A bit of magic, wonder, and joy brought to you by the talented tappers of Dorrance Dance, performing their playful interpretation of The Nutcracker Suite.
Enjoy! ?? pic.twitter.com/qXtCm4t37o
— Jill Biden (@FLOTUS) December 13, 2023
Yes, it’s Tchaikovsky! And I recognized, on the third play-through, why I love this version: I didn’t attend my first live ballet performance until I started going with the Spousal Unit (who is a bit of a balletomane). When we went to see a ballet-school production of The Nutcracker, the klopfklopfklopf during the junior students’ parts confused me… until I realized that walking quietly in toe shoes is also a skill acquired only with practice. Taptaptaptap.
Big props for Our President:
I was proud to host President Zelenskyy at the White House where I reaffirmed that the United States’ support for Ukraine is unshakeable.
Congress must pass supplemental funding for Ukraine.
This is about freedom for Ukraine – and freedom everywhere. pic.twitter.com/iO6WwRLbV6
— President Biden (@POTUS) December 14, 2023
NEWS — Senate will shortly pass by unanimous consent a bill awarding back pay to military officers whose promotions were delayed by Sen. Tuberville’s blockade.
Will happen imminently on Senate floor
— Andrew Desiderio (@AndrewDesiderio) December 14, 2023
BIDEN DID THIS! House passes crucial defense bill in last-minute sprint, providing a pay raise for troops, Ukraine funding https://t.co/IMoZTwYgyE via @usatoday
— Lynn Gallegos (@LGallrgos) December 15, 2023
Per USAToday, “House passes crucial defense bill in last-minute sprint, providing a pay raise for troops, Ukraine funding”:
The House passed an annual defense policy bill Thursday morning, sending it to President Joe Biden’s desk to approve $886 billion in spending for military pay raises, funding for Ukraine and other key issues.
The National Defense Authorization Act, a bill that Congress is required to pass every year, includes a 5.2% pay raise for troops, authorizes funding for Ukraine and an extension of a controversial foreign surveillance program. The bill’s passage concludes a last-minute sprint from Congress to finish the crucial legislation, which cleared the lower chamber by a bipartisan vote of 310-118.
The bill, opposed by House conservatives, was considered on the floor under what is known as “suspension.” It required a two-thirds vote from the House to dodge procedural hoops, which likely would have been stopped by hard-right GOP lawmakers protesting.
Conservatives had two major grievances with the bill: the extension of Section 702, a provision in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that enables the U.S. to monitor foreign nationals using U.S. based messaging services, and its omission of several culture war amendments…
Senate passes military backpay for delayed promotions before recessing.
Back Monday with a vote on, who else, Martin O’Malley to be commissioner of Social Security
— Burgess Everett (@burgessev) December 15, 2023
Nothing motivates the United States Senate quite like Thursday afternoon. https://t.co/tuq5btBHK8
— Matt Glassman (@MattGlassman312) December 14, 2023
Productive year for the House GOP. Expelled a Member, censured a couple more, continued Pelosi’s budget, sent out subpoenas, held some hearings, renamed some Post Offices, published some books, launched new podcasts, sold lots of trinkets, got lots of days off, kissed Trump’s ass
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) December 14, 2023
But Rich ‘Sparklepants’ Lowry thinks he’s found his pony in TFG’s lagoon of pigdirt…
“Vote Republican: The Army will kill him if he goes too crazy,” is certainly a memorable pitch if nothing else. https://t.co/yNPI8GDjYI
— Open Source Stupidity (OSSTU) Starfish (@IRHotTakes) December 14, 2023
Baud
Interesting that the media didn’t report on the Dem no votes. Some progressives have been voting against the NDAA because they want to reduce defense spending.
Matt McIrvin
As far as I know, the military are trained to refuse to follow illegal orders and, under the principle of civilian control, are rightly loath to appoint themselves as moral judges beyond that. My nightmare is that the Republicans find some legal Weird Trick to bring their tyranny in under the letter of the law and the Constitution, so that the military have no leg to stand on in refusing.
Suzanne
At some point — and I don’t know when this is — the GOP has to deal with a post-Trump reality. I feel like they should have a better strategy for that by now.
Baud
More evidence that the metadata war during Obama was about protecting Russian influence ops.
Baud
@Suzanne:
They don’t need a strategy. They’ll just continue to demonize Dems and claim to be whatever it is they need to claim to be to win votes.
Jeffro
Happy Friday folks!
I have to agree with that OSSTU tweet: having to tell voters that your candidate “might try some dictator stuff, but a SEAL team will cap him if he does” is not the most reassuring thing to be thinking about as you head into the voting booth.
Yarrow
@Suzanne: It certainly isn’t now. He’s going to be their nominee for president. Maybe if he loses bigly and costs them Congress they’ll deal with it.
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone 😊😊😊
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
p.a.
To a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Leave it to military fetishists to assume only the military can/should be the guarantors of America democracy.
Jeffro
I have a funny feeling that ‘crabs-in-a-bucket’ won’t begin to describe that reality. Good! Let the country see what they’re all about without the orange one’s distractions.
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: I think they’re just hoping that in that world, they’ll have permanent totalitarian control of the US and it won’t matter whether anyone approves of them or not.
Yarrow
This is a sweet thing I ran across the other day. Nitter link so most people can see it. You do have to click through to see the lovely drawings.
The thread broke for me, so here’s the rest in case you also can’t see it:
Betty Cracker
@Yarrow: That’s my hope. Someone once said Repubs have to lose three straight elections to go back to the drawing board. They’ve underperformed in every election since 2018, but the truth is they haven’t received the kind of whupping they deserve, so the zombie strategy keeps lumbering along. And the Senate map is brutal for us next year.
Jeffro
Btw after Ron Johnson tried to lie his way through an interview with Kaitlin Collins a day or two ago, he tried to play it off on Twitter, so she went back and did a well-researched piece on his false claims. (I’ll see if I can find a link)
It’s awesome!
Yarrow
@Yarrow: One more because Nitter seems to mess with threads so it doesn’t always show up:
Sarah@idlewildgirl
15h
Dad wanted me to post his favourite which was this one
glc
Cartoon (Biden impeachment, Clay Jones)
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin:
I mean, I understand the allure of the easy fantasy. But hope isn’t a strategy, and I am sure that there is someone smart on their side who has told them that they should have backup plans!
Yarrow
@Betty Cracker: I think that was Josh Marshall? Agreed, they’re losing but they’re not losing in a big enough way. The Senate map is dire.
I wish someone on our side would come up with a catchy thing like Schoolhouse Rock, but probably on TikTok, that explains how our government works. And how you have to vote down ballot. And how lots of the things people don’t like are the result of voting for Republicans in Senate and House races.
OzarkHillbilly
@Yarrow: I’m not surprised she saved every one of them. My old man saved every letter he got from my mother during his time in Korea. One every day.
Betty Cracker
@Yarrow: Those are sweet — thanks for the link!
Yarrow
@Betty Cracker: I love them. They’re so sweet and it’s lovely they go back to the beginning of their relationship. What a lovely legacy for their kids.
@OzarkHillbilly: That’s very sweet. You never know when a card or letter is the last one you’ll get.
satby
Love the tap Nutcracker, love the NDAA passing. Good way to start the weekend.
