Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

If ‘weird’ was the finish line, they ran through the tape and kept running.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

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

Republicans: The threats are dire, but my tickets are non-refundable!

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

75% of people clapping liked the show!

We still have time to mess this up!

They want us to be overwhelmed and exhausted. Focus. Resist. Oppose.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

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

“But what about the lurkers?”

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

These are not very smart people, and things got out of hand.

“In the future, this lab will be a museum. do not touch it.”

Every one of the “Roberts Six” lied to get on the court.

There are a lot more evil idiots than evil geniuses.

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

“Loving your country does not mean lying about its history.”

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

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

Disagreements are healthy; personal attacks are not.

You are here: Home / Politics / Biden Administration in Action / Tuesday Morning Open Thread: A Democrat, I Am Still Proud to Be

Tuesday Morning Open Thread: A Democrat, I Am Still Proud to Be

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We interrupt our regularly scheduled broadcast…


Stay safe, Florida jackals!

======


Reader Interactions

116Comments

  3. 3.

    Betty Cracker

    A statement like the one Biden made about his storm-prep discussion with DeSantis and commitment to helping Florida recover used to be unremarkable. Any president, Democrat or Repub, would issue such a statement. Now it is remarkable because Trump and his vile imitators (including DeSantis!) openly play politics with natural disasters as a spectacle for their mouth-breather base.

  6. 6.

    OzarkHillbilly

    Mother Jones
    @MotherJones
    Given the undeniable suffering of enslaved Black people, you have to wonder why anyone would want to find a silver lining in such a dark history…

    @garrison_hayes
    takes us to school and debunks Florida’s slavery argument in 120 seconds.

  8. 8.

    Mai Naem mobileI

    I thought DeShithead said he didn’t need that sweet sweet awful government boot on his neck. This time when Biden shows up, he should just wear Nazi boots instead of the white booties.  He’ll feel more comfortable in them.

  9. 9.

    p.a.

    @Betty Cracker: Only natural disasters in Blue States reflect god’s anger.  As the Republican “faith-leaders” continue to say.  And the increasing rate of natural disasters in Red States has NOTHING to do with climate change.  Or god’s will.

    Also too, as an internet wag (or The Onion) put it, “god has terrible aim.”

  12. 12.

    Soprano2

    Biden didn’t even make DeSantis kiss his ass before he extended help to Florida. Weak! /s/s/s/s/s

  16. 16.

    kalakal

    Curiously amongst the assets DeSantis’ spokesbeing announced were in place there was no mention of his blackshorts State Guard, the $100 million a year, state funded militia organization set up for civilian disaster relief

  17. 17.

    smith

    @Betty Cracker: Now it is remarkable because Trump and his vile imitators (including DeSantis!) openly play politics with natural disasters as a spectacle for their mouth-breather base.

    This is pre-Trump, pre-DeSantis, and pure modern Republican governance. Remember when a number of Congresspeople from hurricane-prone states didn’t want to vote for aid after Hurricane Sandy? And how Christie’s political career was scuttled because of how he expressed gratitude for Obama’s help to NJ?

  18. 18.

    Baud

    I’m not Bernie fan, but I am glad to see him come out early in support of Biden’s reelection.  I would have thought he would have wanted to “negotiate” for his support. I wonder if he sees Cornel West making inroads among his base.

  19. 19.

    Bruce K in ATH-GR

    @Baud: I wonder if Bernie’s worried about what happens if Trump returns to Washington – specifically, who’s going to be stood up against a wall and offered a cigarette.

  20. 20.

    Tony Jay

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    I’m reminded of the handpicked Tory commission tasked a couple of years ago with denying there was any institutional racism in the UK. It released a very quickly trashed report that, amongst other jaw-dropping clangers, called for the rebranding of ‘unhelpful’ terms like ‘the institution of slavery in the highly profitable sugar plantations of the Caribbean’ into something less ‘one sided’.

    I believe they wanted to call it “The Caribbean Experience”.

  21. 21.

    Baud

    @Bruce K in ATH-GR:

    More likely he knows that Biden has been the best president for his causes in a long while, and four more years of any Republican president will set his agenda back beyond his natural remaining lifespan.

