Pure inspiration.
Holy shit — this is fucking fire. 🔥pic.twitter.com/25olipJkje
— Jo (@JoJoFromJerz) December 17, 2023
If someone finds this on YouTube, post a ink and I will add it to the post. (Thank you, Torrey!)
In the meantime, I will summarize with 1/100th of the impact of the video.
This young person calls for Bridget Z. to be fired, not for participating in a 3-way, but because she is terrible at her job.
First of all, he refers to her as Bridget, which I’m sure made her blood boil Then he says their first interaction was when she retweeted a hate article about him while he was a student in the district where she was on the school board. He calls her out for the awful person she is, not there to serve but instead as an opportunity for herself.
He lists all the terrible things she has done in her tenure, all the terrible, lists damaging things the school board has spent money on instead of increasing teacher pay, all while sending her own fucking children to private school. He asks why people in the school district care more about a school board member participating in a 3-way than they do about the school board member harming the kids in the school district.
The short video is really a thing of beauty!
Totally unrelated, but inspirational in a totally different way.
Just looking at this dog with his little toy is reducing my stress level.
What else is going on this week?
Open thread.
Alison Rose
Excellent. No notes. Perfect.
scav
I love the little laugh he got just before the end. kudos.
Old School
It’s a great video, but alas had no real effect (yet, anyway):
artem1s
Yes a thing of beauty. And a reminder that we shouldn’t be afraid of voicing support for competent representatives with equal fervor. Whether they are old or boring or have cankles or whatever. Have they served their representatives well? Does their life history suggest they will act as good and helpful public servants? Or are they a walking example of a self-absorbed, self promoting, grifter?
Whichever is the case, say so without reservations (I know s/he’s old but..; but s/he’s a Christian!).
WaterGirl
@scav: I particularly liked the pause he added.
Under your…. leadership
And also, “just to be extra clear” (unspoken: because maybe you were too stupid to get it the first time) …
Alison Rose
Per his Twitter, he’s on a gap year from Harvard working with a nonprofit called See Our Power, “FL-based nonprofit building power for young people. Organizers of Fl’s largest student-led protest”. A year and a half ago, he had this thread:
Sometimes, the kids are alright.
Chief Oshkosh
Seems like there should be a rule that public school board members should have kids in the system, or had kids in the system. No doubt there are good reasons to not have that stipulation, but seems like it’s worth considering.
MattF
Bridget and her ‘Christian’ spouse will never retreat or apologize.
WaterGirl
@Alison Rose: Wow. I knew from his remarks at the school board meeting that he would be going places! And he clearly is.
Miss Bianca
And he’s delivering this nicely withering setdown while wearing a Detroit Tigers hat, which makes my little Michiganian heart swell with pride.
catclub
@Chief Oshkosh: I think it is malpractice by her opponents and anyone covering the school board election her having kids in private school was not brought up. pointedly and repeatedly.
Jackie
What a great speaker! Another young adult who should consider running for office!
Bridget will tough it out for a short while, but after she’s been shunned by her fellow school board members, something unrelated will happen, giving her an excuse to quit “in disgust.”
That doggo… 🥰
Ksmiami
Hard to shame the shameless but he’s amazing
Miss Bianca
@Chief Oshkosh: The former President of our School Board, who just got replaced, announced he’s pulling his kids *out* of the public school system – apparently because criticism of his Board’s “parents rights” BS has made the public schools too “woke” or something.
Kay
Oh, God, she sends her kids to private schools? Just perfect. How many “Moms for Liberty” grifters send their kids to private schools while ruining public schools?
Old School
Trivia Man
@Alison Rose: The kids are all right. It’s their world, we just live in it. I
don’t antWANT them to recognize their power and take charge at the ballot box.coin operated
That was a thing of beauty! I might just put that video on loop for the rest of the day…
WaterGirl
@Kay: Probably all of them!