Jeffro
@Jeffro: I can’t find her follow-up piece yet, but here’s the original dust-up where she dares to…ask him to back up what he’s
sayinglying about.Michael Bersin
Missouri never fails to disappoint:
Left out the part about wearing a yellow star
Soprano2
I read that whole long thread from yesterday. I learned some stuff, which was good. I understand that young people are struggling today with things that people my age didn’t have to struggle with as much, and those things certainly should be made better. I’m not ready to say, though, that they have it worse than any other generation in history. I grew up in the 1970’s, talk about a screwed-up decade (not nearly the worst in U.S. history, though). It started out pretty good until ’73, with the Arab oil embargo making the price of fuel double in about a year. That was a huge shock to the economy that made the rest of the decade suck. When I graduated from high school, both unemployment and inflation were in double digits. Americans were being held hostage in Iran, which is how we got Reagan. The year I was a senior in college, only 4 employers visited campus to recruit employees. Unemployment was still almost 10%. The attitude was “you’d better take the first job you’re offered, no matter how much it might not be what you want, because you probably won’t get another offer for 6 months if then”. When I bought my first decent car (one year used from a dealer lot) I paid 16% interest and had to have a co-signer. Republicans remember the 1980’s as a shining decade, but the truth was it was hard until the last couple of years; there were constant layoffs as companies moved plants to Mexico. The people who were angry about NAFTA a few years ago didn’t realize that the reason for NAFTA was to give companies an incentive not to move jobs to Mexico! Things didn’t get better until the ’90’s. My sister was five years younger than me, and her reality was much different. Whereas I was extremely lucky to get a job when I was 17 (my parents didn’t even believe I had a job until I showed them the uniform, they assumed I’d have to know someone to get hired anywhere because youth unemployment was double digits); by the time my sister was 16, places like McDonald’s were begging people to apply for jobs. By the time she graduated from college, the job market was good and she was able to find a good paying job pretty easily. And so on.
I guess my point is that people in their 20’s have always struggled. It’s for different reasons at different times, and it sucks, but it’s always been true that people who are young don’t get paid a lot and have a hard time finding reasonable rent and buying houses. Sometimes I wonder if part of today’s struggles are because of the later age of marriage, because having two people and two incomes definitely makes things possible that aren’t possible when you’re single. Just my $0.02.
Scout211
@Jeffro:
Collins follow-up video
Video plays after a semi-long ad
EarthWindFire
@Suzanne: These are people who begged for the fall of Roe for nearly 50 years then acted like the dog that caught the car. Strategy for post-Trump? Might happen around 2100. Maybe. Assuming American democracy still stands.
Geminid
This morning’s Politico Playbook links to a Messenger story about the 9th Ohio CD Republican primary. After Rep. Marcy Kaptur trounced Richard Majewski in last year’s midterms, Republicans knew they needed a better candidate to unseat the veteran Congresswoman. Former state legislator Craig Riedel looked like the guy until someone leaked tapes of Riedel slammng Donald Trump. So neighboring district Rep. Max Miller rescinded his endorsement of Riedel, as did Senate candidate Bernie Moreno.
Majewski is in the race again, and on the principle of “it takes one to know one, he has labeled Riedel “a fraud.” Riedel hopes to salvage his campaign with $10,000 worth of ads on the Fox News station in West Palm Beach, Florida that are airing today.
Ohio’s 9th CD runs west of the Cleveland area and includes the city of Toledo as well as more rural counties.
Jeffg166
@Soprano2: There is also twice as many people on the planet as there were in the 70s. Computers make it possible to do the work with less people. In some case any human.
I would not want to be 20 in 2023.
Kay
@Geminid:
Kaptur will win. Again. I suspect she wants to retire but she’s the only Dem who can hold that seat now.
OzarkHillbilly
@Yarrow: Yeah, we found them in a bottom dresser drawer he had in the garage after Ma died and we were getting the house ready for
sellingdemolition.Jeffro
@Scout211: many thanks!
Scout211
Long investigative report on CNN this morning, well worth a read if you have time.
Betty Cracker
@Jeffg166: I wouldn’t either — the climate crisis is reason enough to be glad I was born in an earlier time. With any luck, I’ll be dead before the Gulf of Mexico swallows my house.
Also, I am grateful every day I went through adolescence before social media was a thing. I think it’s horrible for kids, especially girls.
Another Scott
@p.a.: +1
Gen. Milley:
The military knows their lane and they’ll stay in it, and obey their oath.
Cheers,
Scott.
Jeffro
Apologies if this was already covered, but the FL GOP guy wants $2M to go away.
Maybe they should pay him off in trump NFTs? Rubles?
Geminid
@Kay: This story made me wish that Rep. Kaptur was young enough to run in the next 5 cycles. She’s a valuable politician in her own right, but watching the Republicans trying to beat her might also be fun. It would be like a Roadrunner cartoon.
Patricia Kayden
Lowry is an idiot. Trump will select military leaders who will do his bidding.
Ken
Since the rest of your post is serious in tone, I have to assume this is true too, but it sure sounds like parody, or the setup for a Florida Man joke. “Ohio Candidate Runs Ads in Florida Media Market.”
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Scout211: I’m not sure we’ll ever know how much damage Trump did, much less be able to undo it. God help us if he’s re-elected.
NotMax
The kids are all right.
catclub
@Patricia Kayden: yeah. Military folks are trained for decades to obey orders.
Kay
@Geminid:
She’s a very talented person. I think Democrats have moved toward her positions on economic matters over the years, which must be gratifying to her. A vindication.
She just did a “women in the workforce” event where I live (Kaptur is my rep). Two of my daughter’s friends participated – both Dems so nothing unusual there, but also a probation officer I know personally and deal with on a weekly basis who is an absolute Right wing nut. But she likes Marcy!
Another Scott
@Patricia Kayden: As we learned during the promotions hold, the DoD has its own processes for advancement and promotions. The president doesn’t have much role in the process.
S/He can appoint flunkies to cabinet posts, etc., but those do have to be approved by the Senate, so he can’t totally get his way there, either.
There are checks and balances, if people follow the rules and use them. As Kay says (re Comey and the like), all people need to do is follow procedures…
Cheers,
Scott.
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: I’m not sure we have any backup plans if they do manage it.
Omnes Omnibus
@catclub: Military folks also get a lot of training on not obeying illegal orders.
Harrison Wesley
@Ken: So now we have….Ohio Man?
Gin & Tonic
@Scout211:
I don’t find the circumstances mysterious at all.
Kay
NYTimes has a very good article on the behind the scenes work by conservatives to overturn Roe. Alito is the big driver along with Kavanaugh but two things stuck out to me –
Justice Roberts has absolutely no influence among the conservatives on the court – they have made him irrelevant (such a weak person, really, no spine at all, he takes orders) AND the fact that we don’t have term limits for SCOTUS has skewed politics in all kinds of ways that are wholly negative. The lack of term limits was supposed to protect them from political pressure but it has done the opposite. They’re almost wholly political in response to no term limits.
Lapassionara
@Another Scott: isn’t there an exception to the “advise and consent” requirement that TFG was able to use to get cronies in office? Something like, vacancy happens while Senate no in session, or something?
brendancalling
So, basically, the ACTUAL House majority—a caucus of Democrats and sane Republicans—got it past the goal posts?
Thank god, because Ukraine needs to win this fight.
Kay
I don’t know how gift links work but this is the gift link I read of the NYTimes article on ending rights for women.
OzarkHillbilly
@Michael Bersin: Yeah well, you know Charles Johnson has the goods on Elad. He certainly wouldn’t besmirch a Jew with the old “divided loyalties” smear or make unfounded accusations in a make believe criminal complaint. Not Charles…
s//
Geminid
@Ken: Trump has probably seen the ad by now and is considering whether Riedel has shown sufficient loyalty.
That is nutty. Shit like this is why I call Trump’s Florida home Mar-a-Loco.
Subsole
@Baud:
Which, it bears repeating, would not be enough to get it done if the 4th Estate didn’t merrily roll over and play along with the Republicans’ claims.
Gin & Tonic
@OzarkHillbilly: My dear wife and I have a box full of letters we sent to each other when we were dating but living apart. I keep trying to convince her we should burn them all.
