MCHENRY says he hopes they can vote on speaker tomorrow and he hopes someone can get 217 pic.twitter.com/Wwy8w0oTFX
— Haley Talbot (@haleytalbotcnn) October 11, 2023
If the consequences weren’t so dire, this whole sh*tshow could be a long-running sitcom. (Not a ‘reality show’, because even the least discriminating consumers wouldn’t believe it was real.)
— mike luckovich (@mluckovichajc) October 10, 2023
Congrats to David Duke without the baggage or whatever.
Seriously it was either David Duke or the insurrectionist/rape enabler. The bar was so low people in hell are using it in a limbo contest. https://t.co/isDCfHj19y
— Ragnarok Lobster (@eclecticbrotha) October 11, 2023
There are Americans who have been taken hostage/killed by terrorists, our legislature is unable to respond because the GOP dissolved the House, and political reporters who hold themselves up as GUARDIANS OF DEMOCRACY are tripping over their dicks to get hot goss from Nancy Mace
— The okayest poster there is (@ok_post_guy) October 11, 2023
A consensus candidate emerges!
The Speaker of the House candidate closest to 217 votes is Hakeem Jeffries.
Reporting should reflect that.
— It's Biden AND Harris 2024. Deal with it. (@What46HasDone) October 11, 2023
So, yesterday, every Democrat nominated Hakeem Jeffries to be the next Speaker of the House.
Now, Republicans are meeting behind closed doors with no cameras or phones &, STILL, neither two candidates have enough votes.
Democrats in array. Republicans in disarray.
— Victor Shi (@Victorshi2020) October 11, 2023
“Senior Congressional Correspondent for Fox News”:
Raskin: We have 212 votes for Hakeem Jeffries, who is extremely well organized and efficient..and all we would need is 6 votes from Republicans in order to put Hakeem Jeffries over the (top). But if they're not willing to do that, they should figure out what they are doing.
— Chad Pergram (@ChadPergram) October 11, 2023
The fact that Hakeem Jeffries will once again have more votes on the floor for Speaker than the Republican speaker-designate is both sad and hilarious. pic.twitter.com/bZNA55Tpzz
— Chris D. Jackson (@ChrisDJackson) October 11, 2023
Baud
Not even Abraham could find
106 good people in the House GOP caucus.OzarkHillbilly
Repeat post from below:
A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Captain C
I’m amazed that there aren’t yet 6 Repubs who are easily bribeable to become Democrats for the rest of the term and then enjoy a cush retirement where they never have to deal with the howler monkey caucus again. Of course, their social circles are probably full of supporters of the howler monkey caucus, so…
catclub
@OzarkHillbilly: I can see how you can be not included in the list two times in three years, but how can you be dropped from the list after you have already been dropped from it?
MisterDancer
Nope. Remember earmarks? Remember the massive GOP push to eliminate them?
Curtailing earmarks helped remove a method for driving consensus in matters like this. Add to it: Funding GOP candidates via dark money means a loss of connections to voters (for example: many GOPers barely do Constituent Services, these days, from what I hear). And that’s on top of, of course, pushing voters and the culture to think people like Mace are “moderates”.
By the standards of the 20th Century there’s not a single “moderate” in the GOP on damn near any level. Hell, as late as 2001 we had Sen. Jim Jeffords who switched and bent the Senate to the Democrats, but that got lost after 9/11 and the right-wing waves that created.
But now? They are all, to a person, beholden to Mammon AND/OR the fear of being called out in right-wing circles, up to and including stochastic terrorism on them and their families.
I won’t say there’s no “bribe” the Democrats can give that makes it worth it. But it would be an exceptional event, given the last decade or so.
Betty Cracker
@Captain C: I’m not sure how many current GOP reps are in districts Biden won in 2020 — at least a handful, IIRC. They might not even have to retire!
Dagaetch
The Democrat in me is rejoicing at Republican infighting. The American in me is depressed about the future of our country. The human in me is struggling to not give up entirely considering how much of the rest of humanity seems to prefer violence and hatred.
OzarkHillbilly
Heh, NY Republicans are getting nervous. They see the inevitable tar and feathering awaiting Santos and fear they could be splattered with the tar as well. They aren’t wrong about that.
We’ll see how much protection this go nowhere expulsion resolution gives them soon enough.
p.a.
National lipstick shortage as House Repubs shuffle through the caucus trying to find the least pig-like pig*.
* for public consumption; their voters are bigly pro-piggly.
Betty Cracker
GOP losers Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are holding a RINO convention somewhere and have thoughts about what Democrats should do:
I don’t believe for one hot second Cory Booker told Mitt Romney that. I don’t know enough about Warner to have an opinion, but seriously — Warren or Sanders? Maybe Joe Manchin would say that, but it’s a steaming load of horseshit.
Uncle Cosmo
Surreality show. “Hello, Dali, well hello, Dali,/ It’s so sad to see you where you don’t belong…” Melting clocks, elephants on stilts…have I missed anything?
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@OzarkHillbilly: All the reporting has been that he inflated assets “to get favorable bank terms” and I guess that’s where he broke the law and opened himself up to the NYAG lawsuit.
But I heard a clip of Michael Cohen testifying to the Jan 6 committee about a different motivation. They would get a list of assets together, TFG would tell them what target total he wanted to report to Forbes, and they would inflate assets until the total got to the desired number.
I kind of do that with my spreadsheet when I’m budgeting, but in the other direction. “Hey, if I reduce my monthly coffee consumption to $.43, I can make the target!”
NotMax
@OzarkHillbilly
And to think it wasn’t all that long ago when he was imploring Stormy to wield Forbes as a sexual stimulant.
Matt McIrvin
@OzarkHillbilly: Ooh, he HEREBY did it, that’s gonna sting!
Matt McIrvin
@Betty Cracker: nobody told him that, he’s lying.
(…maybe he literally meant someone LIKE them, but much younger. Even so it’s dumb. The younger Dems will probably be further left on cultural stuff, not more Bernie-esque so much, it seems to me. )
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
That’s the 2012 Mitt we know and hate.
artem1s
Nancy Smash always knew what her vote count was. All 212 Dems voted to nominate Jeffries. ‘Nuff said.
NorthLeft
I am shocked that the House Republicans don’t have a GOP version of
JoeJohnny Unbeatable to put forward for speaker.bbleh
@MisterDancer: … up to and including stochastic terrorism on them and their families.
This is an important point that’s frequently overlooked. Yes the Prime Directive is to Get Re-Elected, which for a relatively-less-crazy Rep makes a primary challenge from a MAGAt an existential threat, but there is also the reality that any handful of Republicans who even dared partner with Dems on, say, a budget — much less a Speaker — certainly would be inundated with death threats and possibly visited by a shirtless nut who shows up the second time with an assault rifle because they wouldn’t let him in the first time with just a handgun
@OzarkHillbilly: I’d bet that they’d settle for expulsion from the caucus, cuz if a motion to expel him from the House got to the floor, Dems would support it, and it *might* actually pass. (Takes 2/3 IIRC so would need more than a handful of Reps, but still …)
MisterDancer
Indeed. Mittens took all that praise for that hagiography that recently came out, his decision to run away from the Senate, to his thick head.