    I think (and hope) Sarandonism is dead.

  22. 22.

    smith

    @Tony Jay: I believe they wanted to call it “The Caribbean Experience”.

    Sounds like a luxury cruise. And, according to DeSantis, it also included a valuable apprenticeship! Can’t imagine why anyone would complain, given that deal.

  24. 24.

    Jeffro

    @Tony Jay:The Caribbean Experience

    Worst. cruise ship band. ever

    ETA: just saw smith’s comment…great minds and all that

    also, “Tropic Thunder” LOL

  25. 25.

    Mai Naem mobileI

    I’d like to see either Jill Biden or Kamala Harris go down to Floriduh for the disaster relief work wearing a jacket that has a big ‘I care don’t you?’ stamped on it’s back. Heck, turn it into disaster fundraising thing so the media has a hard time criticizing it.

  26. 26.

    Jeffro

    @Baud: More likely he knows that Biden has been the best president for his causes in a long while, and four more years of any Republican president will set his agenda back

    100% this.  All hail the Biden-(Sanders-Warren)-Harris administration!

    beyond his natural remaining lifespan. and result in the end of the republic.

    it’s just true

  27. 27.

    Jeffro

    @Mai Naem mobileI:I’d like to see either Jill Biden or Kamala Harris go down to Floriduh for the disaster relief work wearing a jacket that has a big ‘I care don’t you?’

    Is there room in the marketplace for Dark Brandon AND Dark Jill/Dark Kamala merchandise?

    let’s find out!   =)

  28. 28.

    evap

    I was living in the DC area 10 years ago and went to the mall for the celebration of the 40th anniversary of the  March.   I had to stand in line for a long time to get in, but it was worth it.  Lots of amazing speakers including Obama.

  30. 30.

    Scout211

    A jackal last night asked when the judge would announce his decision  in the Meadows hearing. This morning, I read this.

    It made me laugh.  It also makes me laugh to read legal experts today wondering why Meadows would confess testify and give Fani Willis so much evidence against him in the criminal conspiracy.

    Jones, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, did not rule from the bench at the conclusion of Monday’s daylong hearing, but he noted the significance of the issue.

    When Meadows’ attorney said at the conclusion of the hearing that his client was “entitled to a prompt determination,” Jones responded that he was likely going to take his time because he thinks the ruling will set precedent for other cases.

    “If I don’t rule by September 6, then he should show up for the arraignment,” Jones said of Meadows.

  31. 31.

    Mai Naem mobileI

    @Baud: i think older Dem pols learned from TFG’s term like other older Dems  learned during Carter’s term and used it to pass the ACA.. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I’m guessing Bernie sees what Biden’s actually accomplished and doesn’t want a GOP admin to reverse that.

  32. 32.

    Betty Cracker

    @smith: There have always been kooks in congress, but I don’t ever remember a POTUS openly using a crisis to punish a governor of the opposite party or demand that he or she kiss the president’s ass to get federal aid.

  34. 34.

    OzarkHillbilly

    On a sunny day in mid-May, Bobby Hunt fell asleep by the side of a gas station in Phoenix. Hunt says he was waiting for a friend to pick him up.

    “Next thing I know, I wake up in the hospital.”

    Hunt was in a burn unit. He doesn’t remember much, just the bright lights.

    “What am I doing here?” he recalled asking.

    Almost three months later, Hunt stands in the empty chapel of Circle the City, the central Phoenix medical shelter for unhoused people where he’s been recuperating. He lifts his white T-shirt to reveal a lopsided, round scar the size of a medium pizza.

    The burn appears to be about an inch deep, and mars the swath of intricate, black-inked tattoos of skulls and faces that once covered his back. Below the big scar, a bandage covers another wound on his lower back. Hunt pulls the leg of his khaki shorts up to reveal a large, red rectangle where skin from his thigh was removed and grafted on to his back. He’s still in terrible pain.

    Recent heatwaves in the US, stoked by the climate crisis, have caused a surge of heat-related injuries and deaths. Alongside heat exhaustion and the more serious heat stroke, there is also a summertime spike in another kind of injury: contact burns from superheated pavements and other urban surfaces.