Kay
Rich Lowry is saying it because he’s a hack who would say anything but I think people recite these reassuring murmers because they themselves are rattled at the thought of unrest – I always think of the word “soothing” when I read them. Sooooothing :)
But it isn’t to calm you. It’s to comfort themselves.
NotMax
Mark Morris troupe’s version of the Nutcracker.
;)
(Improperly may be of questionable legality in Florida.)
Subsole
@rikyrah:
Good morning!
Jinchi
Great if true. But the article just mentions that the bill “authorizes funding for Ukraine”, nothing about a dollar amount allocated. Is there actually funding in the bill?
OzarkHillbilly
@Gin & Tonic: If you have children, I think that would be a crime. Children know their mother and father as parents first, and it colors everything else. To read those letters from Ma was a window into their humanity. I’m only sorry Ma didn’t save Pop’s letters to her.
Kay
ABC did a documentary on 18 women who were denied medical care because of abortion bans.
It’s on Hulu so wil have limited reach but I’m glad ABC put some money into reporting on womens health, anyway. Maybe more big national media companies will follow and actually put some money behind womens issues. But don’t hold your breath. This is a very sexist country. Some of our abortion laws are more restrictive than those in Saudi Arabia.
NotMax
Brr. In the upper 50s tonight and still heading down.
Kathleen
@Baud: Link to last night’s vote:
https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/2023723
Voting no – Ocasio Cortez, Pressley, Bush, Bowman, Tlaib, Omar, Summer Lee, Barbara Lee, Katie Porter
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Baud:
Cleek’s Law remains the stragety.
Kathleen
@Suzanne: I blame Joe Biden and the Democrats. //ss
WhatsMyNym
@Jinchi: It’s the Bill that the Senate passed. So, yes.
NotMax
@Suzanne
“We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.”
//
Geminid
@Jinchi: This NDAA authorizes $300 million in military assistance to Ukraine. The larger $60+ billion Biden wants is in the $100+ billion Supplemental Appropriations bill that the Senate is now considering. Biden’s proposal also includes $14 billion in military aid to Israel, funds for overseas humanitaran relief and several initiatives relating to Indo-Pacific security; also, $14 billion for enhanced border security. The last is what Senate Republicans and Democrats are wrangling over now.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@OzarkHillbilly:
Totally agree but I’m thinking longer term. If you have kids, save em and make sure the kids hand them down to their kids because such insights into ancestors is a genealogists wet dream.
In our current house in Denver, we dug up, literally dug up in the crawl space (in prep for rebuilding a non-load bearing brick wall, we just can’t get the old house thing out of our system), a pack of stuff wrapped in a newspaper dated 1943. It contained, among other things, letters from the father of the wife of the original owner of the house (1905) that date to 1883-86. They were to his wife back in the Cincy area. He was a bricklayer and moved to Denver for his health, leaving the wife and a couple of kids behind to gather up later. One of those kids, his daughter, is the one who buried this treasure trove of material.
They have no descendants, I did the genealogy work, nobody around today. If I had found somebody, I would have seen if they wanted the stuff.
As it stands now, we’ll donate them to the Western History collection in the Denver Public Library b/c they looked at the stuff and drooled.
Kathleen
@Soprano2: Also in the 70’s a majority of women didn’t have access to top/better paying jobs nor did they have degrees or training in engineering, business, finance, etc.
I interviewed for a secretarial position in 1974/1975 for a large company and when I asked about possible career paths I was told, “We like to keep our secretaries as secretaries.”
I graduated college in 1971 and a Time magazine cover showed a perplexed graduate and headline saying that job market was tight for graduates.
Thor Heyerdahl
I keep picturing the hilarious infighting and backstabbing scenes in The Death of Stalin – and wondering who ends up crashing to earth like Lavrenti Beria (Stephen Miller?)
WaterGirl
@Scout211: Oh my god! Journalism! Hallelujah!
More of this, please, from the networks.
Layer8Problem
@Thor Heyerdahl:
“[the post-TFG GOP crab bucket] . . . the hilarious infighting and backstabbing scenes in The Death of Stalin . . . wondering who ends up crashing to earth like Lavrenti Beria (Stephen Miller?)”
Oooo, I would love to see that, Miller spitting venom right up to a well-deserved end.
Kathleen
@Kay: My problem with that story was they omitted one of the biggest factors resulting in Dobbs, and that was how their undermining Hillary Clinton helped Trump win which resulted in the Supreme Court that overturned Roe.
frosty
@Kathleen: I graduated in 1973 and no shit, it was a tough job market. It took me about a year to come to the conclusion I wasn’t going to get the job I wanted in the town I wanted (San Diego) so I went back to the campus placement center and said “Get me an engineering job anywhere in Southern California.” I got interviews at:
– North American Rockwell, designing bomb bay doors on the B-1
– North American Rockwell, stressing skin panels on the space shuttle
– Fluor, cost/scheduling on design and construction of refineries
I took the Fluor job, which worked out pretty well. Turns out knowing how to do a Critical Path schedule was useful for the rest of my career(s).
narya
For folks on bluesky, I’m gingerchef bsky social there. I realized I don’t know most people’s handles there, so please follow me if you want. I’m not posting anything, but I’m using it as a place to follow others
ETA: I have “Balloon Juice jackal” in my profile, though
OzarkHillbilly
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
Cool find. In fact, Super cool find.
Over the years I found all kinds of things buried in the walls. Mostly trash, old newspapers, half eaten sandwiches, used razor blades, and so on. One guy I worked with found a double gold eagle behind some wainscoting. Another guy found a matched set of dueling pistols. Did the right thing and gave them to the homeowner, who was a self important prick who didn’t even acknowledge it with a small gift. Probably sold them for $20 or $40 thou. (this was the late ’70s, I really have no idea what they might have been worth)
SiubhanDuinne
@NotMax:
That was terrific!
Matt McIrvin
@OzarkHillbilly: Some houses had a slot in the back of the medicine cabinet for disposing of used razor blades, and it just dropped them into the interior of the wall. Out of sight, out of mind, I guess.
Suzanne
@frosty:
This is such a useful skill. I feel like the ability to make these and affect these is vital in every industry. I’m a big fan of pull planning, too.
OzarkHillbilly
@Matt McIrvin: Exactly. Over the years I must have dealt with a hundred thou or so.
Kathleen
@frosty: Good for you! In my sophomore or junior year the School of Engineering at my college had 1 woman. The year I graduated 1 woman was in the School of Business. May I ask how many women were in the Engineering program?
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Kathleen:
It wasn’t much different in the early 80s. My wife graduated near the top of her class with a physics degree, one of only two women in the class, in 1984 (took her 5 years). There were *no* jobs then, the echoes of the Reagan/Volker Recession were still very much in effect. Went to work for the Feds (only jobs to be had) in DC doing Star Wars work for the Navy.
Nobody there knew wtf to do with a *girl* physicist, the work was demeaning and pointless. Even after she moved on to the Night Vision Lab with the Army, the entire clusterfuck that was DoD procurement and research soured her.
It’s the main reason she chucked it all in, moved us to Misery where we restored our 1840s-era railroad hotel along the banks of the Osage River and ran it as a B&B for 20+ years.
She feels she was, as a woman, a generation too soon, for widespread and casual acceptance into that workforce. She’s simply agog now when she sees the number of women in the media doing what she’d been trained to do.
brendancalling
@Kay: Mission of Burma speaks for me.
These people suck. I will celebrate when they die, I will dance on their headstones, and I will relieve myself on their graves.
Old Man Shadow
“Don’t worry, we can always have a military coup,” is not the comforting statement, Rich thinks it is.
