

    @Baud:

    We have to worry about them when they actively create negative narratives about emails or the economy – this they just missed/ignored completely, the public, not them, were out in front on it, so they don’t matter.

  59. 59.

    Tony Jay

    @Suzanne:

    Surely the theme tune from ‘Peacemaker’ has everything required to get the voters ready to rock?

    Or just go with a bit of REM, really play into the pathos of what a pantless presidency promises the people.

  64. 64.

    Tony Jay

    @Kay:

    Fortunately the ACA will enable Mr Leonhardt to receive quality treatment for the multiple hernias he just inflicted upon himself by dragging those goalposts all the way up that hill.

  65. 65.

    WereBear

    @Kay:

    We don’t need them on this. It exists organically regardless of their narrative shaping efforts.

     
    I’m hoping the constant drip of bad takes will erode any popularity corporate money props up.

  67. 67.

    David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch

    @Kay: The same Village who predicted a massive red wave now pretend they never said it.  Therefore they must maintain Dobbs had no effect.

  70. 70.

    p.a.

    @Kay:  Media didn’t lead on abortion- they barely covered it.

     

    Despite its numerous admitted flaws, the intertubes has provided MSM workarounds for progressives (and fascists too 😟).  MSM could help, but they’re just an annoyance now.

  71. 71.

    SFAW

    @Jeffro:

    How about if I get giddy and promise to work my ass off for Biden/Harris 2024?

    WTF? And deny me my curmudgeonlinessitudeness?

    It’s important to enjoy the good times!  =)

    I got no problem with enjoying the good times. It’s the pre-celebrations that drive me nuts.

    That said: after reading some of your horror stories re: your MAGAt relatives, I consider myself extremely lucky/fortunate that the extended SFAW family is/are ALL liberal. The only point(s) of contention is/are how much we hate TFG and the entire Rethuglican Partei. I wish I could wave a magic wand and give you better circumstances in that regard.

  73. 73.

    narya

    @Kay: And I say, let them keep minimizing and dismissing it. People on the ground know, and are, if anything, more activated, I think, than right after the decision came down. We knew it would be bad, but were dismissed as “hysterical.” Now, the stories pile up of women whose lives were endangered, and, at least as important, the continuing push to ban abortion completely and to ban contraception. I do admit that I wonder how they can be so completely oblivious.

  74. 74.

    Jeffro

    @Kay: Biden/Harris 2024 would make a MINT selling little wind-up, motorized media goalposts.  Just in time for Christmas!  Fun for the kids!

    I may have to suggest that to them…

  75. 75.

    Geminid

    @LiminalOwl: Did you see the pictures of the young Turkish woman voting in the May 28 Presidential runoff, with her pet lamb following her around? The video was pretty neat, and Ms. Cracker posted it here.

    By the time the woman got home, she and her lamb were going viral. So she had someone tweet out a picture of her and the lamb, which was now draped in the colors of President Erdogan’s AKP party.

  76. 76.

    SFAW

    @Tony Jay: ​
     
    Not to mention the rectocraniotomy surgery, where they remove his head from his ass.
    [NB: Medical persons may tell me it should be the other way around (“craniorectotomy”), which may be true, but I felt this way “flowed” better.]

  77. 77.

    Ken

    @Tony Jay: Fortunately the ACA will enable Mr Leonhardt to receive quality treatment for the multiple hernias he just inflicted upon himself by dragging those goalposts all the way up that hill.

    Don’t forget it also covers psychological and psychiatric care. Many pundits and politicians are clearly not taking advantage of all the services available to them by law.

  79. 79.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    Of course from the point of view of a committed conservative culture warrior things are ambient worse.  The failure of conservatism is so bad they are no accusing each other being secret liberals sabotaging the conservative movement from the inside.

  80. 80.

    JPL

    @p.a.: IMO The Supreme Court has recognized the separation of church and state in the past.   If they continue to weaken the separation, we could move towards christian nationalism.   That opens the door to fascism

    I really don’t know though, just pure speculation on my part.

  81. 81.

    JWR

    Re Manchin as Indie… Never mind, just got caught up on the Sinema thread. One thing I saw there was that he refers to the “Democrat” party. Screw him with a rusty SinemaSaw.

  82. 82.

    Matt McIrvin

    @narya: On economics, the pundit class still acts like it’s 1980 and Reagan is forever running against Jimmy Carter. It’s not that surprising they’d have similar attitudes about abortion. For nearly 50 years, since Roe was in effect, liberals were mostly complacent about abortion rights and wanted it to go away as a campaign issue because all the energy was on the anti side. The thumbsucker pundits could write essays about striking a Grand Bargain with abortion-banners, red-state governments could gradually chip away at access to abortion, and in the national political arena it didn’t have much effect.

    It was all contingent on Roe standing. But I think it’ll take decades for many people who write about politics to believe that.