    Welcome to the new normal.

  35. 35.

    Scout211

    @Betty Cracker: There have always been kooks in congress, but I don’t ever remember a POTUS openly using a crisis to punish a governor of the opposite party or demand that he or she kiss the president’s ass to get federal aid.

    Trump may not have openly demanded Newsom kiss his ass, but in 2020, he initially denied California disaster funds for our devastating fires that year.  He only reversed his decision after Republican lawmakers in California sharply criticized his decision.  Link

    President Donald Trump has agreed to reverse his administration’s decision to deny federal cleanup funding for six California wildfires, including the largest single fire in state history located in the Republican-heavy Central Valley, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Friday.

    Impact:     The reversal comes after Republican lawmakers representing the central part of the state pressured the Trump administration to approve the funding. Newsom said in a statement that he spoke to Trump and was “grateful for his quick response.” It was unclear what led the Federal Emergency Management Agency to initially deny Newsom’s request earlier this week.

  36. 36.

    RevRick

    Anybody else noticed something ominous about Idalia’s projected path? After it traverses Florida it heads out to sea, but on Saturday and Sunday it heads South, which usually indicates it reverses direction and heads back toward the US. Let’s hope it doesn’t.

  37. 37.

    Jeffro

    @OzarkHillbilly: yikes – that’s some horrible stuff (and I’m shocked at how little length of time it takes to produce serious injuries from contact burns!)

    related, there’s a new book out called “The Heat Will Kill You First“, about the very real dangers of heat waves and mass deaths in the future.  I was thinking about picking it up, but then again, I already read Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Ministry for The Future” and I feel like I (unfortunately) have a pretty good understanding of what’s coming.

  38. 38.

    Jeffro

    Jamelle Bouie has a good reminder to readers that the March on Washington wasn’t just about ending discrimination against Black Americans:

    (link is ‘gifted’/free)

    …Less well remembered, in our collective memory at least, is the fact that both the march and King’s speech were organized around much more than opposition to anti-Black discrimination. It was officially known as the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, with a far more expansive vision for society than formal equality under the law. The march wasn’t a demand for a more inclusive arrangement under the umbrella of postwar American liberalism, as it might seem today. It was a demand for something more — for a social democracy of equals, grounded in the long Black American struggle to realize the promises of the Declaration of Independence and the potential of Reconstruction.
     
    Consider the 10-point list of demands issued by the organizers of the march. They wanted “Comprehensive and effective civil rights legislation” to guarantee all Americans “access to all public accommodations, decent housing, adequate and integrated education” and “the right to vote.” They wanted “a massive federal program to train and place all unemployed workers — Negro and white — on meaningful and dignified jobs at decent wages.” They wanted “a national minimum wage act that will give all Americans a decent standard of living.” They wanted federal legislation to protect workers from exploitation and a federal government that brought its full power to bear on discrimination and disenfranchisement.
     
    Or, better yet, consider the labor leader A. Philip Randolph’s opening speech to the assembled marchers. “We want a free, democratic society dedicated to the political, economic and social advancement of man along moral lines,”

  39. 39.

    Betty Cracker

    @Scout211: I remember that and was appalled by it at the time because it struck me as a new low. AFAIK, Trump pioneered that wholly unacceptable “presidential” behavior. Even his shittiest Repub predecessors that I can remember, including Reagan, Bush I and Bush II, at least pretended to govern for all Americans instead of just the ones who voted for him.

  41. 41.

    smith

    @Jeffro: We got a foretaste of that future in the Chicago heat wave of 1995. At the time I was working for the Cook County health services and saw how our emergency departments had to scramble heroically to deal with it. Since then the city has beefed up its warning system and availability of cooling centers, but I doubt if Chicago (or most cities in the US), even with this experience, is fully prepared for what’s coming.

  42. 42.

    Jeffro

    trump’s election lies left the Michigan GOP broke and battered

    keep it up, trumpies!!!