Kay
@Kathleen:
The NYTimes – the thing itself, which is a for profit company in a for profit industry- does no evaluation of their own work. All of their work is The Best and there is no room for improvement.
What enrages me is that abortion is unlike other issues that come before the SCOTUS because it has an immediate, real effect on womens welfare – their ability to survive. There was no consideration of that at all by any of the far Rght justices. They simply didn’t consider what would happen to pregnant women. The other thing that occurs to me is that court is way, way too influenced by the Catholic Church. It isn’t just that they are Catholics as a personal religious matter, which of course is fine. It’s that they are busily enshrining Catholic dogma into US law. i resent it. I think they are WAY out of line with this.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Scout211:
That would be the Mark Meadows who liked to burn documents in his office fireplace. His wife complained about the smell of smoke in his suits.
Sounds like Mr Terwillger is threatening young Ms Hutchinson
frosty
@Kathleen: There were 55 graduates in 1973, Physics, Chemistry, Math, Engineering, and Independent Studies (mine). All guys. This is out of 112 freshman, 4 of whom were women. By the time I graduated the incoming class had many more women. Now I think it’s over half the students.
Kathleen
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: I know the 80’s had to be tough also. I was fortunate. By 1981 I was promoted to a management position in my company and was able to forge a career that lasted until I took early retirement offer in 1997. I was an English major in a telecom environment but found my training in researching, critical thinking and writing helped me tremendously.
I (and several other women) had a mentor who was the first woman to be promoted to a high level management position in the early 70’s. She actively supported Black and white women and I still consider her the best manager I ever had after 50 years in corporate America.
Does your wife regret that she could not pursue her career path at that time?
narya
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Your wife is only a year or two younger than I am. I didn’t have anything like a physics degree, but yeah, I know what she means. One of the things that strikes me every single time I see some NASA Mission Control room is just how diverse it is; not that long ago, it was white men, in white shirts and ties. It makes me happy to see it, but also makes me wonder what people like your wife might have been able to contribute and accomplish.
Suzanne
Holy cannoli. We just got notified that our deadline is being pushed out another month. Thank the FSM. I am tired.
Kay
Can I just issue a PSA? We have yet another horrible child abuse case here and the one consistent fact in these cases is this – no one ever sees these kids. If someone moves in next to you and you are aware they have children and you never see these children something is wrong. Ordinary good parents OR bad parents? You see the kids. Coming and going. Often with neglect issues you will see the kids too much – little kids and out after dark, like that. But physical abuse? They do not appear. There’s a reason for that.
Wag
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
DPL is awesome
Kathleen
@Kay: I was born, raised and educated in Catholic schools from kindergarten through college and I agree with you. It’s no accident that these judges are not only Catholics but they’re Catholics with a political agenda of suppressing women, civil rights, etc. There’s a whole movement of Catholic billionaires who want to party like it’s 1399 and they are funding movements and candidates
ETA: I also couldn’t find a Comments section but I might have missed it. Do you recall seeing one?
raven
@OzarkHillbilly: My old man saved my letters from overseas. It’s funny, when I re-read them I can remember the I was lying!
OzarkHillbilly
@raven: HA!
Kathleen
@frosty: That’s great. You should be proud you are a pioneer!!!
frosty
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: I got a Master’s in Urban Planning in 1981, just in time for Reagan to destroy the profession. I went through the same process but this time it only took six months to get a job that wasn’t my first choice in a place I didn’t want to live (NoVa). Ended up moving from Baltimore to College Park and driving the DC Beltway every day.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Kathleen:
Does your wife regret that she could not pursue her career path at that time?
Yes. It’s not a constant thing by any stretch but it bubbles up from time to time, particularly when it comes to the broader question of “How Society Judges You” by the usual metrics of career “success”, money, etc. I always remind her of the tons of cats we rescued while in Misery, the old house restoration work we did that prepped us for our work here in Denver, etc.
It also turned her into a defacto master electrician given her moronically educated background (she also has two masters degrees from Hopkins, one in applied optics and one in EE) and how she applied it to working on old buildings.
But yeah, from time to time, she’s bitter about the experience coming out of college).
JoyceH
@Omnes Omnibus: On my first day in the Navy one of the first things we were taught was that you are not merely allowed, you are REQUIRED to disobey an illegal order.
frosty
@Kathleen: Thanks! I’m mostly proud I was one of the survivors.
Spanky
@Suzanne: Did your Scrooge boss get some night visitors last night?
Barbara
@Suzanne:
Like many consequential decisions in life, they are waiting until five minutes before the eventual becomes the actual. Just totally off point, but companies that provided early retirement buy out packages for current employees found that it wasn’t helpful to provide a longer period (60 days versus 30 days) for employees to consider their options and get assistance. The vast majority waited until the last minute and didn’t get more assistance even with more time.
This is what I think of as one of the vagaries of human nature. Plus, it’s not like everyone wants the same thing.
Kathleen
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: She is an amazing woman. I am in awe of her skills and talents and how she’s parlayed them into so many different areas.
Kathleen
@frosty: Being a woman in the 70’s and 80’s will do that to you!
Harrison Wesley
@Old Man Shadow: “A chicken in every pot and a Pinochet at every front door.”
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@frosty:
We would have been contemporaries. We lived in NoVa (just south of Huntington Metro).
It was hysterical back then, the job market was so bad, we had craptons of *Duke* grads being forced to work for the gubmint. Prior to that, people where I worked commented you never saw Duke grads coming to work for the government because it was deemed beneath them. Univ of MD grads in particular loved seeing Duke grads come to work for the gubmint given the long-standing rivalry between those two schools and the intersection, at that time, of the job market in the metro DC area.
dnfree
Regarding the ACLU and NRA temporary alliance, here’s a statement. It reminds me of when the ACLU and Illinois Nazis were briefly aligned and the ACLU lost a lot of support. This is from NLJ.
————————
In NRA v. Vullo, the controversial gun-rights organization is asking the Supreme Court to revive a lawsuit claiming that the former head of New York’s Department of Financial Services embarked on an unconstitutional pressure campaign to get banks and insurance companies to cut ties with the NRA after the deadly mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.
In a statement Saturday after the representation was reported by the New York Times, the ACLU said on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter, “we don’t support the NRA’s mission or its viewpoints on gun rights, and we don’t agree with their goals, strategies, or tactics. But we both know that government officials can’t punish organizations because they disapprove of their views.”
The ACLU will serve as co-lead counsel in the case alongside the law firm of Dallas and New York litigator William A. Brewer III, which had filed the lawsuit on behalf of the NRA back in 2018 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York. ACLU National Legal Director David Cole is expected to argue the case, although the court has not yet set a date for a hearing.
The stage is now set for a clash between two veteran Supreme Court lawyers in the case, with Hogan Lovells’ Neal Katyal having joined the legal team of former DFS Superintendent Maria T. Vullo. Vullo’s team also includes lawyers at Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel and Kaplan Hecker & Fink.
The announcement that the nation’s most renowned civil liberties organization would offer its free legal services to a well-funded gun rights advocacy group has drawn criticism from various progressives, who hold the NRA partially responsible for perpetuating the country’s scourge of gun violence. Notably, among those who’ve expressed opposition to the ACLU’s move is its own affiliate office, the New York Civil Liberties Union, which is located just one floor above the national office in the same New York City building.
Subsole
@Scout211:
All this after decades of them treating us like idiot children who were maliciously trying to hand America over to our enemies…
I want to punch the entire GOP right now.
frosty
@Kathleen: Well, since I’m not a woman I don’t have that perspective but based on observation I’d say it applies to any decade.
frosty
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: We might be. I got the MS from Hopkins, like your wife did.