  83. 83.

    Tony Jay

    @Baud:

    I remember when having five stress hernias and a fist sized haemorrhoid playing havoc with your stance was classed as a pre-existing condition.

  85. 85.

    Kathleen

    I swear Trump’s speech is like a parody of an SNL sketch starring Alec Baldwin. Also great example of good political reporting. The reporter here definitely not a “both sider” (he excoriated Ohio GOP for not complying with Ohio Supreme Court’s order to redraw maps)

    From Cincinnati Business Courier by Chris Wetterich

    Former President Donald Trump may not be a fan of Procter & Gamble hair care products.
    At a dinner in South Carolina on Saturday, Aug. 5, Trump, who is running for the Republican nomination again, implied P&G’s shampoo was overpriced.
    Trump ranted about the flow of water in new homes before mentioning the Cincinnati-based global consumer products giant. Under Trump’s administration, the Department of Energy rolled back 2013 limits on the amount of water that could pass through shower heads. President Joe Biden’s administration restored them, although companies already were making compliant shower heads. Water pressure has long been an issue that has vexed the former president.

    “You buy a sink, and no water comes out,” Trump said. “When you take a shower – you know I have this gorgeous head of hair … I want water to pour down on me.

    “You have suds – beautiful, nice, wonderful suds – a lot of money, Procter & Gamble, all that crap that they say is good, probably cost them about 2 cents and they sell it for $10.”
    P&G did not respond to a request for comment.
    At Kroger this week, P&G shampoo products are selling for less than $10:

    Pantene: A 12-ounce bottle is selling for $5.49
    Head & Shoulders: A 12.5-ounce bottle is selling for $6.49
    Herbal Essences: A 13.5-ounce bottle is selling for $7.99

    Procter & Gamble’s political action committee spent $363,500 in the 2020 election cycle, giving 55% to Republicans and 44% to Democrats. None of the PAC’s money went to Trump or Biden. P&G employees gave $33,828 to Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign, according to OpenSecrets.org. They gave $129,339 to Biden’s campaign.

     

  86. 86.

    Ken

    @Omnes Omnibus: Sure, they’re cute when they’re small, but then they get too big to care for, and you find there are absolutely no animal shelters that take walruses, and one dark night you find yourself trying to flush a walrus down the toilet.

  87. 87.

    Soprano2

    @eclare: It seems like a lot longer! I knew it was going to be like this; when you have to have the bathtub and vanity taken out and the whole floor replaced, it’s going to take awhile. I wish I had replaced the faucets in the bathtub, because he spent a whole day working on them because they kept leaking. New faucets would have been cheaper. LOL

  88. 88.

    Jeffro

    @SFAW:The only point(s) of contention is/are how much we hate TFG and the entire Rethuglican Partei.

    Sigh.  That would be soooo nice!  In fairness, that’s the kind of discussion that my wife and kids have quite often and my in-laws welcome occasionally, too.

    I wish I could wave a magic wand and give you better circumstances in that regard.

    Well, thank you for that.  Others surely have it worse, but thanks!  It is strange to think about sometimes, that 7+ years have gone by and they still can’t see it.

    Oh well.  We’ve got elections to win – let ’em keep losing!

  89. 89.

    Ken

    @Kathleen: I swear Trump’s speech is like a parody of an SNL sketch starring Alec Baldwin.

    I can easily imagine Baldwin coming out in costume, but breaking persona and saying “We’ve given up, it’s impossible to parody what the man’s really saying, so for the next ten minutes I’ll be reading from his recent speeches verbatim.”

  91. 91.

    Sally

    @cmorenc: They accuse others of doing what (crimes) they do, because they assume everyone does it.  That’s the only reason I don’t totally believe “Golden Showers” story.  They have not yet accused a Democrat of doing that.

  92. 92.

    Soprano2

    @Kay: These pundits feel it doesn’t affect them, so it can’t be that important. Male centrist pundits have always felt that way about abortion – they wanted us to throw women under the bus in an attempt to attract white blue-collar men, who they believe are the real voters. They seem to think women’s votes only count half, or something.

  93. 93.

    WereBear

    @narya: I do admit that I wonder how they can be so completely oblivious.

    From what I’ve lived and observed, a childhood in a fundamentalist religion and sticking within 50 miles of the place you were born into, always, will do the trick.

    It has a lot to do with their skill at living in a fantasy world because their whole lifetimes they are still constantly lied to.

    They understand nothing as a result. The biggest marks in the whole world.

  96. 96.

    WereBear

    @Soprano2: I was exposed to this attitude in my very first office job. It’s always a shock. I hope we’ve stopped making so many, and my younger friends seem to be much more open and sensible about, you know, half the population.

  97. 97.