Kay
How could one work in media and not be ashamed of this? I mean Christ almighty. They have now deliberately misled people on both the economy and crime to the extent that almost the whole country believes a bunch of bullshit.
They all should be retrained in whatever work it is they think they are doing. Start over. Find out where it all went wrong.
Also- how do they square this with their silly, recent-history nostalgia about how fabulous the 1980s and 1990s were?
A big part of the ridiculous “anti woke” cottage industry is hysterical, overwrought claims about crime waves. Any comment on this data or are they still chasing Substack subscriptions with fear-mongering?
WaterGirl
@Trivia Man:
Let me know if there’s something that sentence that you want me to fix. :-)
Jackie
Kemp is still having to state he’s NOT reinvestigating the 2020 election.
I might argue about Bigfoot, but it’s fun to watch MAGA still working hard to suppress the GQP voters in Georgia!
Kay
@WaterGirl:
Low quality hires like the Koch Moms have been attacking public schools since progressives invented public schools. You can go back and look at Right wing attacks from the 1920s and 1930s and they look the same except is was “communism” they were alleging instead of wokeness.
Public schools are probably the most resilient public institution in the country. People have spent billions of dollars tryng to eradicate public schools and yet most people still support them. The approval of public schools with the public is remarkably stable – it goes up a little and down a little but it basically stays the same. Public schools are MUCH more popular than the political hacks who try to kill them. They’re much more popular than any President, than Congress, than the SCOTUS.
Trivia Man
@WaterGirl: uhh… I WANT them to seize the reins.🙄 (FYAC)
Based on the under 30 people I know I am very optimistic.
Old School
@Jackie:
Sounds like Kemp needs to go see the giant turd.
Brachiator
How can you be on the fucking school board if you send your own kids to private school?
Also, what books are in the library at that private school?
Jackie
@Old School: Indeedy! Sasquatch rules the Cascades!! //
NotMax
Dunno, WG, whether or not you saw this from late in the thread yesterday.
dm
@Kay: people don’t go by statistics, they go by what they see.
It used to be, people walked around and saw their peaceful neighborhoods.
Now they drive in cars and all they see of “neighborhood” is crime reported on the evening news. The evening news doesn’t report on peaceful neighborhoods.
And, really, I’m showing my age : the evening news isn’t that influential, either, not as much as entertainment and social media.
John S.
@Brachiator:
Easy. All Bibles.
Skepticat
The kidz are more than all right! This absolutely made my day.
dm
@Kay: well, their own public schools (just like their own congress member) is okay, but everyone else’s is a disaster?
(Sorry, I don’t mean to seem like I’m picking on you)
TeezySkeezy
Quantumania.
Alison Rose
@Brachiator:
The Left Behind series.
The Help
To Train Up a Child
Those history books that refer to the work enslaved people were forced to do as “chores”
A compendium of Blue Bloods transcripts
The Art of the Deal
teezyskeezy
@WaterGirl: Quantumania.
Marmot
Heck, I thought it was Bridget’s mammoth hypocrisy about queerness that made her 3-some sex a big issue.
It helps that it’s titillating, granted.
Edit: And clearly, she sucks at her job!
Eyeroller
@dm: People also always seem to think that crime is going up. That is pretty constant with only a few intervals over the past few decades when they thought it was going down. They also typically think it’s fine in their own area, but it is certainly going up in other areas. The news (in various forms) does reinforce this. And some people equate homelessness with “crime.”
teezyskeezy
@Marmot: I agree that her private life is actually relevant since her whole schtick is helping her fellow fascists police people’s sexuality.
scav
@John S.: Ahhh, they’ll just soon start arguing about which bible then and which parts should be avoided as providing dicey precedents. All that associating with the poor and prostitutes! Feeding people! Providing extra booze at a wealthy do, ok, allowable at the limits but still.
Marmot
@Eyeroller: I have never heard a conservative say that crime is down. Never. Once I realized this, it clarified a lot about how they see the world.