Matt McIrvin
@JoyceH: Yes, but… isn’t the understanding that you’re going to just have to deal with the world of hurt you’ll land in for disobeying the illegal order? I mean, it’s a situation where the structures that would normally protect people have presumably broken down.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Kathleen:
I married well, single best thing that’s happened to me (married 40 years now). She has an amazing intellect. And she’s probably her most happiest the two days a week she volunteers here at the cat-only spay/neuter clinic.
eclare
@narya:
Go see Hidden Figures if you haven’t already
Matt McIrvin
@narya: Organizations with that kind of white-guy workforce are and were just depriving themselves of a pool of brainpower. The lament about diversity efforts is always that they’re taking precedence over worker merit but it’s really the reverse, unless you’ve got the implicit assumption in the first place that only white guys have the merit.
dnfree
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: My sympathies to your wife. I was one of two women studying physics at a state university in the mid-60s. The other one was a physics major and I was a minor. We quickly learned that we had to be each other’s lab partners, because a male lab partner would just relegate us to a role as gofer.
I discovered computer programming at that time, and that’s where I built my career. I have often wondered what happened to my lab partner. In the 1960s, most college-educated women seemed to be planning careers as teachers or nurses.
mrmoshpotato
@Scout211: Wow. What you posted in the block quote is more than enough for me. 😠
mrmoshpotato
@Jeffro: Is this about the GOP threesome bastards again? Have they considered soliciting a cop and going away – to prison?
eclare
Thank you for posting that Nutcracker routine from the WH! I saw it a few days ago. Def beats Melanie’s murder trees!
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@dnfree:
Oh man, that’s eerily familiar. She was doing that, in part, in the early 80s as part of the curriculum. The school didn’t actually have a Computer Science department, it was run out of the EE program. Not surprisingly, she was awesome at it but the physics profs all poo-pooed it as a career path.
As she puts it “WTF did I know at the time? There was no mentoring, no guidance, particularly for women.” She frequently says that upon getting out, she wished she gone the CS/programming route. As it stands, she’s done pro-bono programming work over the years for several non-profits, usual cat-rescue related.
mrmoshpotato
@NotMax: Are you sure they aren’t trying to cause a mass orgy at Lincoln Center? 😁
MagdaInBlack
@dnfree: When I was growing up in small farm town Illinois in the 60’s and early 70’s, the only college educated women were nurses or teachers. We simply did not have any other college educated women as role models, and it did not help that HS guidance counselors guided women in that direction
Eta: if your parents did not have the exposure or knowledge of other options, or didnt want you to have other options, you were on your own to figure it out. I didnt get decent guidance and a college education til I was in my 30’s .
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@mrmoshpotato: I’m not Watergate-savvy enough to make a comparison, but it’s like if Alexander Butterfield’s testimony were part of the public record because the conspirators sued the government for not releasing Nixon’s tapes…
Kathleen
@frosty: Duh. I’m always 3 chapters behind the plot twist. But your right. The 80’s were hard on everybody. Ronald Regan was the Fascist forerunner of Trump and he set the stage for so many bad things.
dnfree
@Kathleen: I graduated from college in 1967 and wanted to pursue computer programming in a scientific setting. One of my job offers was from Bell Labs, which at that time was a very prestigious organization. They offered me a special new position just for women. It had a different title than the supposed equivalent position for men, they were going to offer lots of special support, and oh, yeah—they wouldn’t help pay for your master’s degree as they would for the men.
That was kind of a red flag, so I accepted a position elsewhere. When I did eventually get a master’s, in the late 70s, I applied at Bell Labs again and mentioned the previous offer. “It’s a good thing you didn’t accept,” the interviewer said. “That position turned out to be a dead end.” No kidding.
Kathleen
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Your story of you and your wife is so uplifting to me. Thank you for sharing it!
Kathleen
@eclare: I love that movie.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Bemused Senior (Mrs.) was a physics major at Stanford in the late 1960s and the only woman in her class. She found her way into software and that became her career. I’m grateful because she and I would never have met otherwise. I don’t know details of the misogyny she faced but I know it was fierce.
Kay
@Kathleen:
We hired a young conservative law student – he’s not a lawyer yet- and he told me the other day he was converting to Catholicism. I was a little taken aback that he would tell me something so personal, especially because I have been quite demanding of him – I’m not that happy with his work – he’s careless.
It’s interesting though because I know both his parents and they belong to our local megachurch and are MAGA. He’s smart and a genuinely nice guy – I can’t really pin down why he’s (to my mind) slow to catch on. Maybe he feels comfortable telling me because I know his parents. I didn’t ask what they thought – I honestly think this discussion he started isn’t appropriate at work – but it was interesting. JD Vance concerted to Catholic. Maybe it’s a fad among younger wingnuts.
Jeffro
@mrmoshpotato: yes it’s about them and no, they don’t seem to want to go away. The husband still is the head of the FL GOP and the wife is still on the local school board despite pleas from the entire board that she step off.
Keep going with that no-shame, always-double-down stuff, GOP!
Suzanne
@Spanky: Haha, it’s not that. Extending the deadline costs the client additional $$$, so we had to demonstrate that late decision-making on their part meant that they were going to get uncoordinated work, and that it was in their best interest to pay us more now so that they would pay less later.
Omnes Omnibus
@Matt McIrvin: It’s a weird expectation in the military, that on occasion you will be shit on for doing the right thing. Nevertheless, the expectation is that you do the right thing. Someone has to stay behind to cover the tactical withdrawal. Someone has to put out the fire in the engine room. Someone has to testify to Congress about shenanigans at the NSC. These aren’t necessarily career enhancing or life extending assignments. I am not saying that every service member will always respond correctly (I’ve been around too many soldiers for that), but an assumption that the military will just obey order no matter what is misplaced. Hell, Milley, et al, did alright during Trump’s presidency.
Kathleen
@Matt McIrvin: Funny how they don’t get that “White Guy is Default Against Whom All Should Be Measured” is example of “Identity Politics”
Scout211
This one is just for fun this morning. Ivanka was partying Wednesday night with Kim Kardasian in Vegas and got trashed on X because it was in the middle of a school week!
Brad Moss on X : (not gonna link)
More X replies on the HuffPost link.
Suzanne
@Kay:
It is. Some of them kind of see it like an “old-money” type status symbol, whereas evangelicalism is kind of “nouveau riche”.
It also appeals to the weirdos who have kind of a Dungeons-and-Dragons approach to life. They like a rigorous and complicated rule structure to argue about.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@eclare: [Hidden Figures]
Yes, it’s great.
mrmoshpotato
@Suzanne:
Holy or not – mmmmmmmm.
Anyway
@brendancalling:
Blast from the past! Remember catching Mission of Burma in the basement of the old church on Chestnut St (Philly) in 2015?? something like that. They came on at like 11 and played past 1 am. Good old days…
Harrison Wesley
@Jeffro: My understanding is that he can be bounced (if they have the spine to do it), but she can’t.
Kathleen
@dnfree:
That is so true. I remember one of my female classmates lamenting that it was so sad that one of the girls in her circle of friends was the only one who wasn’t engaged yet. This was 1971. They were all nursing students.
brendancalling
@Anyway: I DO remember that show and it was awesome. Naked Raygun came through around the same time.