    WereBear

    Last night we finally had our indictment celebration, as the indictments kept coming and we don’t go out that much. But we had relatives visiting and it was fantastic. I invented the dark rum Gibson, which I think of as a form of anti-Gibson, normally made with gin, or sometimes vodka.

    It was perfect for this rum fan. I understand there are still more indictments coming…

    I also do not know if a Gibson was ordered by someone else at the table, what the minimum distance should be.

  98. 98.

    Scout211

    Interesting article in The Messenger this morning.

    The discussion here a few days ago debating whether Governor Newsom is an asset or a distraction for President Biden’s re-election is now answered.  At first the campaign was uncomfortable but now they see Newsom as a lead Democratic surrogate. Good for you, Governor Gav.

    When California Gov. Gavin Newsom sparred with Fox News’ Sean Hannity in June and touted President Joe Biden’s accomplishments directly to the person who spends an hour each night attacking them, no one loved the contentious back-and-forth more than Biden and his top aides.

    “We got a real kick out of [it],” said one Biden aide, who was still relishing the way in which Newsom fielded questions on the economy and how he fired back with relative ease.

    . . .

    A Biden adviser said the campaign’s view is that Newsom is an “incredibly effective surrogate and he has shown himself to be more than willing to do whatever the campaign needs, whether it is media, whether it is fundraising, whether it is helping mobilization efforts.”

    The adviser added: “He is 100% on board.”
    Newsom is particularly helpful, this aide said, in attacking the Republicans vying for Biden’s job. Those sorts of efforts free Biden up to tout his accomplishments, the first aide said, allowing Biden to “be more affirmative.”

    The thinking on Newsom’s public-facing role is, in part, to use the speculation around the California governor swooping in to run in Biden’s place to their advantage. Multiple Democrats made the case that if the media is going to focus on Newsom because of that speculation, he might as well “scream from the mountain tops” that Biden is doing a good job, as one operative put it.

    . . .

     

    “I don’t think until recently that this level of ‘attack dog’ was required,” Ashford said. “The ante has been upped. So Governor Newsom is responding appropriately to the time we live in. We don’t live in a time when soft cuddling gets attention.”

    “That kind of blunt and plain-spoken critique is something Republicans have been very good at and something Democrats are getting better at,” she concluded.

  99. 99.

    Glidwrith

    @p.a.: Partially lucky: when you have a system of lucky sperm members who get legacy admissions to college and then nepotistic hiring for jobs, incompetence is assured.

  101. 101.

    Ken

    From electoral-vote.com this morning, two law professors, both Federalist Society members, will be publishing an article arguing that Trump has violated the 14th Amendment and is ineligible to serve as President. The Federalist Society connection is interesting — electoral-vote asks the obvious question of whether this is part of a larger Republican/Federalist push to dump Trump.

    Though as we found out with the emoluments clause, just because the Constitution says something doesn’t mean there’s any enabling legislation or executive processes allowing it to be enforced, nor any individual or group that can put together a standing argument for a lawsuit.

    EDIT: They also speculate today might be the day Willis files the Georgia indictments, with the caveat that defendants are usually notified in advance and there’s been no threat-filled whining racist all-caps diatribes on Truth Social. Well, none about Willis.

  103. 103.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Soprano2: There’s this old idea that what Democrats really need to do is reassemble FDR’s coalition, which was fundamentally about social democracy for white men, with only a nod in the direction of civil rights to the extent that it didn’t bother the white-sheet crowd too much… but the civil-rights movement and the reaction to it killed that forever–it’d be morally atrocious to try to un-ring that bell even if you could. Besides, the demographics of the US aren’t the same as they were then.

  104. 104.

    MomSense

    @LiminalOwl:

    Wait, they were able to go back there?  After the literal shit storm (you can’t make me have a septic system!!!) and then the takeover by bears, I thought they had given up.

  105. 105.

    SFAW

    @Scout211:

    I think it would be good humor if Newsom said something like “You know how the other side used to screech about how ‘The best is yet to be!!!!’ ? Well, they actually were right, because the Biden Administration is here, doing it every day.”

    One would hope it would induce Junior and his fiancee (or whatever she is) to do a few more lines. In front of a cop.

  109. 109.

    What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?

    @Ken: That’s what Tina Fey said about her Palin sketches. She said they were easy because she didn’t actually have to write anything, she could just repeat stuff Palin actually said and got roars of laughter.

  110. 110.

    Chief Oshkosh

    @cmorenc: What I’ve been saying is that even the Republican’s star witness ended up testifying under oath that the Hunter story was made up by Russians, that was psyops to slant the election for Trump.

    Doesn’t impact the thickos, but at least it’s closer to the truth.

  112. 112.

    oldgold

    Assigning Federal District Court Judges randomly to cases seems much less than ideal. Perhaps on run of the mill cases it is acceptable, but on exceedingly high profile cases (our Republic hanging in the balance) it is a recipe for serious trouble.