What a wanker.
MisterDancer
I gotta thank Adam for making what I had felt under my skin about this, very clear. And once you see it, it’s damn hard to unsee.
It’s terrifying how much of the GOP governing coalition is clearly held together via implicit, and actual, violence.
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone 😊😊😊
rikyrah
Scholastic Book Fair
WTF 🤬🤬
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT8r7ssB7/
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
Matt McIrvin
@bbleh: Are they at greater risk from violence than all the actual Democrats are?
Betty Cracker
@Baud: Yep. And there’s no goddamn excuse because he knows what his party has become. He’s spending a million bucks a year of his personal money on security for his family because the feral nutcases are threatening him and his family.
Steeplejack
@catclub:
Because people’s net worth changes year by year. You could drop below the cut line one year (or several) and then gain back enough to make the list later.
Note: Trump probably never had enough money to legitimately make the list.
bbleh
@rikyrah: same to you and a lovely morning it is here — clear, no humidity, going up to 71-72, very nice.
Eolirin
@Matt McIrvin: I think they are. Being a traitor is an even greater offense than being a Democrat, though it’s a near thing.
mrmoshpotato
Fixed.
bbleh
@Matt McIrvin: I would say that, if a FEW Republicans singled themselves out that way, then yes indeed! The Dems are a faceless crowd who just generally wish to destroy America, and there’s not a lot to be gained by offing just a few of them, whereas a few TRAITORS would need to be dealt with harshly and swiftly, so everyone would know that Justice Will Be Done.
I think the Tony Evers thing — apart from the obvious mental disorder of the wannabe shooter — was because he IS singled out: he’s the top dog, so he’s an obvious target.
Ken
In the absence of a Speaker, this is even more uselessly performative than we’ve come to expect from Republicans. Think he’ll bother re-introducing it when something might result?
MisterDancer
Will someone go tell Congresscritter Mace to STOP LYING? She’s embarrassingly bad at it! From TPM:
Nitter link: https://nitter.net/Acyn/status/1712219052721013094
OzarkHillbilly
@rikyrah: I loved the horns that kept appearing on his head. I am wondering if that was intentional or just a digital ghost.
jlowe
We shared a laugh about “David Duke without the baggage” for a couple of reasons: first, David Duke is nothing but baggage, and second, there were probably a few hundred thousand MAGA-goobers under the age of fifty who were asking, “who the f*ck is David Duke?”
Baud
Thank God Biden took care of the debt ceiling when he did.
artem1s
@Betty Cracker:
Entitled asshole. He’s winding himself up to run for the WH again, isn’t he? Or worse, going to run vicariously thru one of the Mittlling
Ken
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: That Cohen story is remarkably believable, complete with the implication that Trump didn’t care (or maybe didn’t understand) it meant lying to his creditors.
MattF
@MisterDancer: Ha. Ha. Ha.
bbleh
Oh btw, yes Jeffries is still the lead vote-getter, but I’m not at all sure I’d wish that job on him. His margin likely would be even thinner than Nancy Smash! had, and the Republicans would instantly revert to their best Nazi goose-stepping and vote as a bloc against Dems on every issue, so he’d constantly be subject to blackmail from the most squirrelly of the “moderate Democrats.” Not clear he would want that.
(Plus as noted above, one or two of the Republicans likely would be assassinated.)
Betty Cracker
@MisterDancer: Props to Tapper for displaying the correct amount of comic incredulity at that claim! ;-)
OzarkHillbilly
@Ken: It’s all just CYA, it isn’t going anywhere. But they want to tell their donors, some of whom no doubt gave to 2 or 3 of them and got ripped off by Santos, “Well, we tried.”
prostratedragon
@OzarkHillbilly: Another episode in season 8 of I: The Series, a recentered and unnecessarily extended reimagining of Beckett’s Not I (available on youtube).
MomSense
I will say what I’ve been saying for years about Republicans – this is no way to run a superpower.
The GOP “leadership” style may work just fine at their local Klan or Citizens Council meetings, but for a modern democracy it’s fucking bullshit.
IF we had a functioning press in this country they would have been for years and would still be calling them out for their lies, their discrimination and their willful incompetence.
Just like peak wingnut was a lie, so is the idea that things will get so bad that finally the press will develop a conscience and start telling the truth about what is happening.
Brachiator
OT and FYI
MattF
Trying to picture some arrangement of infinite numbers of clown cars being run over by busses driven by face-eating scorpions. But I think it will require new set-theoretical axioms.
Geminid
@Captain C: Those 6 or so Republicans may exist. But if they do, I think their Plan A is electing Scalise or a fallback choice like Emmer. If Republicans repeatedly deadlock, we might see a Plan B.
The Speaker’s post is gonna be filled, one way or another. I’m pretty sure we’ll know how it will be filled this time next week.
Geminid
@OzarkHillbilly: That would be Anthony D’Esposito, (R-🎯)
Ken
@MattF: Or M. C. Escher. Though if you keep the set-theoretic material, you might have that sequel to Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach that the world didn’t realize it needed.
OzarkHillbilly
I’m not hooked into the caving community anymore so this is the first I’ve heard.
RIP.
John S.
@Betty Cracker:
And yet, Tapper still finds it acceptable to have Nancy Mace on his show in the first place to spew her bullshit.
Eolirin
@bbleh: If Jeffries was made speaker he would not be trying to govern like a normal speaker, but instead bringing bipartisan legislation to the floor, stuff that would pass with overwhelming support even if it’s not with the majority of the Republican caucus, like aid to Ukraine and Israel and the senate appropriation bills. The only legislation that’d be on the table would be things that can pass cloture votes in the Senate.
And it’d have to involve rules changes to make it very hard to pull another motion to vacate.
He would not be able to pursue an actual agenda other than preventing the collapse of the government. But that’s more or less fine given the circumstances.
Manyakitty
@rikyrah: holy fuck. I hate it here.
Dorothy A. Winsor
Did we hear how Soprano2’s husband’s driving test went?
Have we heard from JR in WV lately? You recall they were in cancer treatment.
Manyakitty
@MisterDancer: at least she got some pushback. God in heaven.
ETA: I am finally on Bluesky if anyone is interested. Manyakitty.
Shalimar
@Betty Cracker: So Biden needs to be replaced because he’s too old, but one of his possible heirs is a year older? Whaaaaa? And Warren is 74 herself. These do not sound like real suggestions from anyone paying attention to politics.
I say that as someone who loves Warren and thinks Sanders does more good than harm.
Dorothy A. Winsor
I have a blue sky code if anyone needs one.