Kay
@Suzanne:
Lol. I wish with this guy. He’s as serious as a heart attack. I want him to PLAY AROUND a little when he’s stuck, you know what I mean? I won’t let him make any big errors that would actually hurt anyone – he can try some things. Instead he asks for direction on.each.step. He alternates this overcaution on big things with carelessness with small things – like sending email to wrong party. But I feel bad for staying on him because he IS nice. Really earnest. Anyway! He’s not bad enough to fire so we’re working on improvement.
mrmoshpotato
@Subsole:
Take your place in line. :)
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: There was this guy, the Rev. John McCloskey (he just died of Alzheimer’s this year) who had a one-man crusade going on to convert powerful right-wing political figures to Catholicism. He was a Wall Street guy who became a priest and joined Opus Dei. Did it for decades. He was the one who converted Newt Gingrich, Robert Novak, Sam Brownback and, I think, Robert Bork.
dnfree
@Soprano2: What an interesting point—about being married at a younger age, and having the advantage of two incomes, making a difference. I think there’s some truth to that. We were married in our early 20s, right out of college, in 1967. Living together was still out of the question for most of us then, especially in the Midwest. our entire mindset was that we were adults—planning ahead, budgeting, saving. We still struggled, but we didn’t expect luxuries, or travel to exotic destinations. We were the children of those who grew up in the depression and lived through World War II.
Many younger people now seem to think they have all the time in the world to find themselves and settle down. You can still have kids in your 40s if you freeze your eggs!
We had our third and last child in our mid-30s. Some of the wisest words I ever heard were these, from another “older” mother at that time: “Thirty-five is not too old to have a baby. But forty is too old to have a five-year-old”.
WaterGirl
@Scout211: Thanks for posting that. Yikes! That’s hair on fire stuff. If Meadows kept that, as suggested in another comment, he needs to go to prison for the rest of his life.
Burnspbesq
@Kathleen:
All very predictable.
Matt McIrvin
@Kathleen: That very default makes it not “identity politics”. It’s THE conservative identity game–maintaining control over who is designated to be just normal people. White straight cis men don’t have a race or a gender or an orientation, they’re just normal. In fact if you even call them “cis” somebody will get mad.
eclare
@Scout211:
I don’t know why Kim is slummin’ with Ivanka, she’s usually pretty savvy.
gene108
@Kay:
Outside of conservative Catholicism and conservative American evangelical Christianity very few religions have strict abortion restrictions. I think Islam allows abortion through some point in the second trimester.
The conservatives acting like their anti-abortion religious beliefs are shared by all religious people is just another thing to throw on their pile of lies. Sad part is their narrative is accepted as conventional wisdom and rarely challenged in public.
Bokonon
@Jeffro: The GOP’s apologists are just making whatever excuses and evasions that will get them through the next news cycle, and give their readers permission to vote for Trump in spite of all the evidence that he intends to do very bad things.
They did the same thing last time – and this time, it takes some real gall to say “oh, don’t worry, there will be adults and practiced hands around that will keep Trump from killing everyone.”
Miss Bianca
@Soprano2: What you describe is what I remember. Life was shit-ass bleak in the 80s for a young person as a job-seeker, as I recall.
narya
@Matt McIrvin: Exactly.
@MagdaInBlack: Similar experience here. My parents expected me to go to college, and I did go to a good one, but actual guidance? Not so much. Some things worked out fine, but I will say that the same things that drew me to philosophy as a second major would have been useful in software design. Alas, I didn’t have a way to think about that as a path.
dnfree
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Wow, thanks for sharing! In 1965 I took the one and only programming class offered by my university, Fortran 2, in the math department (my major). The business department offered a class called “Introduction to Computers”, nothing technical at all. Those of us interested in programming took those two classes and that’s all, and yet we were able to get jobs. Amazing. It was the “Hidden Figures” era, when women were thought to be suitable for programming.
Wag
@Kay: Maybe recommend that he get evaluated for ADHD. you might change his life in a positive way
Burnspbesq
Can I just say “fuck you, Elise Stefanik, you miserable piece of shit.”
Filing an ethics complaint against Judge Howell of the D.C. District Court over a speech accepting an award from an organization of women lawyers, as “excessively political” because it refers to the impact of “lies” on 1/6 defendants? YGBFKM.
Judge Srinivasan, who as chief judge of the D.C. Circuit has supervisory authority over the D.C. District Court, will presumably know exactly what to do with this garbage. But still …
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/elise-stefanik-files-complaint-judge-ruled-jan-6-trump-cases-rcna129878
dnfree
@MagdaInBlack: My MOM went to college, in West Virginia in the 1930s. Her dad left home at 15, and he wanted his children to go to college. My mom was determined that we would all go. I knew families where a boy went to college despite being a mediocre student, but there was no reason to send a very bright daughter who wanted to go.
Suzanne
@Kathleen: My grandfather, who was the primary male figure in my life until his death when I was 17, believed that women should only be secretaries, nurses, or teachers. So his wife was a secretary, his older daughter was a nurse, and his younger daughter was a teacher. He tried to push that shit on me, and then when it didn’t work, he tried to get me to join the Army… figuring that if I wouldn’t follow in the paths of any of the women in the family, I could at least follow in his path. That didn’t work, either.
MagdaInBlack
@narya: HS guidance counselor told me the only use for a degree in History ( of any kind ) was teaching, did I want to do that? No I did not. But guess what I studied at 30? Urban History with an eye to community development. That last didn’t happen but at least, if nothing else, I learned critical thinking.
Kathleen
@dnfree: I worked for the old Bell System in the 70’s, 80’s and most of the 90’s. AT&T settled a huge settlement with the Justice Department in 1973 because of discriminatory hiring/promotional patterns that excluded women and Black men and women.
Factoid – Bell System operators were not “allowed” to get married, consequently many of my co workers were former operators who were still not married. I could go on and on but good for you.
Matt McIrvin
@dnfree: I managed to break into the software job market in the 1990s with no academic training in CS beyond the high-school level.
(But I did have experience in a long-running summer job writing graphics software in which I’d taught myself the equivalent of a college-level course in CGI out of Foley and van Dam, and I had a PhD in an unrelated field which for some reason impressed some people. My training in advanced mathematics actually did come in handy on a few isolated occasions–I could understand a few specific things that people with the usual CS background couldn’t.)
Matt McIrvin
@gene108:
And until the late 1970s it was just the Catholics. The evangelicals flipped to being anti-abortion as a conscious political strategy to ally with right-wing Catholics and get a moral issue that played better than racial segregation.
Suzanne
@Kay: To note, tho….. the people who are into Dungeons and Dragons (either the game or the mindset)….. are incredibly serious about it. Nothing playful in their approach.
Some people just really are drawn to arcana. Complicated things feel somehow truer to them. I note that there is a significant strain of this personality type who are drawn to the old religions like Catholicism because there is a history of scholarship, of parsing, of things to memorize. I think some of them are drawn to Catholicism (and to an extent, Orthodoxy) because it helps those people feel grounded in a way that newer expressions of faith do not. Like, it feels old and traditional and mystical. But it’s not an exceptionally theological impulse. From what I observe, it’s really a purely aesthetic thing.
Chris
@Suzanne:
I’m not sure it’s even the rigor and complications, they just like feeling like they stepped into a fantasy novel.
If you’re an evangelical, your churches look like shopping malls and your preachers dress like bankers (or possibly Las Vegas entertainers). Switch to Catholicism, and all of a sudden your churches and especially your cathedrals, not to mention your clergy, look like a Renn Faire setting with higher production values, and you occasionally get to utter magic phrases in a dead language (if you can find the right mass, in fact, the entire service in a dead language!) It’s just so much more mythical.
Naturally, you can get all that from Episcopalians, too. But Episcopalians are woke liberals and, well, ew. (They also don’t have the cachet of being able to say they go all the way back to the Roman Empire, so if you’re into the mythical aspect, still less awesome).
You could also get it from the Eastern Orthodox, and some people do, but Catholicism is just much more widespread here, so that’s what people are likelier to convert to. Depending on Putin’s propaganda successes, though, I could picture a rise of interest in Eastern Orthodoxy instead, as a way to sort of virtue-signal which side of the culture wars you’re on. (Especially if Pope Francis continues to exist and be what he is). I’m not aware that that’s actually happened, though. At least not yet.