    Forgetting  Judge Cannon’s political ideology, she is, at least at this point in her career, absolutely unqualified to try the Trump documents case. She has presided over just 4 criminal cases involving only 14 days in court.  In two of these cases she has made serious errors that a second year law student would not. In one she forgot to swear in the jury. Unbelievable!  In another, in her jury instructions she forgot to include a “not guilty” option. Lordy!

  113. 113.

    MisterDancer

    @WereBear: From what I’ve lived and observed, a childhood in a fundamentalist religion and sticking within 50 miles of the place you were born into, always, will do the trick.

    My AP English teacher was an Evangelical who tried to use the Book of Job as one of the works of fiction for the class. Issue was that she couldn’t help but teach Job as fact, not literature.

    And that’s the who business in a nutshell — Fundamentalists/Evangelicals get taught from childhood that it’s their primary role in society to spread the gospel (as they know it). Not to be a good person, or a good citizen, except insofar as those roles are filtered thru the “spreading of the Word of Jesus Christ”.

    That last part is why they have zero compunction about lying, or taking people like Trump into their bosoms. Why they can literally hear a preacher say scripture, and call it “too liberal” (no, this really was just reported!) Why they can put out medically horrific forced abortion centers, places filled with lies and putting people at health risks.

    All they are taught to do, is “win” — win hearts and minds, win people to their perverted vision of “Christ,” and screw anyone or anything that gets in the way. It’s no wonder, when you listen to people who did escape that world, that mindset, they sound something like that gnawed their own leg off to leave.

    It’s ironic — Jesus spent a huge amount of time, per the Gospels we have now, railing about the Pharisees and other hypocritical religious leaders. I mean, there’s a reason his only recorded act of violence was about people using the Temple grounds to make profit on the backs of innocent folx! And now, these people claim to be the only true Christians, the only ones who see what Christ was said to come for…but haven’t a lick of Jesus’ actual empathy and wisdom in them!

    Look. I ain’t here to tell you Christianty is an unalloyed good. As absolutely crucial as it was for enslaved people and descendants, like my family, it’s then-adherents– the forerunners of the Evangelicals in many ways — utterly erased the many religious that were worshiped by my ancestors and other enslaved people from (mostly) Africa. I would never erase that loss.

    But Our Good Anti-Christian commentator fails to see this nuance, these distinctions, and in doing so actually empowers these people. They can hide behind a broad anti-Christian stance, play the martyrs in that way, making a mockery of the pain and suffering early Christians actually went thru.

  115. 115.

    Ken

    @oldgold:  In another, in her jury instructions [Cannon] forgot to include a “not guilty” option.

    I’m OK with that for the documents case.

    Just kidding, I know it would be grounds for an appeal. It’s going to be appealed anyway, but it’s better if Trump’s lawyers don’t have a legitimate reason and have to make up something ridiculous.

  118. 118.

    Geminid

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: The woman’s political affiliations did not surprise observers. Her headscarf indicated that she was religiously observant, and traditional Muslim women are a mainstay of the AKP.

    At the time, I thought there were good reasons to vote against Erdogan, but there were also good reasons to vote for him. So I was mainly curious as to what Turkish voters thought. Afterwards though, I was glad Erdogan won. The actions of his opponent, Mr. Kilicdaroglu, during the runoff and afterwards made me sceptical of his ability to do the job well.

    I am influenced in this by Turkiye’s pivotal role in the war in Ukraine. For several reasons, I’m glad that it is the stubborn Erdogan facing Putin.

  119. 119.

    Kay

    @Doug R:

    Thanks. I hope rank and file building trades really come out for Biden. I know he’ll get endorsements from the nationals but I’m talking locals and on down. I cannot imagine a better President for them – between infrastructure, inflation reducation, green energy ramp up building and a GREAT Dept ofLabor this is as good as they will ever get. The rank and file are fools if they let racism or some other irrational bias get in the way of that. They are fools who put their families second. Same for manufacturing unions. Biden has an actual industrial policy. He is the best President for them since FDR and it’s not close.

    Labor union members really do understand wages in a way that non union members do not- they follow wages,can tell you in granular detail who pays what and why. If this hasn’t sunk in with them I really can’t help them. They’re going to have to do some of this themselves. Every one of them should be knocking doors.

  120. 120.

    Yarrow

    @Suzanne:

    I really miss Obama/Biden memes and I was hoping that there would be more memes out of the Biden era.

    I wonder if it’s because Twitter has gone down the shitter. Twitter used to be really fun and the source of a lot (most?) of the memes like that. Now it’s mostly the home of crypto crybaby fascism. Those people aren’t fun.

  121. 121.

    Chris

    @Suzanne:

    My first thought is that the conditions for fascism to really take hold have to be fairly specific.

    Per Paxton, the real make-or-break condition is “what is the center right doing.”  If conservatives decide to hold the line against fascism, the line will hold.  If they decide to throw open the gates, holding it becomes very difficult/unlikely.