E-mail me at dawinsor (at) dawinsor (dot) com.
WaterGirl
@MisterDancer: I thought the Dems brought back earmarks when we got the House? Am I wrong about that? Or did the Rs ditch them when they took the House back?
WaterGirl
@Betty Cracker: It’s something like
12Biden districts currently held by Republicans in the House.edit: I just looked it up, and it is 18.
bbleh
@WaterGirl: @Betty Cracker iirc it’s 18
StringOnAStick
@WaterGirl: I’m in one of those 12 districts and there are 3 women running, including the one who lost last time, Jamie McLeod Skinner. While I’m as liberal is not more so than Jamie, I’m considering supporting one of the other declared candidates because she has deeper roots and prior elected office in the SW of Portland area that was added to this district for the last election, and is where Jamie lost this district last time.
Geminid
@WaterGirl: I would add prospective retirees to the pool of potential defectors.
Some, like Don Bacon (NE) are in both groups. Bacon has already retired once, 12 years ago as an Air Force general, and Joe Biden won his Omaha-based district.
Ben Cisco
I also have BlueSky invites (2)
Email benjaminlcisco at the Gmail joint.
cain
@MisterDancer:
They also can’t be trusted. I wouldn’t trust any GOP deal. Assholes wrap themselves in the flag, but do not have a single sense of honor between them. Thieves have more honor.
Geminid
@Betty Cracker: I like Mark Warner, but he’s gotta be one of the blandest politicians out there. When Kamala Harris was giving cooking lesson 3 years ago she taught Warner how to grill an open-face tuna sandwich. She know the guy.
MisterDancer
@WaterGirl: Hi! Yes, earmarks came back in 2021 (you’d be amazed how few articles their appear to be on this!).
This is why I used the term “curtailing” to represent that earmarking isn’t what it used to be. The point was that earmarks aren’t a great tool for impacting voting, compared to back in the day. I was kind of implying that wasn’t a side-effect of the GOP’s campaign to remove them, but for some a key goal to reduce the ability to work across the aisle.
Daoud bin Daoud
@MisterDancer: I think the only thing holding the GQP coalition together is their love of violence and cruelty.
Geminid
@cain: This is why I think none of the New York Republicans could win a Democratic primary, even if Democratic leaders offer to sponsor them (which they won’t). D’Esposito and company have too many bad votes on their records.
cain
@Manyakitty: I got an invite – so I’ll probably try it out. Will let people know what my id is.
WaterGirl
@MisterDancer: Ah. I hadn’t taken note of your specific choice of words.
It seems crazy to me – as corrupt and transactional as the Rs are, I would think they would be all over earmarks.
MisterDancer
@Daoud bin Daoud: Nah — at least, not always!
No coincidence it’s a lot like how Jim Crow was held together — even through the effect, for many people under attack, has to be treat them all as open to violence, the “reality” is that a lot of them are cowards at heart.
They just want the security of a sinecure, and are more than willing to screw anyone over to get it. As long as the gun is pointed at someone else — preferably someone they’ve been told doesn’t matter anyway — they can sleep soundly. And they’ll do so many, many horrible things to keep it that way.
Other MJS
So if Trump said he was “Hitler without the baggage” they’d be OK with that?
cain
@Geminid: They’ve destroyed their brand – there are nothing but chaos actors and have zero thoughts on what the future should be.
We’re pretty much on our own here on trying to guide this country.
Belafon
@Ken: In the catalog of all possible unique symmetries in group theory, there’s an group affectionately known as the monster, which exists in 196,883 dimensions, and has 808,017,424, 794,512,875, 886,459,904, 961,710,757, 005,754,368, 000,000,000 elements.
Baud
@Other MJS:
Trump could say that he was Hitler with the baggage and they’d be ok with it.
Baud
@Belafon:
Blog broken.
kalakal
Repeat from late night post
Lady Karma paying a visit to “Biden is senile” spouter, traitor, and all round scrote Tommy Tatertown
Tuberville falls
Baud
Via mastodon
OzarkHillbilly
The gods of irony are hard at work.
MisterDancer
But that’s indirect money, at best. Dark money, on the other hand? Gets far more quickly into one’s pockets.
Beating the hell out of earmarks helped push voters not only into the GOP lane, but into another plank in the “all politicians are corrupt” (indirect) platform that the GOP’s been running for so long. It feels like the “smoke-filled rooms” stuff that voters rejected in the 20th Century, right? So the backlash against earmarks played against stereotype, against an emotional reaction to politics, just like the rest of the Conservative Movement.
The earmark attack also helped remove one of the key aspects of how the Democratic Party made an appeal to White voters. This plays into the “‘they’ abandoned ‘you'” aspect of how the GOP captured those votes, esp. in rural areas. And now? Those voters act out of emotion, so they barely notice when Federal funding comes back to them.
And no, none of this directly ties into dark money! Yet — as I recall — the approach to attacking earmarks parallels the push to allow more dark money. My “gut” says there’s a trade, of sorts, that happened in the Conservative Movement around these, among other things.
There’s a lot here, and I’m not saying the entire GOP thought this up! But I’m pretty damn sure there’s a well-funded thinktank or four that came up this this strategy, and got the GOP caucus to buy into it. Just as we know that the waves of Transphobic legislation are all coming from a couple of groups, and being presented directly to state legislators for rubber-stamping into law.
MisterForkbeard
@Ben Cisco: Ooh, neat. I may hit you up for that. I’ve hit my limit with twitter.
Manyakitty
@cain: looking forward to it 😃. Pretty good so far, feels a lot like old Twitter.
Geminid
@Baud: Speaker Tom Reed!
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@StringOnAStick: Is that Janelle Bynum? She seems like a good candidate.
Ben Cisco
@Ben Cisco: BlueSky invites are gone.
Geminid
If Hakeem Jeffries was endorsed by 212 Democrats, Mary Peltola must have returned from Alaska.
BellyCat
This.
schrodingers_cat
The world is discovering th right wing troll factory that the BJP has created because of the latest happenings in Israel. They are bigoted, vile amd stupid.
rikyrah
@Betty Cracker:
All the while ignoring the VICE PRESIDENT THAT WE ALREADY HAVE.
Geminid
@BellyCat: I think most of the rest of humanity does not prefer violence and hatred. Just a few of them do, but too many of that group are in positions of leadership.
cwmoss
@Ken: Lying to Forbes Magazine is not a crime. Lying to a bank to get a loan is a crime as is lying to the gov’t to avoid paying property taxes.
WaterGirl
@Baud: I added some spaces, it should be good now.
WaterGirl
@Baud: Interesting!
Baud
@WaterGirl:
👍
WaterGirl
@MisterDancer: I guess earmarks as doorways to corruption are so yesterday!