    The Michigan Republican Party is starving for cash. A group of prominent activists — including a former statewide candidate — was hit this month with felony charges connected to a bizarre plot to hijack election machines. And in the face of these troubles, suspicion and infighting have been running high. A recent state committee meeting led to a fistfight, a spinal injury and a pair of shattered dentures.

    This turmoil is one measure of the way Donald J. Trump’s lies about the 2020 election have rippled through his party. While Mr. Trump has just begun to wrestle with the consequences of his fictions — including two indictments related to his attempt to overturn the 2020 results — the vast machine of activists, donors and volunteers that power his party has been reckoning with the fallout for years.
    As the party looks toward the presidential election next year, the strains are glaring.

    Mr. Trump’s election lies spread like wildfire in Michigan, breaking the state party into ardent believers and pragmatists wanting to move on. Bitter disputes, power struggles and contentious primaries followed, leaving the Michigan Republican Party a husk of itself.

    The battleground has steadily grown safer for Democrats. No Republican has won a statewide election there since Mr. Trump won the state in 2016.

  43. 43.

    Gin & Tonic

    @Jeffro:

    a spinal injury and a pair of shattered dentures.

    Almost, but not quite curious enough to RTFA and see whether that was one person or two.

  45. 45.

    Yarrow

    FYI, for anyone in the path of the storm that might experience storm surge. Move your electric vehicle

    With TS Idalia approaching Florida, if there’s ANY risk of your EV being impacted by storm surge you need to relocate it higher ground; salt water compromises lithium ion batteries and there’s really no easy way to extinguish these fires. FULL STATEMENT: https://t.co/7dRIYDTVtK pic.twitter.com/XowaDFANqE— Jimmy Patronis (@JimmyPatronis) August 28, 2023

  47. 47.

    smith

    @bbleh: And that thumb-on-the-scale judge maneuvered herself into a corner by agreeing to put off the trial long enough that everyone else gets to go first. With any luck, her pet defendant will be an at least twice-convicted felon by the time she gets to him.

  49. 49.

    bbleh

    @RevRick: there have been a lot of weird trajectories in the past few years.  The other current major one — Franklin — did a 270-degree turn around a circle about 600 mi in diameter with the USVI more or less in the center before heading north.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before.

  50. 50.

    Ken

    This morning, I spoke with Governor DeSantis

    And that, fellow jackals, is how an experienced politician destroys a rival’s campaign.

  52. 52.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Mai Naem mobileI: Bernie Sanders has never not endorsed the Democratic candidate in the general election campaign, as far as I know. It’s just a question of how early and wholehearted it is.

    At this point, it should be clear to everyone in the party that regardless of whether they would prefer another candidate, Biden is the presumptive nominee in the manner of most incumbent Presidents, so most are getting on the train. It’s just that the ones who won’t get “man bites dog” attention.

  53. 53.

    Jeffro

    @Ken:And that, fellow jackals, is how an experienced politician destroys a rival’s campaign.

    LOL

    “While we were on the phone, I expressed to Governor DeSantis that I wish I could be there to give him a warm, supportive hug.  A truly American embrace.  The full wrap-around.  You can almost picture it, right?  Me and Ron just a-huggin’…”

    <Biden wink>

    LOLOL

  54. 54.

    Spanky

    @Gin & Tonic:

    It will take the US a generation to recover from TFG. I doubt I’ll live to see it.

    Recovery won’t start until he’s safely dead, if then, so I’m not sure any of us will live to see a world where TIFG is just another historical figure.

  55. 55.

    Matt McIrvin

    …Also, I get the impression that Biden and Bernie Sanders are personally friendly with one another.

  59. 59.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Spanky: A day will come when studies show that absolutely no one ever voted for trump. At least that they will admit to. Not that I will live to see it.

  60. 60.

    Suzanne

    @Gin & Tonic:

    It will take the US a generation to recover from TFG. I doubt I’ll live to see it. 

    Shit, I don’t think we’ve recovered from Reagan. It’s gonna be longer than that for TFG recovery efforts.

  61. 61.

    gene108

    @Betty Cracker:

    Any president, Democrat or Repub, would issue such a statement. Now it is remarkable because Trump and his vile imitators (including DeSantis!) openly play politics with natural disasters as a spectacle for their mouth-breather base.