And on the whole, I’m not sure a majority ever says crime is down—it’s just a smaller majority saying it’s the same or worse.
TF79
@dm: As you note at the end, I was going to say social media (Facebook, NextDoor) certainly isn’t helping things. The other day, some kids shot a BB gun at someone’s window and put a hole in it. It’s a shitty thing to do, and a shitty thing kids have done since time immemorial. Of course, as is typical the post about it on NextDoor inspired a pile of “oh my, what is happening to this town” and “this what you get from democrat policies” and “you didn’t see these sorts of things 20 years ago until all those people came here” type posts. No one ever seems to connect two-and-two that 20 years ago you simply wouldn’t have heard about something minor like that a few neighborhoods away. Weird toxic stew of nostalgia, amplification from social media, and statistical innumeracy.
On topic – what an outstanding video. You would think the “sends kids to private school” thing would be a death knell for school board positions, but for a good chunk of her supporters it’s probably a positive thing, more of a feature than a bug.
Alison Rose
@TF79: Yeah, ND is horrid here too. But in my supposedly liberal city, apparently every single thing that goes wrong is to blame on unhoused people. It’s amazing how powerful they are!!!
Keithly
@Brachiator: Thus sayeth the board: Only the bible is needed on private school library bookshelves, for all other books be frivolous. /s
Albatrossity
@TF79: I signed up for NextDoor just to see what was posted there. And yeah, it’s a constant stream of paranoia. And ads. A mirror reflecting the state of our country today, for sure.
I canceled after a couple of days of that. Worthless, it was.
FelonyGovt
I think a lot of these Moms for “Liberty” types homeschool their kids. Similar hypocrisy, which should ALSO disqualify them from serving on school boards.
twbrandt
@Miss Bianca: Same!
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Kay: There are some caveats. The number of jurisdictions reporting crime data has fallen a LOT. That means we can’t rely on these numbers.
Bupalos
@Chief Oshkosh: maybe “if you have kids, they have to be in the system?” A school system shouldn’t be thought of as only serving or belonging to people with kids. I am open to the idea that if you specifically opt out of the school system bu removing your kids, you shouldn’t be a leader of it.
Captain C
@Brachiator:
How To Exploit the Rubes for Fun and Profit in 10 E-Z Steps
and
You’re Better than Them: How to Get What You Deserve (Everything), Keep a Boot on the Necks of Those People, and Make Everyone Like It
Matt McIrvin
@Kay:
Assume delayed effects with the right timing and you can tell any story you want.
“The permissiveness and criminal-coddling court decisions of the 1960s led to a crime wave that lasted 30 years. Finally during the Reagan era we GOT TOUGH ON CRIME, and it took some time for those reforms to fully take effect, but by the mid-1990s we had put enough bad guys in prison that they finally did.”
And for the geographic distribution of crime, you just find the level of government that Democrats are at and that’s who you blame. Crime higher in Trump-voting states? Well, it’s in the Democrat cities.
Barbara
@Albatrossity: Someone in my neighborhood asked if I was on NextDoor, and I told her that NextDoor was a complete waste of time. I don’t care if people feel insulted anymore. Plus, my understanding is that NextDoor is super exploitive of people’s information.
zhena gogolia
Oh, just watched the video — bravo, young man!
Captain C
@Matt McIrvin:
Crime rates higher in the Republican areas? Use absolute numbers.
Jojo
@Kay: in my town, most of the Moms for fake Liberty didn’t actually even live here. They basically had a bunch of people from other communities descend on our town and pretend to have kids there when they had their dopey little protests. The whole thing was such an obvious sham, right from the beginning. So it comes as no surprise to me that this twit doesn’t even have kids in the school district she wants to ruin.
Spanky
@Old School:
Don’t drag Trump into this.
lowtechcyclist
@scav:
King James Version, red letter edition. Was written by the tail feather of the Holy Spirit, don’t’cha know. //
This is really a thing that’s happening in conservative churches: people can’t believe that Jesus said some of the things he said because they sound too ‘woke.’