Steeplejack
@kalakal:
Nelson Muntz “Ha-ha!”
rikyrah
@Betty Cracker:
18-20
Sure Lurkalot
@Betty Cracker:
Seeing that Mitt made a lot of his fortune by slicing and dicing up companies, laying off people and transforming paychecks and pensions into management fees to line his prodigious pockets, “his personal money” is doing a lot of work here. That the rubes buy that Republicans are the party of the working man and Democrats are the elite reflects the state of education and gullibility in America.
JPL
@Other MJS: Charles Lindberg thought highly of hitler.
Peale
@Betty Cracker: Oh, good lord. Elizabeth Warren is now a spry 74. And Sanders has that boyish charm of a wet-behind-the-ears 82 year-old. I’m sure there are Democratic insiders fretting that they are the future of the party. But not because they are way too progressive. Its that they are progressively entering dotage.
twbrandt
I have four Bluesky invite codes – ping me at tom [at] tombrandt [dot] net if you want one.
Ken
@Belafon: I’ve heard of it, and tried to understand the sporadic simple groups, but it’s just so weird. “Everything is one of these few basic types, except for these 26 things which aren’t.” It’s as if every natural number was either zero, a unit, prime, or composite, except for twenty-six of them.
Redshift
@Betty Cracker:
I may not always agree with Warner, but he’s not dumb. That definitely didn’t come from him. Romney either just made it up, or some Democrat somewhere said it and he deliberately mentioned it in the context of talking to Dem senators to make it sound like they’d said it. What an ass.
Michael Bersin
Mark Alford (r) has a few complaints:
Maybe you should elect a Speaker at some point?
oklahomo
@schrodingers_cat: I was shocked at the obvious trolling done with profiles that had the flag of India as part of the handle.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Redshift: Sen. Romney is a habitual liar when it comes to politics, especially regarding Democrats.
Redshift
@Geminid:
Popehat did a game theory analysis of the situation, and concluded that a Republican supported by some Democrats is the most likely outcome in the end, though we could see one or more weak and unstable McCarthy type speakerships before we get to that.
Michael Bersin
@Baud:
Bingo.
There’s no such thing as a “moderate republican”.
WaterGirl
@Michael Bersin: Yeah, but this is the crap he posted with that.
WaterGirl
@Formerly disgruntled in Oregon: Remember how dumbfounded we all were – including Obama – when Romney spewed lie after lie after lie in that first debate?
That’s who Romney is. He’s a snake.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@WaterGirl: Poor Steve Benen nearly went mad keeping count.
Redshift
@Formerly disgruntled in Oregon: Habitual bullshitter is probably more accurate. One of the sad things about the modern GOP purely from an entertainment perspective is it’s all bullshit, which doesn’t have to be at all believable. It’s just lazy. A convincing lie, especially a political one, takes some effort, but instead they just throw out stuff that’s obviously false and they know it. “Democrats tell me they definitely share the totally made-up conservative delusion that the party is being taken over by communists!”, feh.
Geminid
@Redshift: It sounds like he’s comparing likelihoods, and he is probably right in that respect. But there is a tendancy to “bet” on these propositions, and make predictions based on them. But less likely outcomes often happen. That’s something poker players know very well.
lowtechcyclist
@p.a.:
More like a herd of 221 feral hogs. Do they make an AR-15 that rapid-fires tranquilizer darts?
Lacuna Synecdoche
Chad Pergram via Anne Laurie @ Top:
It should also be noted that, at 48.7%, Jeffries has a greater percentage of the House voting for him than Trump got in either of the presidential elections.
Steeplejack
@Redshift:
Benjamin Wittes (the author of that piece) is not Popehat. Ken White is.
Baud
Via Bluesky
wjca
Didn’t realize, at first, this was a real person. I was thinking of the hero of The Most Happy Fella (Tony Esposito) And struggling to make a connection. Not to mention to square that with the source: They Knew What They Wanted — since, manifestly, they don’t know (or, at least, agree on) who they want.
Barbara
@OzarkHillbilly: His MO, apparently, was to select a woman to go with him as part of the liberation exercise, and in order to maintain a low profile, to register as a “couple” in the hotel in whatever city they were going to. Once they got to the room he tried to insist that the selected female engage in sexual acts with him.
I mean this seriously, that MO probably fits the definition of sex trafficking in some places. I really distrust the obsession with sex trafficking on the part of evangelical Christians.
lowtechcyclist
@bbleh:
You lie down with gun nuts, you wake up with terrorists.
Rileys Enabler
I have Bluesky invites if anyone needs:
salcam(at)gmail(dot)com
Eolirin
@WaterGirl: God, even the framing. “Russia and Ukraine are at war” is a bit like saying “irreconcilable differences lead to termination” to describe a workplace shooting
Michael Bersin
@WaterGirl:
Yeah, Mark Alford (r) is a MAGA true believer. He consistently ignores the grotesque dysfunction inherent in his ideological world while utilizing his (former morning television talking face) superficial communications skill to regurgitate the party line. On top of that, he’s an actual idiot.
wjca
Why would someone who doesn’t even bother with constituent services care in the slightest about an earmark for his district?
Redshift
@WaterGirl: Christ, what an asshole, and the idiots who vote for him. “We have these urgent crises, the only solution is a new leader who takes office a year and a half from now, not fixing the dumpster fire that I’m participating in!”
schrodingers_cat
@oklahomo: They attack like a swarm of angry locusts if you run afoul of them. It has happened to me a couple of times.
lowtechcyclist
@rikyrah:
Seriously, what the everloving fuck?!?
smith
I haven’t seen this noted here before, but Gym Jordan had an even worse day yesterday when he was pantsed a second time by Fanni Willis. From her reply to his latest attempt to stop the prosecution of the Once and Future President-King:
I wonder when Ol’ Gym will finally realize that bluster and intimidation don’t work all that well on prosecutors?
Redshift
@Steeplejack:
Argh, I knew that. How embarrassing, thanks for the correction.
trollhattan
@MisterDancer: Wow, when it’s Jake Tapper bringing the lie-swatting hammer I have to wonder if it really is the End Times.
Baud
@wjca:
Companies.
Barbara
@smith: Yeah, having immunity from prosecution is not actually the same as having the authority to require other people to do whatever you ask.
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
Indeed. A shutdown isn’t good, but we’ve been through two of those in the past decade plus a couple weeks, and the harm was only short term. Nobody really knows how disastrous a debt default would be, but the consensus is that it would be disastrous.
Dr. Fungus
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Thanks so much! My shiny new handle, SkyDog, seemed appropriate on a site called Bluesky, for a Duane Allman fan who also digs dogs. :-)
smith
Especially since they can just wait until Democrats fund projects in their districts that they can then take credit for?
Michael Bersin
@Redshift:
Yep. I live in the district. Two out of three voters elected him against token opposition.
Mark Alford (r) – Town Hall – Warrensburg, Missouri – August 31, 2023 – a self-sustaining information feedback loop
lowtechcyclist
@bbleh:
He could put the combined Ukraine/Israel aid bill on the floor for a vote, either followed by or wrapped in with a CR for another 60 or 90 days (let the GOP shut down the government in an election year!), and then step down again the moment the Rethugs become too much of a royal PITA.