    In our case, the decision was basically made all the way in the late sixties when our “center right” took one look at the closest thing we had to a fascist party at the time and said “yep, this is what we want inside our tent.”

  123. 123.

    Baud

    @Kay:

    Agreed. A large portion of labor has been shooting themselves in the foot for a long time. It’d be nice to seem them change course.

  124. 124.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @cmorenc:

    is there even a tiny, shriveled, grossly misrepresented / mis-characterized “there” to their claim ?

    Yes, but boy, is it tiny:

    There is an FBI document recording that a friend of Rudy Giuliani claimed to be a Ukrainian who witnessed Hunter Biden taking a 5 million dollar bribe on behalf of his father.  The FBI could not authenticate this person, could not find any other evidence.  It’s just ‘Someone said it, so we wrote it down.’  This is the same informant who the GOP first went ‘We can’t tell you who, but they totally are real’ and then ‘Uh, uh, he DIED!  Yeah!’

    Also, on Hunter Biden’s laptop, there is an email saying ‘the big guy’ will get a cut of some deal.  There is no context implying this is Joe Biden, but Republicans take it as assumed that must be Joe rather than, you know, any of the hundred other important people corporate board member Hunter Biden was schmoozing with.

    It’s worth mentioning that the laptop also has a lot of emails of Hunter telling the other Ukrainian executives things he is not going to do because they could be considered influence peddling in the US.

  125. 125.

    Chris

    @p.a.:

    Yeah, this is one of my many big causes for concerns; with a couple of miscellaneous exceptions like the Park Rangers, basically all of our security forces from feds to staties to cops are full-blown Trumpian nutjobs.  It’s hard to see how  that bodes well for democracy, especially when you see how much damage they’ve already done to it.

  127. 127.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @JWR:

    One thing I saw there was that he refers to the “Democrat” party.

    That’s the invariable tell, isn’t it?

  128. 128.

    Kay

    @Soprano2:

    Republicans are all running on “crime” so expect the NYTimes to lead on a crime panic and the rest to follow. Violent crime is dropping- it’s looking more and more like their crime freak out was just a pandemic blip, but as we know facts don’t matter in narratives.

    The GOP counter to “womens agency and autonomy” seems to be 1. the existential threat of woke Yale law students 2. demonize trans people and 3. roll out another crime panic.

  129. 129.

    eclare

    @Dorothy A. Winsor:

    Were you the one doing an escape room yesterday?  If so, what did you think?  I did one with coworkers, and wow, some people got really intense.  Much more so than at their jobs.

  130. 130.

    Chris

    @Tony Jay:

    Give the early 1920’s Klan more efficient leadership, keep it a going concern until the Wall Street Crash, then remove FDR and his influence from the scene, and you’ve got the ingredients for something very nasty indeed.

    While I think the “economic crisis => fascism” thing can be overdone, I do think we got incredibly lucky that the Great Depression didn’t hit until the end of the 1920s, rather than the beginning of the decade which was when fascism peaked for that generation.  By 1929, at least some of those movements like the KKK were already past their sell-by date, and Democratic rule was too far in the past to be credibly blamed for the depression.

  131. 131.

    WereBear

    @Yarrow: Exactly why I left. One can tell when a social media in on the downslide now. It was great in its time… but in a way the oligarchs did not like.

    So they pinned the tail on the richest donkey. They conned him.

  132. 132.

    Kay

    @Baud:

    “The Left” (or whatever these online ninnies call themselves now) have really embarrassed themselves on Biden and labor. Freddie DeBoer wrote an anti AOC screed where he pointed to Biden’s support of the negotiated agreement for rail workers. The agreement where they got sick time? I dont know- I can’t tell but I suspect DeBoer only read the headlines and does not know they got a good contract.

    If you care about wages and workers rights Biden is the best President of your lifetime. They don’t understand any of this if they don’t realize that.

    Them not supporting Biden on the withdrawal on Afghanistan was one thing- I don’t think any of them actually give a shit about foreign policy- but to not see that he’s a great workers President? That’s supposedly their entire reason for being.

  133. 133.

    Ken

    @Baud: No live audio, unfortunately.

    Trump’s not attending, so there won’t be much to hear, just a judge and a bunch of lawyers talking through legal processes.

    Though it would be funny if an unmuted microphone picked up something like the judge saying “You know that’s a ridiculous argument,” and the Trump lawyer replies “Off the record, your honor, I have a ridiculous client.”

  134. 134.

    Bill Arnold

    @Sally:

    That’s the only reason I don’t totally believe “Golden Showers” story.
    There’s a line of thinking that the Golden Showers story was injected into Steele’s information feeds to discredit his output and divert attention from the rest of his report(s).