Ksmiami
@Kay: Oh dear god… I’m so sorry you have to bear witness to this
Kathleen
@Suzanne: I was extremely fortunate. When I was born my parents started saving for my college education. I don’t imagine there were a lot of parents doing that for their daughters in 1949.
The only careers I was interested in were writing or government service. I don’t have the talent or brainpower to be an engineer architect, computer expert, scientist, etc so I never even considered those as options. I was in English major and had no clue what my next step was after I graduated. Long story short, because I needed a decent paying job to support my family, I took entry level position at ATT and worked my way up to supervisor via a position in Sales. I really enjoyed learning about the telecom industry and was able to apply my writing and research skills in various jobs I had. I was able to support me and my daughter after my divorce so it turned out well for me.
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: I’m amused by fiddly arcane complexity. Sometimes memorize it as part of a taste for weird trivia. But I don’t particularly want the world to have more of it.
Miss Bianca
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
OMG, this whole shit show enrages me, even the funny parts.
Hell, *especially* the funny parts.
Kay
@Suzanne:
My oldest plays Dungeons and Dragons. He found a Danish group. He’s a firm atheist though.
Chris
@Matt McIrvin:
Yeah, it’s kind of a fascinating look into American identity politics. The “real American” identity, which historically has had Catholicism as one of its biggest bogeymen, was reforged as something that could affirm both Catholics and Protestants, while still affirming that shared commitment to bigotry and patriarchy. Opposition to abortion, the stereotypical Catholic issue, being embraced by the people who had stereotypically hated Catholics the most, nicely symbolizes the whole thing.
zhena gogolia
The White House video is great. It’s Duke Ellington’s version. Of course if you try to google it, you get “CRITICS ROAST JILL BIDEN’S TASTELESS VIDEO”
Ugh.
Matt McIrvin
@Chris:
It has. Rod Dreher flipped to being Eastern Orthodox because right-wing Catholicism wasn’t doing it for him, he needed something harder-core.
I’ve mentioned it before… I had an old online friend somewhere in the Carolinas who converted to this ultra-hardcore Eastern Orthodox sect and became a priest, and that shit was weird. It reminded me of the far-right splinter Catholics who insist that the Pope is a fake. He started going on about all the physical miracles he’d witnessed that were only accessible to Orthodox, and how society had forgotten the virtue of Obedience, and the need to cast off reason itself in favor of Obedience… all kind of disturbing. Passed on all this anti-gay propaganda, too.
Soprano2
@Kay: Too many people can’t wrap their minds around the idea that TFG isn’t kidding when he says he’ll be a dictator. Amanda Marcotte certainly has the MAGA’s number, probably because she grew up around them. Here’s her latest:
Miss Bianca
@Kay:
Actual quote from his performance review? >:>
Matt McIrvin
It’s why in horror movies about Satan, the exorcists always have to be Catholic. They do it the theatrical way.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Burnspbesq: a bit surprised Porter’s on that list and Jayapal isn’t
rikyrah
@Yarrow:
WHO cut the onions?
Soprano2
@Kathleen: Yeah, I didn’t even mention how much worse things were for everyone who wasn’t a white man. My point is, every generation has their own challenges, and it’s easy to believe that yours are worse than any other generation’s were. I suspect we complained just as much but you didn’t know it because there was no internet.
zhena gogolia
@Yarrow: Those are great!
Matt McIrvin
@Soprano2: Trump and fascists in general always, always benefit from the Schrödinger’s Asshole tactic where they maintain strategic ambiguity about whether they’re joking or serious. Sartre was talking about that in that famous passage about antisemites way back in the mid-20th century.
dnfree
@Matt McIrvin:
DeMorgan’s theorem! I explained that over and over again to people.
Matt McIrvin
@dnfree: I remember at one point there was a graphics feature we had to implement that was called a “tensor product mesh”, and the description of it involved these tensor formulae that just made everyone who looked at them nope out and say “give it to Matt”. The concept was actually not that hard (it was a cubic Bezier with control points defined by cubic Beziers), but the notation was scary unless you’d encountered something like that before.
wjca
I really hope so. Hope, but don’t expect. You only have to look at the Republican Party here in California. They’re so far around the bend that they’re down to maybe 1/4 of the state legislature; no sign of a return to sanity on the horizon. Why should the national party be any different?
And it’s not like California is a wildly liberal state,** its reputation notwithstanding. Currently the serious liberals here are whining because so many of their pet causes are going nowhere. (Apparently they haven’t grasped that rejecting the RWNJs doesn’t automatically translate to being particularly liberal.)
** Yes, we gave the country Earl Warren. But also Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.
WaterGirl
@Burnspbesq: This is an example of one of the several reasons I really hope that Katie Porter is not the next senator from California.
Chris
@Matt McIrvin:
The Eastern Orthodox feel like the worst of both worlds to me. Take the monarchist and pre-Enlightenment mindset of the Catholic Church. Take the obsessive submission to one country’s nationalism and cultural anxieties of American evangelicalism. Merge the two together, you get Eastern Orthodoxy.
Matt McIrvin
@Chris: But I know a lot of Eastern Orthodox churches are not like that at all. This was some kind of weird little ultra-hardcore manifestation.
Geminid
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Around 46 Democrats voted against the NDAA. Rep. Jayapal’s Yea vote may reflect the size of defense-relayed industry in her district.
I’d be interested to see if Porter voted for the NDAA last year. Then, she faced a tough reelection in a purple district. Now, Porter needs to differentiate herself from her leading Senate rival. She and Adam Schiff have similar positions on most issues, so this is one that could help her in the primary.
Maybe not so much in the November runoff though, when all voters will be in play. Right now this race looks like a two person contest between Porter and Schiff, and the runoff will shed some light on the dynamics of California’s jungle primary system.
Kathleen
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Jayapal is on the list, if you’re talking about
Jayapal
Democratic
Washington
NAY
If this has nothing to do with your discussion I will skulk away.
Chris
@Matt McIrvin:
I’m always amused at the “Christianity is Catholic” trope in Hollywood given how much it’s not just a minority religion in the U.S, but a historically very unpopular one. The nature of the censorship industry (“movies made by Jews and censored by Catholics to be watched by Protestants”) in early Hollywood probably has something to do with creating the trope.
I’m also amused that in Hollywood, in order to signify that a religious order is ancient and mythological, there are two things you have to do above all: 1) make sure they’re Catholics and not Protestants, and 2) make sure they’re speaking with English accents and not American.
The contradiction in those stereotypes is probably not obvious to most American viewers, but let’s just say that if you thought America had a history of being inhospitable to Catholicism, oh man, let me tell you about England…
Kathleen
@Soprano2: Thank goodness we didn’t have to deal with social media.
Kathleen
@Geminid: I saw this regarding
Jayapal
Democratic
Washington
NAY
Geminid
@wjca: California is an unusual. For one thing, it has more Democrats than almost all other statrs, and a higher oroportion of minority voters as well. Plus, it has a jungle primary system while 47 other states do not. So, I do not extrapolate too much from the Republican party there.
Matt McIrvin
@Chris: The Farrelly brothers did an attempt at reviving the Three Stooges some years back in which the Stooge characters were foundlings in an orphanage raised by nuns.
Which, you know, OK, that maybe could work in that comedy universe except the original Stooges themselves were very much coming out of a Jewish comedy tradition and dropped references to that in their films, and it’s kinda weird to have all this Catholic imagery overwriting that. But I figure that was Farrelly brothers instinctively reaching for stuff they were familiar with.