WaterGirl
@Steeplejack: I find that Benjamin Wittes far too often has a strong Republican slant on things. So I don’t give his opinion on this much weight.
But he vouched for Bill Barr, I suppose I should. //
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
So immediately.
WaterGirl
@Eolirin: Yeah, there wasn’t a line in there that didn’t leave me fuming.
sab
@trollhattan: He didn’t swat. He gently rolled his eyes to the back of his head, suggesting scepticism. She’s pretty and presentable ( not an obvious nitwit like Boebert.) She’ll be back because his producers like her.
wjca
Maybe. But in some of those rural district there isn’t really anything to motivate a company to go there. I mean, at minimum you need some decent infrastructure connecting to the rest of the world.
@smith Point taken
Juju
@Betty Cracker: That tells me that Romney and Ryan don’t want VP Harris to have even a possibility of becoming president. That is probably the kind of thing that makes them wet their pants.
WaterGirl
@Baud: Remember when Romney had the workers in some company build him a special platform to speak from, which he used to tell them all they were fired and the business was being closed.
Fucker.
trollhattan
@sab:
IDK, thought “name one” was pretty aggressive for a typical news-chatter person.
schrodingers_cat
@John S.: Her rack is inviting. Reasonably attractive white women can get away with a lot
The tight T shirt with the scarlet letter, the revealing blouse she knows how to flaunt her assets. She will continue to get invited and promoted on the shouty shows.
JPL
CNN showed a picture of a baby murdered in its bassinet. The face was blurred but you can’t unsee it.
I often said that if they did that for the murders at Sandy Hook, we’d have stronger gun control laws. I don’t know though.
😢😢😢
Steeplejack
@WaterGirl:
Yes, Wittes’s naïve, uncritical support for Barr was a low point.
trollhattan
@WaterGirl:
Did La Jolla ever approve his car elevator? That always came across as cementing the Thurston Howell III persona, despite Lady Ann’s poverty tales of selling stocks whilst eating lunch off the ironing board (I expect it was in fact an irony board).
schrodingers_cat
@Steeplejack: Also for Kavannaugh IIRC.
cain
@Manyakitty: oh.. that’s too bad. I really want a different experience. :/ When you say old twitter – what era? :)
Steeplejack
Just discovered that my phone apparently has a Gym Jordan emoji: 👔. WTF.
Citizen Alan
@Dagaetch: This. No amount of good news from the Democratic Party can cheer me up because at the end of the day 49% of the electorate belongs to an insane white supremacist death cult. As in, imagine if Charlie Manson had decided to forgo murdering people and instead gotten into politics … and the Manson family was 70 million strong and completely controlled an entire political party. Who was it on here that said that for the foreseeable future, every election was a game of Russian roulette?
Soprano2
@Dorothy A. Winsor: My husband’s driving test went about how I thought it would; he failed every part of it. Rather than sitting in the waiting room, I had to go into the room with him. He tried to tell the evaluator he had driven yesterday! When I said “No, you didn’t”, he said he’d driven the day before. I said “No, you didn’t drive that day either”. Then I told the evaluator that I thought the last time he drove was around September 20th; it might have been even earlier. It was hard to watch him take the test and fail all of the modules, but it was a necessary step in order to get him to quit driving. I’m not sure he’ll even remember taking the test. We need to go to the DMV and trade his driver’s license for a MO state ID.
Ken
I’m delighted that “McCarthy type” is on the way to becoming an adjective, but worry it will be confused with “McCarthyism”.
Also, I’m not sure how I feel about possibly displacing Italy as everyone’s go-to example of unstable government.
Juju
@Betty Cracker: I think that Democrat is probably very much like my boyfriend from Canada.
cain
@Barbara:
Everything is projection – they want to sex traffic. They love having power over women. They are obsessed with women’s bodies which pisses them off so they keep passing laws to bind them because they are depraved.
sab
@trollhattan: OT. I went to visit my sister in San Diego about ten years ago. Our GPS was obviously not local. The pronunciation was hilarious. Slightly Brit. La Jolla Row (j pronounced as in jaybird, so the whole word sounded like jolly without the y) row (pronounced to rhyme with cow. )
We almost missed our turn from laughing.
ETA To non- Californians it should be pronounce La Hoiya Roe.
Michael Bersin
@JPL:
“…I often said that if they did that for the murders at Sandy Hook, we’d have stronger gun control laws…”
Yes.
“…in Fairfield on Dec. 17, just before the start of Noah’s service, Pozner took Malloy by the arm and led him to her son’s open casket.
During a news conference later that day, the usually unemotional, no-nonsense Malloy wiped away tears, his voice breaking as he spoke briefly about conversations with the victims’ families. A Malloy spokesman said Thursday that the governor does not want to discuss the conversations….”
sdhays
@Betty Cracker: Mitt Romney has correctly realized that his Republican colleagues don’t care about democracy, but while Mitt thinks that’s bad, it’s not a dealbreaker for him. He still thinks they belong in Congress, and he still thinks whining about his shitty policy goals is at least as important as preserving the Constitutional order.
It’s so tedious hearing Republicans try to lecture Democrats on what they should do. Clean up your own fucking house before commenting on the neighbors, shitheads!
JPL
@Soprano2: That has to be so hard for you to see though. hugs
smith
@Citizen Alan: For the foreseeable future, every election is an existential crisis. As is every Supreme Court term. This shouldn’t be the case in a functioning democracy, so I guess that tells us exactly where we are.
Ken
Does Jordan still have that title, when there’s no Speaker? Or will they have to go through the committee assignment process again?
I’d love it if Scalise ends up saying “Sorry, Jim, in order to get Rep. Smith’s vote I had to give him the chair of Judiciary.”
cain
@lowtechcyclist:
😲😤😤😤
What the flying fuck is this? Apparently, some right wingers have managed to infiltrate scholastic books.
Cameron
@Baud: Is anybody going to tell the Fed Chair that?
JPL
@Michael Bersin: President Obama tried and failed. Pictures can tell a powerful story.
JPL
@cain: Book sales! They care more about the bottom line, than the fact that they are appeasing whackos.
mrmoshpotato
@Ken:
Can’t we forever refer to Gym Jordan by the title of Jackass?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
In fairness, Willard claims “Democrats” have told him that, not Warner or Booker. Warner makes sense as a Romney consensus candidate, but I do find his affinity for Booker amusing. Booker ran to Warren’s left on several issues, but he speaks that religiously infused unity stuff that I imagine appeals to the post-trump, BLM marching version of Willard.
cain
@JPL: The majority don’t want books banned. That’s not going to help their bottom line – they are literally going after the rural vote or something or maybe the texas state vote – but in the aggregate as you can see how many reject the moms for liberty people.