  135. 135.

    smith

    @Frankensteinbeck: Also, remember that that laptop has passed through an unknown number of skeezy hands, any one of which could have altered the files. There’s no chain of evidence that would stand up in court. Any “evidence” found on the laptop is worthless.

  137. 137.

    jonas

    @MisterDancer:Issue was that she couldn’t help but teach Job as fact, not literature.

    I recall a Sunday School teacher (not an English teacher, at least) telling us when I was a kid that the description of the “leviathan” in the Book of Job was proof biblical people lived with dinosaurs.

  138. 138.

    CliosFanBoy

    @LiminalOwl: ​
      Thanks. I got to read it. When the “subscribe” box popped up, I clicked on “privacy policy.” That took me to their privacy policy page. That I hit my browser’s back arrow to the article and I could read it.

  139. 139.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @Chris:

    basically all of our security forces from feds to staties to cops are full-blown Trumpian nutjobs.

    None of them, zero, from smallest to largest, lifted a finger for Trump when he lost the election.  Not even the ultra-Trumpian ICE.  His attempt to put together some kind of personal para-military during the BLM protests went nowhere.  The generals of the military issued a statement before J6 that the military was not going to get involved with the election.  We know now that’s because Trump was talking about using them to enforce a coup vis the Insurrection Act, but we knew it then as well.  ‘Trump will try a military coup’ was a major topic of discussion here.

    A relatively small number of law enforcement employees showed they will, as individuals unconnected with their jobs, join a mob in his favor.  Since J6 they’ve been going “Shit, that might get me arrested.  Hell no!”

    A coup by law enforcement is the one thing we do not need to fear even slightly, no matter how ultra-conservative they trend as individuals.  It’s been tested and the results were clear.

  141. 141.

    Kay

    @Yarrow:

    I’m not suprised by the out and proud racism of Elon Musk and his online fans -as it turns out some of them are getting paid to push “race science” and, well, they’re racists. I am surprised by the weirdo incel misogyny though. It’s so clearly bitter and loser-ish. Parents basement. I would think all these Righties who put so much of their identity into hetero manliness would not out themselves as “I hate and fear GIRLS” – but they are!

  142. 142.

    Josie

    @MisterDancer: ​
     “But Our Good Anti-Christian commentator fails to see this nuance, these distinctions, and in doing so actually empowers these people.”
    Beautifully stated. Thank you.

  143. 143.

    Betty Cracker

    @Matt McIrvin:

    On economics, the pundit class still acts like it’s 1980 and Reagan is forever running against Jimmy Carter.

    Truth. Even pundits who weren’t alive at the time are trapped in that amber. It’s weird.

  144. 144.

    Kelly

    No water this morning. Probably another failure in an aging asbestos/cement (transite) pipe. Happens about once a year. Should be fixed by end of day. We keep 10 gallon jugs of water in the bottom of the chest freezer for days like this and to help get thru power failures.

    I’m off to help an old friend set roof trusses on his cabin he’s rebuilding after the Beachie fire burned his old one down. The old one was a beauty. He was a high school teacher and summer carpenter. Worked on the old one for years. We’ve been getting a good turn out of us geezers. It’s a nice day out with old high school buddies. We usually get a young guy or two which will be handy now we’re up on single story walls.

  145. 145.

    Tony Jay

    @Chris:

    What (arguably) did for the 1920s version of The Klan was incompetent/divided leadership, scandal, and the absence of a serious societal divide to exploit. Give the organisation some competence in the upper ranks, a charismatic leader, and a long-term ambition to play the political games necessary to turn a ‘non-partisan’ white supremacist movement into a very political vote machine and by the time the Depression hit it would have been well-positioned to provide a populist alternative to the discredited Republicans and what could well have been (in FDR’s absence) a fatally divided Democratic Party.

    These are all big asks, yes, but it’s how it happened elsewhere. The rise of a populist, ‘patriotic’ movement willing and able to overthrow democratic norms relies upon widespread societal fear and the ability to intensify and exploit that fear so that people who should know better… don’t. A lot, but thankfully not all, of those preconditions were around in the US of the 1920s.

  146. 146.

    NobodySpecial

    @Matt McIrvin:

    “On economics, the pundit class still acts like it’s 1980 and Reagan is forever running against Jimmy Carter.”

    Of course they are. So many of their leadership grew up in that time period and they’re fossils encrusted with money. You’d think four economic downturns (under R’s) and recoveries (under D’s) would change the narrative, but they’re dishonest and report dishonestly.

    Villago, as always, was correct.

  147. 147.

    jonas

    @cmorenc: but is there even a tiny, shriveled, grossly misrepresented / mis-characterized “there” to their claim ?