    Started with Tea Party Congressional Republicans blocking hurricane Sandy relief, because NJ and NY aren’t Republican strongholds.

  62. 62.

    smith

    @Yarrow:  Yep, worked like a charm. I’m sure DeSantis wouldn’t let Biden get within 10 feet of him, though. Someone might take a picture.

  66. 66.

    Tony Jay

    @smith:

    I swear to Dog, ‘valuable apprenticeship’ isn’t far off the mark. The commission made a very big deal about how ‘The Caribbean Experience’ basically civilised those Stone-Age savages and gave them God, Government and a share of Europe’s mountain of gonorrhoea.

    @Baud:

    Well, the commission was made up of people quite willing to say that blackface is A-OK if the price is right.

  67. 67.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Betty Cracker: I consider the Trump administration’s hoarding of medical PPE during the early COVID pandemic to distribute to politically sympathetic areas as an act of mass murder and attempted genocide.

  71. 71.

    smith

    @Spanky: That’s not unheard-of. A hurricane hit Iceland the one time I was there, about 50 years ago. For our return flight, they waited until the eye was over the island, and our plane took off into it.

  73. 73.

    hueyplong

    @Jeffro: “A recent [GOP] state committee meeting led to a fistfight, a spinal injury and a pair of shattered dentures.”

    Probably shouldn’t be admitting this, but I’m not entirely sure I’ve read a sentence that pleased me more.  Trump getting indicted is way cooler, but I wasn’t surprised to read it.  This, on the other hand, is just absolutely Schadenfreudelicious.

    With Trump sucking up all their individual contribution money and both Putin and the NRA too distracted by their own problems to give, one hopes the state GOPs can be reduced in sized until they can each be dispatched in the bathtub.

  74. 74.

    Tony Jay

    @Jeffro:

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    As you’d expect, within moments of the report’s release the Interwebs were awash with mockery.

    “Let’s not downplay the beneficial side of wartime Germany’s compulsory relocation of oppressed ethnic groups into ethnically aligned conglomerates – or as we call it, ‘The Auschwitz Experience’.”

    @Paul in KY:

    “Far too many Irish peasants were denied proper opportunities by an overbearing Church and a culture of self-pitying dependency on a single crop, rather than relitigate who starved who, we should celebrate the generosity of spirit that led many wealthy landowners to incentivise their former tenants towards taking up jobs in New York’s fledgeling brewing and uniformed thuggery industries.”

  75. 75.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    @Spanky: ​

    We’re flying through Iceland late in the week, Friday early AM. I suppose that’s so long after the storm that it won’t even matter. The Viking ancestors probably considered the storm to be over when the waves got below 40 feet.

  77. 77.

    Tony Jay

    @Spanky:

    Yeah, but I was thinking more of the way ‘The Caribbean Experience’ opened up opportunities for, uh, lonely, white agricultural specialists to assume private mentoring positions atop generations of otherwise educationally-starved women of African origin.

    What brave, taboo-breaking souls they were. So dismissive of acclamation that they even kept their spouses in the dark. /s

  80. 80.

    Miss Bianca

    @smith: Oh, man, I remember that heatwave. I was living in Chicago at the time. I remember walking home from the El (slowly, very slowly) on one of the days of the warnings and, after climbing the three flights of stairs to my apartment, lying down on the bare wood floor in my living room, just breathing. And feeling lucky that even tho’ I didn’t have any air conditioning, I still had windows that would open.

  82. 82.

    Gin & Tonic

    @Geminid: There are a lot of Democrats running, although one has dropped out due to sexual misconduct allegations (Don Carlson.) He endorsed Sandra Cano, and she is now busy trying to distance herself from him.

    Here are profiles of most of them. I suspect it’s between Matos and Regunberg, but with about a dozen candidates, who knows?

    The election is next week, and I’ve gotten 0 (zero) pieces of direct mail, even though I’m a registered D who votes in every election. I’ve also seen very little on TV, but that may be because I don’t watch much TV.

  84. 84.

    WaterGirl

    @Suzanne: I can recall predicting that it was going to take 20 years for us to recover from Reagan. Ha! Wouldn’t it be nice to think so?