So it isn’t even a smart business move. What they are sensitive a bout is bad publicity. Right wingers have a powerful online and in person presence that is menacing and scaling – so they make more noise than actual impact.
Citizen Alan
@JPL: The Garbage Humans would have used it as a rallying cry to say “If only the teachers had been carrying automatic weapons, those children would still be alive.”
trollhattan
@sab: Hilarious!
My GPS map feature is set up with an Aussie woman’s voice, because I demand entertainment whilst being ordered around. TBH I always wanted a Mr T voice, “I pity the fool who don’t take the next exit!”
Occasionally get tripped up by pronunciations used by BBC news readers, such as pronouncing the “J” in junta. Somehow a “South Sudan Joonta” sounds half-serious.
eclare
@Soprano2:
I know you were expecting this, it still has to be so hard to go through.
catclub
I fear that is a typo. $100k would be nothing. $100 x 0.001 is also pretty small.
Probably $100M
trollhattan
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
The “some say” school of fibbing.
Imaginary person said imaginary thing that totally proves my assertion. It’s about three-quarters of Trump’s schtick.
smith
This looks to be fun: Menendez was just hit with a superseding indictment charging him with acting as a foreign agent while in office (for Egypt). I can think of a whole lot of other members of Congress it would be satisfying to see thus charged, if prosecutors can get the goods on them.
catclub
@lowtechcyclist: so there is stochastic terrorism and and also scholastic terrorism?
Citizen Alan
@trollhattan: I regret never getting a Tom Tom because at one point, they had a Brian Blessed voice. “Turn left NOOOOWW!”
Frankensteinbeck
@Barbara:
The phrase gives me hives, because I have known sex workers. They say the phrase is used as a catch-all for any sexual behavior the user doesn’t like. Don’t like adult consensual sex work? Combine the statistics for it with sexual abuse of children and teen runaways fleeing abuse, and you get to shit all over women and the vulnerable while claiming you’re fighting for them! There are no shortage of activist organizations doing exactly that.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@catclub: soon they will be using weapons of math instruction.
sab
OT Very Ick.
Two nights ago I was reading on my ebook in the dark and a tiny pear-shaped critter with multiple legs landed on my screen. My immediate reaction was ” Yikes tiny guy you look like a tick!” so I picked it off and flushed it. Felt bad afterwards. Maybe I jumped to conclusions and killed an innocent beetle.
Today I was fondling my pitbull and found a lump behind her ear. She was resistant to probing. “Privacy! It’s only a skin tag! How dare you!”
After poking around a lot with growling, a tick fell off!
” You fucking stubborn dog! You brought a tick to my bed! Two ticks! How dare you!”
Dogs can tell the difference between performative outrage and genuine outrage. This was genuine.
So she will let me check for ticks.
But still ick. She never goes anywhere. But deer can and do jump our fence. Ick ick ick.
I was late on her flea tick medicine. Still, ick.
MisterForkbeard
@rikyrah:
No argument there, but Harris is getting such an (undeservedly) bad rap that I’d be worried about her running in the general. The press just has it out for her, the exact same way they have it out for Hillary. Worse, in some ways: Harris doesn’t have a history of baggage that Hillary did, so they’re working overtime to attack a strong black woman.
They’re trying to get her excluded and/or weakened, and it has sadly worked
smith
@MisterForkbeard: Most of Hillary’s baggage was manufactured by the press and GQP operatives. They just had a much longer lead time to make it up and solidify the mythology with Hillary than they’ve had with Harris. It’s deeply discouraging to see the patriarchy on both sides of the aisle come together to make sure that the ultimate glass ceiling is never cracked.
sab
@MisterForkbeard: Press is very misogynistic, They hate women who are not curvy dingbats.
I think this goes back to Elizabeth Drew. Shapely extremely bright “dingbat” scooped them all for a generation. They treated her like a potted plant at cocktail parties and she heard everything. Women won’t ever get to do that again. They may get the story but no one will pay it any attention.
trollhattan
@MisterForkbeard: Misogyny is so deep and pernicious I think it will take a PERFECT candidate to be our first woman president.
zhena gogolia
@sab: Wow, I don’t remember Elizabeth Drew looking like that.
sab
@trollhattan: To do that you need folks to vote for her. In America?!
sab
@zhena gogolia: She was very pretty in her youth although not quite beauty queen. But back then Washington standards were lower.
ETA Also too charm and good manners count for a lot in attractiveness.
trollhattan
@smith: Started with Richard Melon Scaife and his Arkansas Project waaaay back in ’93. Hellovan ROI considering it set the groundwork for torpedoing her campaign 23 years later.
MisterForkbeard
@lowtechcyclist: I am honestly surprised that McCarthy isn’t doing this.
Say: “Look, I’ll get in there to pass aid and we’ll negotiate a new CR or budget, and then we’ll take a vote on whether or not we’d keep me or take it back. I’ll put it on the books for November 30th.”
He gets back in, and then spends a fair amount of time pressuring people to vote for him. And if they don’t, then he can leave as an elder statesman taking one for the team. Way more dignified than what he’s got now.
Juju
@Soprano2: I know that was a hard day for both of you, but it’s for the best. I don’t know if you read my last reply to you yesterday in the squirrel post, it was the second to last comment, last time I checked. I mentioned that you should probably go ahead and get POA as soon as you can. You don’t have to use it until you feel it’s necessary, but it’s good to have it already set up. Take care of yourself and hugs from me.
Alison Rose
@smith: Wonder if he’s still gonna be all I AIN’T RESIGNING AND YOU CAN’T MAKE ME.
If they do seize their house, I hope we get a bodycam walk-through so we can see what interior design horrors they’ve committed with all that sweet sweet illegitimate largesse they enjoyed.
trollhattan
@sab:
Hillary did win the popular vote and IIRC it was 60k votes spread across three states that gave Trump the needed electorals. Nevertheless, close = losing.
trollhattan
@Alison Rose:
An actual Real Housewife of Jersey–thinking Carmella Soprano and her Lladro collection.
John S.
@schrodingers_cat:
No lies told.
twbrandt
OMG, Baud! followed me on Bluesky! My day is complete.
Manyakitty
@cain: old Twitter from a better time. It’s very pleasant so far, but I’ve built a tight bubble of jackals and fun stuff. So far, so good!
zhena gogolia
@Soprano2: I’m so sorry you’re going through this. It’s heartbreaking.
zhena gogolia
@sab: I was shocked by the screengrab of Mace with her assets hanging out. I don’t think even Boebert goes on TV like that (intentionally).
MisterForkbeard
@trollhattan: I think it might honestly be a republican.
If they run a pretty, racist, asshole female then the media will eat it up. The media made fun of Sarah Palin, but the right didn’t care at all and loved her, though part of that was that she wasn’t on the top of the ticket.