    No, there’s not. It was a hatchet job by Russian-backed Ukrainian mobsters who wanted revenge against Obama and Biden for supporting the Maidan revolt and the ouster of Putin lackey Victor Yanukovich. When Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma, they saw their chance to damage the vice president, who, as we know, had been outspoken on fighting corruption in Ukraine. Aside from transparently bullshit allegations made by these slimy Russian assets with an axe to grind, no one has produced any credible evidence of any wrongdoing by either Biden.

  148. 148.

    rikyrah

    @Kay:

    They don’t want to admit it, because that would mean that they would seriously have to study POLICY. None of them want to actually study POLICY. THAT would mean WORK.

     

    I will die on this hill:

     

    They absolutely resent the competency of 46 and his Administration. They resent his policy successes. And, they resent that he acconplishes it without being flashy or showy. He, and his Administration, are workhorses.

  150. 150.

    Yarrow

    @WereBear:  I don’t buy that Elom was conned. He’s a competent adult. He makes his own choices. He has access to and can afford the very best advisors. If he’s driven largely by ego, easily led, and won’t follow expert advice, that’s on him.
    @Kay:

    I am surprised by the weirdo incel misogyny though.

    Really? I’m not. It’s been everywhere for the last decade. It’s just who they are. It’s why I can’t understand anyone supporting the Republican party in any way. This is who they are. Walk away!

    I would think all these Righties who put so much of their identity into hetero manliness would not out themselves as “I hate and fear GIRLS” – but they are!

    That’s the source of it though – fear of girls and women. Unless they’re in the closet, in which case it’s fear of LGBTQ people because they fear they are in that group. That’s why they have such a need to control women and LGBTQ people. It’s so sad, pathetic and dumb. Men who are secure in who they are don’t behave that way. It’s such a tell.

  152. 152.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @NobodySpecial:

    So many of their leadership grew up in that time period and their fossils encrusted with money.

    I think part of it is also that leadership and the successors they cultivated are the ‘Reagan Democrats’.  In reality, those were racists who finally accepted the Democrats had abandoned white supremacy.  In the media fantasy they see themselves:  People who think and claim they are liberals, but agree with Republicans on almost all issues.  Cutting entitlements is the best way to help the poor, equal rights are good but brown people are scary so let’s not be hasty, we’re not bigots, queers are just asking for too much by wanting legal protection from oppression, yadda yadda.

  153. 153.

    Kay

    @Matt McIrvin:

    I agree on all that, but that they cannot move out of their rigid frame on “abortion” and broaden it to include what is actually happening is a real problem. What they should have realized by now is that Roe was like a fence and it kept the state out of the whole range of reproducive and pregnancy care – made that almost  exclusively the province of health care professionals. When they removed Roe they removed the fence, so we’re seeing this religious dogma that replaced medical care seeping into miscarriage care, birth control, women being forced to carry dead fetuses for weeks or ordered to wait in parking lots until they bleed out, etc.

    It was never just “abortion”. You can’t carve out pieces or processes of womens bodies like that. Pro choice women always said this, we said there would be repercussions and consequences outside “getting an abortion”, and apparently on that as with on everything else we were ignored.

    To not cover this as “womens health” because they’re so rigid and narrow they are hung up on THE WORD abortion even when women are testifying (in Texas) about how these laws led to them receiving substandard medical care? I mean COME ON. Break out a little! Do your own thinking!

  154. 154.

    WereBear

    @Tony Jay: That decade was a sudden jump in public sophistication. US people came off the farm because of the Great War. But they did discover the world. And that was the end of that.

    Farm people reacted by putting money in mattresses. Others went into finance. Those are the people who made more of an impact, bad or good.

  155. 155.

    Kay

    @Yarrow:

    The paid Righty – the one who was promoted by UT and WaPO and the NYTimes- who was just outed as an insane racist also has many screeds on women. It’s boilerplate incel. They really want to be the “girls are ICKY and DUMB” men? I mean, I guess they can! But all the bodybuilding and expensive Joe Rogan supplement regimes aren’t going to help them with women if we know they loathe and fear us.

  156. 156.

    p.a.

    @Kay: … I hope rank and file building trades really come out for Biden. I know he’ll get endorsements from the nationals but I’m talking locals and on down. I cannot imagine a better President for them – between infrastructure, inflation reducation, green energy ramp up building and a GREAT Dept ofLabor this is as good as they will ever get. The rank and file are fools if they let racism or some other irrational bias get in the way of that. They are fools who put their families second. Same for manufacturing unions. Biden has an actual industrial policy. He is the best President for them since FDR and it’s not close.
    Labor union members really do understand wages in a way that non union members do not- they follow wages,can tell you in granular detail who pays what and why. If this hasn’t sunk in with them I really can’t help them. They’re going to have to do some of this themselves. Every one of them should be knocking doors.