  85. 85.

    UncleEbeneezer

    @OzarkHillbilly: On a related note, Michael Harriott has a thread about Jacksonville that fairly well destroys the arguments against Reparations that White People love to make to justify their resistance:

    That is the “systemic” part of systemic racism Instead of about what they did TO BLACK PEOPLE, we should be talking about what they do FOR WHITE PEOPLE THIS is white privilege.

    WHITE people got their fires put out which gave them real estate and land boosted by government handouts which gave them MORE equity in their homes schools which gave them MORE resources which gave them economic security. But here’s the important part:

    BLACK PEOPLE PAID FOR WHITE PEOPLE’S STUFF. They paid taxes for fire departments and GI bills and federal subsidies and a good public education system and WHITE PEOPLE GOT IT. No one cares about how white people FEEL about Black people. We want our STUFF

  86. 86.

    Scout211

    Good news for Medicare recipients.  President Biden announced the first 10 drugs subject to Medicare price negotiations.

    The Biden administration unveiled Tuesday the names of the first 10 drugs subject to price negotiations in Medicare, including blood thinners and diabetes medications.

    They are: Eliquis, Jardiance, Xarelto, Januvia, Farxiga, Entresto, Enbrel, Imbruvica, Stelara, and Fiasp and certain other insulins made by Novo Nordisk, including NovoLog.

    The medications treat heart disease, certain cancers, diabetes and autoimmune diseases. Some 9 million Medicare enrollees took the medications on the list and paid a total of $3.4 billion in out-of-pocket costs last year, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. Those who didn’t receive additional financial assistance shelled out as much as $6,500 on average.

  87. 87.

    smith

    @Scout211: Really glad to see Eliquis on the list. It seems to have become the standard post-operative blood thinner, and it is pricey, and not covered by any Part D plan I’ve ever had.

  88. 88.

    CaseyL

    @Ceci n est pas mon nym: Heh.  There are only two times in my life I’ve gotten a strong “past life” vibe. Neither indicated I was royalty or even nobility.  (One was a dream of being in Herculaneum, walking near the water and seeing a storm approach.)

  90. 90.

    narya

    @Jeffro: Chris Hayes did a “Why Is This Happening” podcast episode w/ the author; I haven’t listened to it yet, but I find the WITH pods to be interesting.

  91. 91.

    RaflW

    The godawful NYT frames the Biden-Harris admin as:
    “Biden Looks for New Ways to Energize Black Voters
    With much of his racial equity agenda thwarted by Congress or the courts, President Biden is trying to close an enthusiasm gap among the voters who helped deliver him to the White House.”

    The article starts out fine, describing pretty much what’s in the Xits (pronounced ‘zits’, since they aren’t tweets any more) in the OP. But then it — of course! — references their own NYT piece from this past April about “Black frustration” to claim that “there are growing concerns about an enthusiasm gap”.

    Uhh, assholes. Has there been any shift in Black stay-home-ness in the past four months? Hmmm? Any recent polling, perhaps? Y’all use the term ‘reporter’, so get dialing. Read up.

    I just get so furious with the constant effort by the Times to hang an anvil around Joe’s neck. It’s such bullshit. And they use the Supreme Court striking civil rights and student debt relief, via a young Black woman’s sense of unease, as cudgels to beat Biden. Dishonest as f–.

  92. 92.

    Geminid

    @Gin & Tonic: Thanks. This race hasn’t made much news. A few years ago, some Democratic House primaries used to be big ideological battlegrounds. They aren’t so much now, so I guess there’s not a “hook” here for national reporters.

  93. 93.

    Jeffro

    @Tony Jay: “ethnically aligned conglomerates”

    oh my

    I had vapor lock for a second there…couldn’t decide to laugh or throw something

  94. 94.

    eclare

    @smith:

    Yeah my mom took an alternative to Eliquis because it was too expensive.  Of course the “cheaper” drug required a dr visit and blood work every four to six weeks to make sure it was calibrated right.  Luckily she was retired so that was not an issue.

  95. 95.