Ohio Mom
@Chief Oshkosh: Most of the recent candidates for my school district boasted that their kids are graduates of our system; in one case, a candidate said her grandchildren are second generation students.
I think it does add legitimacy but I don’t know how you could require candidates to have students in the system, sounds like that would be illegal though I don’t have the legal background to articulate why.
Omnes Omnibus
Cocker spaniel!!!!!
ETA: Some of us have our priorities in order.
lowtechcyclist
@Ohio Mom:
IANAL, but it does sound like a bit of a stretch from a legal POV.
OTOH, the county could create its own voter guides for each school district and mail them to each house in the district. There’s no reason why they couldn’t ask each candidate the basics like age, how long they’d lived in the county, ages of children (and/or grandkids if applicable), and which schools they attended.
Candidates wouldn’t have to answer, but there’d be blank spaces for the answers to each of these questions under the name of any candidate that didn’t provide answers.
WaterGirl
@NotMax: I did not, thanks for pointing it out.
WaterGirl
@Omnes Omnibus: I love that coloring – can you get that coloring on a cocker spaniel, or do you think that one might be part springer spaniel, or some other kind of spaniel.
Especially curious since I may be looking to add a pup in the spring.
Matt McIrvin
@Captain C: Oh, yeah, that’s a time-honored one. 433 people got murdered in New York City (population 8.4 million) last year! Only one got murdered in Bridgeport, Nebraska (population 1,463).
Paul in KY
@dm: The vast increase in cameras has also contributed. Lots more ‘caught in the act’ stuff they can show.
Paul in KY
@John S.: Gotta have an Atlas Shrugged or three. If only for use as a doorstop.
Soprano2
@Kay: At this point I truly believe people who say “crime is up” really mean either “I see more black and brown people in my city” or “I’ve been seeing more homeless people begging for money in my city”, or “a crime happened to me” because they have no actual way to know if crime is up or down unless they’ve read it in the press.
FelonyGovt
@lowtechcyclist: I volunteered on my friend’s candidacy for the local school board. The fact that she didn’t currently have a kid in the district was brought up all the time (and she lost)– even though at the time she had a pre-schooler who was about to go into (and spend 12 years in!) the school district.
Omnes Omnibus
@WaterGirl: I’ve seen it on Cockers.
Kent
The qualifications for office for most elected offices are pretty minimal and generally limited to criteria such as that you actually have to live in the district. Other then for President where there is minimum age requirement and an archaic requirement that one must be native-born.
A lot of school board members do have (or had) children in the district but I doubt it should be a requirement.
On the other hand, district employees are usually forbidden to serve on school boards due to the obvious conflict of interest. So as a teacher I can’t serve on the school board of the district where I work. At least not until I retire.
scav
@lowtechcyclist: I’d be leery of the assumption that one has to have kids to have expertise or valuable contributions to education. Infertile or childless by choice? Tut tut tut, your opinions are of less interest to the community is not ground I’d wish to explore. Right up there with mere renters don’t have a long term stake in the community and shouldn’t maybe be allowed to vote.
Sure Lurkalot
New ProPublica article about how Clarence Thomas complained about the salary of a SC justice and lobbied for raises and speaking fees before he really started on the grift circuit
Huh.
As they say, read it and weep.
https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-money-complaints-sparked-resignation-fears-scotus
AM in NC
@Kay: So, on the Fox website, the way the commenters hand wave this away is by saying, “Well when Democrat DAs decide shoplifting or theft isn’t a crime anymore, OF COURSE crime rates go down”. NOTHING will pierce their bubble. Not data; not context; not reality – NOTHING.
Chief Oshkosh
@Bupalos: Sounds like a good way to go.
TriassicSands
@Kay:
This is just one more indication of how poorly informed — and often unreachable and unteachable — American voters are. The 77% figure means, as usual, that the majority of the misinformed are almost certainly Republicans, but it is a serious problem for Democratic voters as well. It is difficult to vote intelligently when you believe nonsense.