     

    I retired from a union job in 2015, a liberal union (IBEW Communications union in New England) and I would say the white members- generally and not surprisingly older- were the oft-discussed Reaganaughts.  The younger, more p.o.c. and female, seemed more liberal.  Just my impressions of a local union that, over my 29 year career, went from about 1,100 members to 400ish.  The olds like me were, I guess, Henry Jackson Democrats (remember him?)  Economic liberals, but otherwise, yech.  And yes, they would cut their own throats, at least in presidential elections.

     

    Does this extrapolate nationwide?  If so, the movement will be in the right direction thanks to retirement and funerals.  And of course the building trades have historically been the worst re: progressivism.  Maybe that’s changing too?

  157. 157.

    WereBear

    @Yarrow: He’s a competent adult.

     

    Legally, yes. Everything else, no :)

    By conned, they likely paid attention to him and flattered him into buying Twitter to show the world the rightness of his vision. While secretly sure they could do it, but they were busy right now.

    Didn’t the Blue Sky guy turn around and get money for the Beta version which never made ENOUGH money? Now he’s sold the prototype and reboots his own venture.

    That’s just business, I guess.

  160. 160.

    catclub

    @LiminalOwl: ​
     Democrats should learn to say: “when gas prices go up that is because the economy is strong and demand for gasoline is strong.”

  165. 165.

    Chris

    @Tony Jay:

    I think the problem may have been too many societal divides rather than too few, actually.

    On paper, the Southern Democrats looked like a great basis for an American fascist movement given how they’d already arranged their home region.  But the South was still sort of singled out as not-like-the-rest-of-the-country (thanks to themselves as much as anybody else), so a movement based there was going to have limited appeal elsewhere.

    Republicans would have been a better bet, since then as now they identified themselves as The Party Of Real Americans (which back then meant non-Southern white Anglo-Protestants).  But the Republican Party still had a lot of liberal elements in it that would have balked at turning the entire United States into something that looked like Fascist Italy, or even Democratic Mississippi.  Conservative Republicans who were as bad as the Southern Democrats existed, but they couldn’t do it alone.

    There was plenty of racism and anti-Semitism among the immigrant groups that voted for Northern Democrats, too – Germans, Irish, etc.  But a lot of heartland racists whether Republican or Democrat would have balked at a fascist movement that made these guys feel too included; anti-immigrant hysteria was the big rallying cry for the Klan when it made it outside of the South, after all.

    And so on, and so forth.  Too many of the walls between the various people who might have made good American fascists still hadn’t come down in those days.  Unfortunately the improvements in tolerance made in the mid-twentieth century – with the acceptance and assimilation of “white ethnics” and the North/South divide slowly fading away – probably did a lot to make the current fascism possible, by creating a much stronger sense of shared white identity between those various people, while still leaving others outside the tent to be used as bogeymen.

  166. 166.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Betty Cracker: It’s specific to that moment in time too–they have to forget that Carter inherited stagflation from the economic policies of Nixon and Ford.

  167. 167.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Chris: Also, the racist neo-Confederate types in the South by and large HATED the Nazis. The Nazi-curious racists were more Midwestern/Western.

    I don’t entirely understand it, but that’s how it was. And it probably lessened the likelihood of a fascist international.

  168. 168.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Kay:

    I am surprised by the weirdo incel misogyny though. It’s so clearly bitter and loser-ish. Parents basement.

    The hardcore white supremacists have always had a big streak of that. You see the PUA/incel types talking about “objective” measures of alpha maledom, “T” levels, female attractiveness etc. and they all sound just like 19th-century scientific racists waving around skull calipers. The obsession with ranking human worth and understanding human nature by some kind of measurement you can do with scientific instruments is common to the two things.

  170. 170.

    Geminid

    @Chris: The anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic element of tbe Republican Party was “present at the creation.” The American “Know Nothing” Party dissolved itself in 1860, and most of its members joined the new Republican Party. The Know Nothings swung a lot of weight in 1850s politics, and their descendents have been a force ever since.

  171. 171.

    Chris

    @Matt McIrvin:

    TBF, an anti-Nazi American Fascist movement isn’t that hard to imagine – it just ends up with their fascists and our fascists in a pissing contest over who’s REALLY the master race and who’ll get to inherit the earth.  Like those two dorks in The Great Dictator fighting over who gets to conquer “Osterlich.”

    But yeah, that didn’t happen.  And generally speaking, the more divides there are like that between supremacists, the better.

  172. 172.

    Chris

    @Geminid:

    Yeah, I think that has a lot to do with why the Republican Party’s basically been in a downward spiral since Abe Lincoln (who was, himself, pretty against the Know-Nothings).

    You had a bunch of parties popping up in the mid nineteenth century that were anti-this-or-that-thing: Anti-Slavery (the Republicans), Anti-Catholic (the Know-Nothings), Anti-Masonic (the Anti-Masons, because creativity is overrated).  The Anti-Slavery party is the one that endured, and that’s good, but that meant a lot of the other parties’ voters simply ended up folded into it, with predictable effects.

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