The problem is that the candidate would have to get through the primary and I don’t think there’s a way to do that. So the situation is:
1. Democrats can get a woman through the primary process, but the media and the right’s misogyny will sink her in the general
2. Republicans would absolutely vote for an attractive female asshole in the general (especially to spite Democrats) and the media would probably run with it. But they have no way to get her through the primaries when she’s competing against “christian men”.
smith
@trollhattan: It’s interesting to me that even then they sensed they she had real potential to be the first woman president. They saw the future and it terrified them.
Barbara
@Alison Rose: Doesn’t it seem like it ought to be a separate crime for a U.S. Senator to act as a foreign agent whether he registers or not?
Seizing their house ought to be interesting. I mean, the feds know how to play hard ball. No doubt they are adding to the bill that Menendez and his wife can expect to pay, in order to give them something to negotiate with.
StringOnAStick
@MisterForkbeard: I hate to say it but the normie D’s I’m friends with think Kamala is an inarticulate idiot and Biden must drop out due to age; they all find the coming election very depressing. They’ll vote D but they won’t be enthusiastic about it and will complain endlessly about it. It’s all I can do to not get depressed by these various groups of NYT readers, and every single one is a daily reader including the far lefty I saw recently who tried to both sides the two parties to me; it may have done lasting damage to our friendship. He lives in VT and is damned near a VT old hippie leftist stereotype.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Alison Rose: one of the MSNBC FormerFederalProsecutors said that his Senate seat is Bobby Gold Bar’s best chip in plea negotiations, and were she his defense attorney, she would tell him to cling to it
@trollhattan: that episode made me chuckle and wince, because my mother loved her Lladro collection. Made me feel a little guilty when we gave it away, and I was surprised at how many of my cousins wanted pieces of it.
smith
@MisterForkbeard: I think that the Democrats also need a come-to-
JesusFSM self-reckoning about how much of the misogyny in 2016 was coming from inside the house.schrodingers_cat
@StringOnAStick: I am guessing that they are all white and not of recent immigrant or any other minority backgrounds
raven
@Soprano2: I’m so sorry but it has to be for the best for him and others.
sab
@Juju: My mom gave me a full POA. She was mentally sharp but physically failing.
That has been a godsend. My dad is physically intact and mentally mostly gone. And he won’t sign away anything any more (we stuck him in a nursing home!) but he isn’t competent to do much. Fortunately I haven’t had to go to court to have him declared incompetent.
This is making me re-evaluate my own eldercare choices. Don’t assume your spouse wii be competent when you fall part. Do you have trustworthy competent kids or stepkids? Sign to them in some form before it’s too late.
Omnes Omnibus
WIGOP backs off from impeachment of Protasiewicz. (NYT) I didn’t think they would actually pull the trigger.
Betty
@smith: Maybe now there will be 50 Senators demanding his resignation. Has been stuck at 31 for a while. I expect nothing from Republicans or the newly declared Independent.
StringOnAStick
@schrodingers_cat: Of course they are! All are pretty damned comfortable economically except the VT hippie who survived off Medicaid until he turned 65 because he refused to make enough money to have to pay income taxes, which he called “war tax”. At least he supports aid to Ukraine.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I agree, even if I don’t really see a potential POTUS in current GOP.
I always thought that Claire McCaskill could make a credible run if she had survived in her Senate seat. As an active politician (as opposed to her current pundit job) she was too Blue Doggy for me, and probably for the 2020 primary.
Alison Rose
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: He’s gonna be like environmental activists and chain himself to his desk.
sab
@zhena gogolia: I need to recheck the Mace screen.Yikes! Elizabeth Drew never had her “assets” hanging out. She was just pretty and charming. The phucking world has changed so much since my youth I don’t even recognize it. I pity my granddaughters so much. They are all pretty, but yikes!
smith
@Soprano2: It’s hard, but you’re doing the right thing. My aunt had dementia, but continued to drive, at the insistence of my uncle, who was disabled and something of a domestic tyrant who didn’t want to give up his personal chauffeur. With sickening predictability, she wandered into a head-on collision that killed them both. The only silver lining is that the crash didn’t kill the other driver.
Juju
@sab: that’s exactly what my mother did when she realized that she had senior onset dementia, before it became advanced dementia. When it’s advanced dementia, those who have it don’t realize they have it.
lowtechcyclist
@sab:
Shoulda named the second one ‘tock.’
Alison Rose
@Soprano2: I’m so sorry. This kind of situation is so tough.
cain
@Manyakitty: My mastodon follow count is approaching 1.2k so I’m doing pretty good that way. All my open source/free software people are on mastodon. (which makes sense since mastodon is an open platform running on open source software)
I still haven’t logged into bluesky yet. Maybe I’ll give the invite to my wife she might find it more interesting for her work in education.
cain
@Soprano2: oh man, this is so sad. So sorry to hear you both go through this.
Paul in KY
@OzarkHillbilly: You have to have a subliminal deathwish to do that sort of thing. Or an addiction to fight or flee adrenalin bursts.
trollhattan
@smith: Completely agree.
Even addled Trump and his crew recognized Biden as his main threat, and were actively attacking Joe (and Hunter!) long before he even announced.
But targeting Hillary back in Arkansas days was some kind of twisted genius.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Soprano2: It feels wrong to say “good” but it is a good thing.
lowtechcyclist
@trollhattan:
Or Biden/Harris winning next year and Biden calling it quits sometime in his second term.
Now what it will take for the first woman to be elected President…well, my hope is that Biden retires early enough in his second term that it gives Harris a bit of an incumbency advantage going into 2028.
Manyakitty
@cain: there you go! Tell her to look us up 😁
cain
@zhena gogolia: In the Jake Tapper vid?
trollhattan
@sab:
Loathe the things–very high on the creep scale, plus Lyme. Luckily we only have them in the country and not in town. Our brown dog while a literal short-hair conceals them perfectly, requiring a good inspection after a hike.
sab
@smith: Yikes. I am so sorry for you and others.
My mom insisted on driving until she rolled into a train ( didn’t know her foot left the brake at a train stop) and innocent driver bystanders saved her life just before Thanksgiving. Cops and BMV said she would never drive again. But she shouldn’t have been driving at all. I was available for any errand. But I didn’t take or have taken her keys.
There was a sizeable inheritance at stake. My siblings could have stepped in to support but they wanted their cut. So I was out on my own being the bad guy. They aren’t as awful as I make them sound, but the inheritance was an issue. Don’t piss off a parent.
Children should know that and as a group steer parents to better decisions. Otherwise everyone loses.
Leto
Happening a county over from us: Moms for Liberty meets its match: Parents in this swing suburban district are fighting back; Republicans hope to use education wars to turn purple suburbia red. In one Pennsylvania district, that backfired
lowtechcyclist
@trollhattan:
They were mostly targeting Bill, but they had money and energy to spare for crapping all over Hillary as well.
catclub
CNN Headline.
Pretty sure that CEO is not Trump, although he claims to be an alum. He probably _claims_ to have made donations, too.