    Bupalos

    @Spanky: As a historically oriented person, I don’t understand the measure you guys are looking for here. The United States will never be the same as it was before TFG. It never was going to be the same as it had been before. Nothing can be ‘restored’ or ‘reborn’ or ‘fixed.’ New things will come into being as a result of old things crashing into one another, combining, interacting, attracting, and repelling.

    I guess this is a vague objection to the framing that the past ever can be a place that we work our way back to, given enough time.

  97. 97.

    Bupalos

    @Gin & Tonic: I feel like “A spinal injury and a shattered pair of dentures” would be a great truth-in-advertising fix to Hoover’s apocryphal “A chicken in every pot and two cars in every garage”

  98. 98.

    Scout211

    @smith: I helped my neighbor negotiate the sign-up process to Medicare a couple of months ago. I convinced her to make an appointment with our local Medicare navigator to help her find a part D that covered her Xarelto. She was able to find one with a “low” copay of $400 a month.  Yikes. Hopefully, it will be negotiated now.

    But Big Pharma is still fighting this so time will tell.

  99. 99.

    Bupalos

    @Ceci n est pas mon nym: People tend to do that with their future lives as well, a big part of why downscale folk aren’t terribly turned off by regressive tax changes and worry instead about “communism” and making sure we’re fair to billionaires.

  100. 100.

    Jackie

    “House Majority Leader Steve Scalise has been diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a blood cancer, Punchbowl Newsreports.”

    “From a statement: “I have now begun treatment, which will continue for the next several months. I expect to work through this period and intend to return to Washington, continuing my work as Majority Leader and serving the people of Louisiana’s First Congressional District.””

    Cancer doesn’t care what political party you’re in. I’m trying to wish healing thoughts for him, but it’s hard; Scalise is such an asshole.

  102. 102.

    RaflW

    @Spanky: I happened to be in London on Oct 16, 2017, when ex-hurricane Ophelia arrived in the U.K.

    The sky over Earl’s Court turned a bit of a strange colour and the clouds looked very, very juicy — the sort of storm clouds I always associated with the heavy downpours of Houston, TX. Winds weren’t bad in London, but the west coast (and esp. the country of Ireland) got raked

    @smith: Wow, those were the swashbuckling days of aviation, huh.

  103. 103.

    MisterDancer

    @Tony Jay: What’s frustrating is that there’s actually a really good discussion to be had about the trained slave! There’s a whole thing about how their forced labor — labor they, to say the least, didn’t want to provide in that way! — broke the economics of poorer “free” laborers, and thus the overall American Southern economy. That had knock-on effects, from what I gather, that not only assisted in imprinting racism into the non-slaveholding side of the culture, but also, post-Civil War, in establishing The Lost Cause.

    BUT. That’s a complex and nuanced topic, that requires thoughtful engagement and careful research to flesh out. None of that is the point, of course, of the FL effort, and the no-doubt similar shitty efforts to come.

  105. 105.

    narya

    @MisterDancer: whoa. Thank you. That comment has made me suddenly see something I should have seen decades ago . . . thank you. (Roughly: I’ve long mused idly on how the US lacks the “artisan/guild” traditions, and unions, of Europe, which have made unionizing more difficult over the years in the US and reduced the regard folks have for that knowledge. But if a lot of that knowledge is embodied in/by individuals who are enslaved, that would reduce the need for/appreciation of those skills.)

    ETA: moved the open paren

  106. 106.

    dirge

    @Suzanne: I don’t think we’ve recovered from Reagan.

    I don’t think it goes first-in-first-out.

    This right here, the pro-labor, pro-environment Biden administration, this is the recovery from Reagan.

    When all the appeals are exhausted, Trump and all his ratfuckers are in jail, and Kamala declines to pardon them, that’ll be the recovery from Nixon.

    Recovery from Trump happens when the prophesied “reasonable republican” descends from the green room to redeem the party from itself. Or, more likely, when the GOP disintegrates entirely, and the political landscape reconfigures around different, and hopefully more constructive, arguments.

  107. 107.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    @Jackie: Scalise is the guy who couldn’t see an issue with too many guns even after he personally got shot, right? Well, something something courage of his convictions or something I guess. At least it’s an ethos.