Geminid
@Kathleen: Ah, thank you for the correction. I did not go through Roll Call’s voting list before I commented.
sab
@Chris: Episcopalians do have apostolic succession, i.e. links bishop to bishop all the way back to Saint Peter. That is important to our legitimacy. Otherwise we’d just join UCC or Southern Baptists, depending on our politics.
ETA: Or Catholics. My Catholic husband was amazed by how similar our communion masses were. Duh. Same service.
sab
@Chris: That may be why our nutjobs love their nutjobism.
Scout211
@WaterGirl:
Yeah, me too. I am still planning to vote for Schiff.
The latest poll: link
suzanne
@Chris:
I think it’s a bit of both. There is a subset of people who really really want to be both religious and also thought of as intelligent, even rational or of the Enlightenment. Those are the people who are drawn to the older traditions because there’s a veneer of intellectualism. And they’re essentially nerdy, and mildly obsessive, and they love to debate highly specific details.
But there are definitely the people you’re talking about, too. The people who, if they’re being honest with themselves, often don’t really believe anything mystical…. but they really wish that they did. Because it feels more elevated and beautiful and it feels like it turns your suffering into something graceful, and not just…. suffering.
wjca
And the reason we have a jungle primary system is that the Republicans here had become so irrelevant that winning the Democratic primary (for statewide positions) was all that mattered. A jungle primary gave all voters, including independents, a say in who got elected,
Bupalos
@Soprano2: there’s a flip side to this. It’s dawned on me lately that all of us acting like Trump getting elected will be the end of America are doing some serious marketing for Trump to this crowd. There’s a balance that needs to be struck that is very hard to find.
Hoppie
@frosty: Chiming in late: Homewood/SAIS guy here, as my nym might suggest. Strange, heady years were the seventies, but I spent almost half of them in Italy. DuPont Circle when in DC.
Geminid
@wjca: Like I said, California is an unusual state both politically and demographically. The jungle primary system may have come from that, but right now jungle primaries are the exception and not the rule. Washington has a similar system, while Alaska combines a jungle primary and a 4-way, ranked-choice runoff.
Now, I am not saying the regression we see in California’s Republican party won’t occur in other states. But I need to see matters play out over some more election cycles before I conclude that it’s inevitable.
Not that I would mind if Republicans everywhere regressed like they have in California. I’m just not sure that they will.
Burnspbesq
@WaterGirl:
I love Katie about 98 percent of the time. This is one of her rare misses.
wjca
But my point was that the regression happened first. That is, they went crazy first, started losing elections, and continued to do so for a couple of decades (before the jungle primary ever arrived). Without changing, even though they kept losing.
I’m not saying that it’s inevitable that the same will happen nationally. Just that we shouldn’t assume that it won’t.
Kayla Rudbek
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: 1990s woman graduate in physics and I was the only woman in my undergraduate class after sophomore year. If I was a man, I’d have bounced around a lot less in schooling and career. Heck, I might have done Navy ROTC and had a steady job for years.
But I’ve never wished that were a man, only that I be taken as seriously as a man.
Burnspbesq
Large parts of California remain deeply red. But they’re the parts with no people.
Geminid
@wjca: Well, I’m not assuming that the trend towards radicalism won’t be seen in other states, and I said so at #204. I’ve commented on this trend’s presence in Virginia and other states many times.
But to me, California politics provide data, not conclusions. I’m as or more interested in what happens (and will happen) in purple states like Arizona, North Carolina and Georgia, and light blue states like Colorado, Minnesota and Virginia.
Citizen Alan
@Matt McIrvin: I assume the plan is for the First-Day Dictator to have enough Dem Reps and Senators arrested on “sedition” charges to give the GOP control of the House and a filibuster proof majority in the Senate and then they will just pass laws to legalize their precious “permanent Republican majority.”
Paul in KY
@Betty Cracker: Yeah. Would have been bad for me. I was pretty dweeby in middle school & HS.
Paul in KY
@Another Scott: If (God Forbid) he did get in again, about the only thing he could possibly try is just to appoint people who have never been in military to military positions (like make Steven Miller a Field Marshal orOberGruppenFlakenFuhrer) or something crazy like that. Would need a very supine congress for that gambit.
Geminid
@Kathleen: Democratic no votes on the NDAA:
Eleven from California: Barragan, Chu, DeSaulnier, Garcia, Gomez, Kamleger-Dove, Khanna, Lee, Porter and Takano.
Eight from New York: Bowman, Clarke, Espaillat, Meng, Nadler, Ocasio-Cortez, Tonko and Velasquez.
Four from Illinois: Garcia, Jackson, Ramirez and Schakowski.
Three from Massachusetts: Auchingloss, McGovern and Pressley.
Two each from New Jersey: Payne and Watson-Coleman;
Oregon: Blumenaur and Bonnamici;
Texas: Casar and Dogget.
The other twelve were Balint VT, Bush MO, Cohen TN, DeGette CO, Frost FL, Jayapal WA, Lee PA, Omar MN, Pocan WI, Raskin MD, Tlaib MI and Williams GA.
That adds up to 44, so I must be missing one.
The vote totals were 163 Democrats for, 45 against; 147 Republicans for and 76 against. The Democrats were from the liberal side of their caucus, while the Republicans seemed to be on the more conservative side of theirs.
Paul in KY
@Thor Heyerdahl: Would rather he hang than be shot. Other than that, it would be great!
Scout211
Hey! I’m a people!
Geminid
@Geminid: Probably have two missing Democratic Nays, because I have 10 from Cali but I said 11.
Paul in KY
@Matt McIrvin: The comedy show The Great has some scenes where Russian Orthodox weirdness comes into play. Set in mid 18th century, but for that church, probably very topical.
Paul in KY
@Matt McIrvin: SNL ought to do a skit about Southern Baptist Exorcists! Father Doug and Elder Cletus…
Paul in KY
@sab: Episcopals are just American Anglicans. That church is just Henry VIII’s version of Catholicism (IMO). Some T. Cromwell stuff also thrown in.
Geminid
@Geminid: Rep. Hoyle (D-OR) also voted Nay on the NDAA. Still missing one I think.
Mart
Wife mentioned last night that the Weirdos & Jagoffs party talking heads were upset with Jill’s Christmas tap dance show. Just looked like fun to me.
Paul in KY
@Mart: Fox News was flogging how ‘appalled’ some people (with sticks up their ass) were with the show.
Another Scott
@Lapassionara: @Paul in KY:
The things I remember under TIFG was someone getting senate confirmation to be Assistant Deputy Undersecretary to the Regional Manager and then later being appointed to Acting Secretary of Big Important Department. IOW, that subsequent appointment can happen without senate confirmation if they have been confirmed by the senate for something else. But even in that case, they’re only Acting and cannot do many of the things that a fully senate-confirmed person can do (and that inability can create problems in itself).
As always, if someone wants to break the rules and norms and systems, they can do it no matter what the paper says – if those around them let them do it. People need to do their jobs – especially when monsters come in.
Cheers,
Scott.
Another Scott
@Mr. Bemused Senior: My step mom graduated from a women’s college in Mississippi. Boeing recruited there in the ’60s for women to do COBOL programming, so her first job was in Seattle. She stayed in IT her whole career, rising to be VP at various places in Atlanta and elsewhere. Her last job before retiring was training some wet-behind-the-ears new young, male, MBA, to do her job. She knew it was time…
One of her stories was about the brainiacs at L’eggs deciding to do away with the “egg” containers and displays at drug stores, etc., because they were too expensive. They destroyed the brand and never recovered, of course. :-/
My J had her retirement lunch yesterday. Her last day is the 29th. She’s so looking forward to it!! I’m going to stick it out a while longer and see how things go in the next few years.
Too many men are totally oblivious to the senseless difficulties that women have in the workplace and elsewhere. It’s holding the country, and humanity, back.
Cheers,
Scott.