Old Man Shadow
It would be really nice to have a boring, competent government that functioned.
eclare
@smith:
Oh that’s horrible. My sympathies.
Citizen Alan
@MisterForkbeard:
True. That’s why I was never worried about Michele Bachman and am not worried about MTG or Boebert. (Disgusted by but not worried about.) Because for all of them, their base constituency consists of people who think that a woman should never be in any position of authority over a man. I don’t think Amy Coathanger Barret would have ever gotten near the Supreme Court if the position were an elected on. I genuinely wonder if she asks her husband and/or pastor how to vote on important cases and then she works backwards to get a legal basis for whatever outcome they demand.
smith
@sab: I had a similar experience with my mother. Her cognitive decline made it so she couldn’t handle her finances, but otherwise was able to live alone and independently into her nineties. My sisters and I had a running argument as to whether we should step in and stop her driving. There weren’t inheritance issues, but one of my sisters was unable to really face our mother’s decline. We were lucky nothing happened before she reached her final months and had to move into assisted living. It is hugely anxiety-provoking to be in that situation, knowing that there is real danger (we had the example of my aunt!), and not be able to act.
trollhattan
@Citizen Alan:
I shall always treasure Michele Bachman for her “shootspah.”
patrick II
@WaterGirl:
If they depended on local money and local issues for earmarks they would be all over them. But money and policy have been nationalized. No Republican votes for a local bridge while they could be campaigning for looser national gun laws nationally. That’s where the money, the Republican media, and eventually the voters are.
Mousebumples
Thanks for the news! If anyone has a gift link to share, that’d be great, but the headline works for me.
Alison Rose
@Mousebumples: Ask and ye shall receive
I love the photo. She’s like “That’s what I thought, bitch.”
Barbara
@sab: In that case, you needed a united front so that no one would take the brunt of retaliation. My FIL stopped driving voluntarily when he developed fainting spells, even though, eventually, they were corrected through heart surgery. He told us that he took the keys away from his own mother, and she never forgave him, so he wanted to avoid that for himself by voluntarily stopping.
He took his mother’s keys away after one of his kids told him of the terrifying experience of being in the car when her grandmother announced (and followed through) that she no longer had time to stop at stop signs anymore. Not exactly dementia, but somehow an inability to logically connect the dots about the consequences of her own behavior.
zhena gogolia
@cain: Yeah.
catclub
@StringOnAStick:
I think my response to that would be: “Not a dimes worth of difference. Ralph Nader tried that in 2000. How did it work out?”
rikyrah
@OzarkHillbilly:
Not a Drag Queen
Barbara
@Omnes Omnibus: It seemed unlikely that they would get every Republican member of the Senate to go along, but it’s clear that a majority seemed to have been on board. It took a long time for Pennsylvania to overcome extreme gerrymandering, but it can be done. I hope Wisconsin gets there soon.
trollhattan
@sab: MIL’s driving ability was going away noticeably but since they moved from “overcrowded” Napa Valley to the remote Sierra foothills, half an hour from anything via river canyon, drive she did. One day heading here in the valley she went off CA 50 and rear-ended a pickup stopped off the road. Totaled the Prius and miraculously, she walked away with nary a scratch and did not hurt the pickup dude. Oof.
So we shared our opinion with her and BIL SIL living on the foothill compound that that was that–no new car, no more driving. IDK how it is the CHP and DMV don’t communicate on these issues, but there was no pulling of license and requiring a driving test.
Somehow the Toyota dealer got wind of a sales opportunity, delivered a fresh Prius, signed some papers and voila, MIL is back on the road. Fast forward a few months and after lunch with a friend she pulls onto CA 29 in Rutherford and is immediately tboned by an oncoming car. AGAIN walks away unscathed and that was her final stint behind the wheel.
Mousebumples
❤️
I called my weasel word GOP reps, for whatever good that did. (or maybe it did)
Thanks!
Barbara
@trollhattan: Peripheral vision declines significantly with age. I started noticing noticed that while driving even before I turned 60. My night vision is also worse, and I really dislike driving at night.
Cameron
@Leto: Very cool. Almost enough to get me to move back to Philly.
wjca
I have to say I find this both sad and baffling. I wasn’t that big Harris fan back when she was Attorney General here. Nor when she was my Senator. I didn’t see her as inarticulate or an idiot, just not particularly to my taste.
But as VP she has done a decent job, and I’m far more impressed than I used to be. As in, I’d have no problem voting for her for President. How anyone (outside the RWNJs, of course) gets that down on her is a mystery.
yellowdog
@Omnes Omnibus: Vos has not backed down.
Omnes Omnibus
@yellowdog: ???
MisterForkbeard
@catclub: I had friends in 2016 who tried that. First how “no difference between Trump and Killary” and then when they couldn’t sustain even that they spent all their time attacking Hillary and then demanding that I recognize how selfless they were for giving such an awful bitch their vote.
I’m not friends with them anymore, no.
thruppence
@trollhattan: Those were some darn safe Priuses. Prii?
Soprano2
@Juju: I did see that. We already have it set up in his trust, I just need to know what to do to activate it. I think I’ll need two doctors to say that he cannot manage his own affairs anymore. We did all of that when we set up trusts in 2014, thank God.
Soprano2
@sab: My mother and grandmother had to do that with my grandfather. I found notes my mother had made for it, that he did things like try to eat a frozen pot pie and couldn’t remember how to make a sandwich. It had to be heartbreaking for them to have to do that, but they didn’t have a choice because he didn’t think anything was wrong and certainly never would have signed any kind of POA.
Soprano2
@smith: Oh I’m sorry, that is so awful. I’ve been afraid he would hurt himself or someone else for awhile now.
Soprano2
@Barbara: I’m the same, and especially when it’s raining I hate driving at night.
catclub
I would guess that through most of Obama’s terms they thought the same
about Joe Biden. I would have said if they are even looking at what the VP is doing they are not normies.
sab
@Soprano2: My great[-grandfather (rich) was famous in his day for wandering around downtown in his pajamas. My grandmother did nothing. Then she retired later down south and had a wonderful housekeeper who took care of her for several decades for minimal pay, and eventually inherited only a mink coat. That is on us and I will always be ashamed.
I am doing better with my dad’s caretaker. She treats him like her own father and I pay her like a union factory worker. My siblings will be surprised some day that we spent their inheritance on his eldercare. Oops. It was his money he earned, and they had and ignored lots of chances to oversee the finances.
sab
Duplicate deleted.
rikyrah
@cain:
NO LIE TOLD
Bill Arnold
@Betty Cracker:
Technically, somebody who registered at some point as a Democrat (in a state that does this) and never changed their registration, but currently votes as MAGA Republican, is a “Democrat”. Or at least a registered Democrat.
My father retained his Republican registration after starting to reliably vote for Democrats, just to continue to get the campaign literature. (Mom(/wife) was a registered Democrat.)