    (Aside: Why does my phone think there’s no such word as “well” and it needs to have an apostrophe in it?)

  109. 109.

    RaflW

    @Ceci n est pas mon nym: If it’s any consolation, my phone is about 80% wrong on that one. Wants to add the apostrophe to “well and truly” and then cannot grasp that “we’ll be over soon.” It’s like it is reverse programmed on the context.

  111. 111.

    Tony Jay

    @MisterDancer:

    That’s true about so many important and relevant issues across a very wide range of human experience. We – as in everyone outside the overlapping wingnut bubbles – can’t have sensible conversations because the howlers get given a huge megaphone and drown out everything with their one-note nonsense.

    It’s like trying to share a delightful moment of duelling whistles with a cartoon sparrow while ten sweaty big-eyed freaks in cargo shorts blast vuvuzela-noise down your ear. Can’t be done.

    And we’re all the losers for it.

  113. 113.

    Chief Oshkosh

    @Jackie: Many decades ago, really in another life, I had a priest who used to say that it is not a sin to pray that someone have a quick, merciful death.

    Of course, he was talking about Idi Amin…

  114. 114.

    Ruckus

    @Betty Cracker:

    at least pretended to govern for all Americans instead of just the ones who voted for him.

    Did he actually even give a damn about the people that voted for him? I really think that he, and the others like him, really, only ever think about how they can get the most for the least. They are the scum of the earth, only willing to take, never to give. They wouldn’t even be willing to give the exhaust of their breath if they thought had a choice.

    SFB thinks that everyone should like him, even as he tells them he thinks everyone but him is shit. He’s the guy that has to be on the top, and never, ever actually is. He is worthless to humanity and actually to himself as well. One wonders what he sees in a mirror. We know it isn’t anything close to any reality. We’ve all met versions of him in life, although few of them are ever near as horrible as he is at being human.

  115. 115.

    Citizen Alan

    @Betty Cracker:

    I remember it because it was the moment that I accepted the fact that the next time we have a GOP President, House, and Senate, there will be a serious attempt to intern or kill Democratic constituencies, and the GOP SCOTUS will find it constitutional.

  116. 116.

    lurker

    @Betty Cracker:  @smith:  @Betty Cracker:  @Betty Cracker:  @Spanky:  @gene108:

    Responding late to a dead thread because well, see nym…

    My recollection is that part of the problem with the Katrina response was that the Bush administration rushed aid to Mississippi and delayed aid to New Orleans (and to a lesser degree Louisiana in general).  It was pretty clear that the governor (R) of MS (Haley Barbour IIRC) had the ear of the Bush administration and the governor (D) of LA (Kathleen Blanco) was getting some initial stonewalling.

    The Feds cited issues with the requests they received from LA, essentially saying their hands were tied due to paperwork errors.  Thing is – these type of issues come up all the time and the federal and state governments work to smooth them out, but this was the administration of Rove and Cheney, empowered by Bush the younger, and they were not making the same attempt to work well with everyone.

    Ultimately, they also had a guy named Mike Brown (‘heckuva job Brownie’) in charge of disaster relief at the time, and he was so incompetent that it made the rest of the shenanigans around the LA/MS response less of a story – he became the shiny object for the press and even for left-wing blogs at the time.

    But make no mistake, Bush played politics with Katrina, that was part of how it became his Katrina.  There was a story about how an aid in the WH put together a DVD of news clips and played it for Bush to show him how the administration was making things worse and getting terrible coverage, and apparently that was part of what led to turning the corner and getting some effective federal relief in NO.  There was also the image of Bush flying over the devastation and looking out the window to see the situation, which was admittedly less intrusive than coming in on the ground and delaying recovery, but made it clear he was out of touch.

    There have been other lesser issues in the past where the R administrations held people to higher standards to provide aid, but Katrina stood out as one time where it happened, and was reported a little in the media, to the point where the feds had to comment and end the stonewalling.  Any warm thoughts you have about either Bush president, they could have been worse, but still managed to find ways to be bad.

    Not nearly as bad as TFG and Puerto Rico though.

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