WaterGirl
@Omnes Omnibus: I will have to look into that!
trollhattan
@Brachiator: Perhaps you remember our Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos?
Ruckus
@TF79:
The internet has/is changing our world.
We get to have discussions that span basically the entire world. We get to find out that people are about the same the world over. Good – bad – inbetween – obnoxious – stupid – smart – accepting – denying – demanding – not giving a damn – self centered – willing to risk their own for others – and everything inbetween.
But the internet also shows us that some humans are not built to understand themselves let alone anyone else. They yell, scream, project either all the bad or keep their heads down and just exist and live. And the difference now? It is easier to be completely, overwhelmingly full of shit and still have a rather large soapbox to yell from and be heard, no matter how hard people work at ignoring them.
WaterGirl
@Sure Lurkalot: Corruption in plain sight.
trollhattan
@Jojo: Nobody’s immune, they’ve made inroads in the tony suburbs of this blue California city.
Collectively, they don’t seem…smart and like the dog having caught the car might be pondering the next moves.
NotMax
@WaterGirl
Jerry Springer spaniel?
//
Soprano2
@Jojo: Ours are the same way, they live in a neighboring smaller town but want to cause trouble for our school system.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@Ruckus:
Just to keep it interesting (Far Side)
Brachiator
@trollhattan:
I’ve done my best to forget her.
But yeah, an Education Secretary who hated public schools.
Old Man Shadow
@catclub: Yeah, but gay people were just existing… in PUBLIC!
So you know, you can see why a majority of voters just had to vote for her.
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: Homicide actually did go up substantially in 2020… to a level that was nowhere near the massive crime waves of the 1970s-80s-90s. And we seem to be coming off of the 2020-21 peak now.
I think a lot of older Americans were acutely aware of the massive increase in general crime that happened during the 1970s and just kind of tuned out after that, assumed it was continuing to increase forever.
Old Man Shadow
I tend to think that the perception of increasing crime is really the perception that America isn’t as white as it used to be and THOSE people are increasingly visible now. And the perception of THOSE people with crime, lawlessness, and chaos runs deep in the hearts of white suburban voters.
debit
@WaterGirl: if you consider a cocker, make sure you get a chance to check out the breeder, the parents, and possibly interview adopters from previous litters.
I love the breed, but it really suffered from careless overbreeding and resulted in dogs with issues. There’s a reason why they are referred to as “insane little biting machines.” My own cocker was very sweet, but was also not bright (took a year to reliably house train) and never got over the impulse to submission pee when strangers went to pet her.
Matt McIrvin
Another thing that affects public perception of any kind of trend is a general inability to distinguish “X is higher than I want it to be” from “X is increasing”. A confusion of a function’s value with its rate of change, or with its integral.
This is why I cringe a bit when I hear that nobody actually needs to learn calculus. Maybe not the whole bag of tricks, but it’d be nice if the most basic ideas were generally known.
JoyceH
Jazzy update – she has an appointment for a surgical consult in Richmond on the 28th. I’m actually rather relieved; was afraid they’d be booked up well into January. They also have us down to be notified in the event of earlier cancellations, and if my vet thinks it’s an emergency they’ll try to find an earlier opening.
Gvg
@Brachiator: My mother went to public school, my cousin is an administrator in one, I went to one, but had what my mother thought were some less than excellent teachers and when my sister had an even worse 5th grade teacher who stated all the children who did not believe her exact brand of Christianity were going to hell with descriptions, and the administration did nothing, my mother pulled my sister into private school. It was hard, and I have to say my sister got a better education and makes far more money than I do. So she started her son in public schools and when he regressed in first grade and was reading less well plus hating school she found a private school. He had to repeat but he loved it. Unfortunately they only went through 7th grade and this county has fewer choices so he’s back in public, and there are problems. She had to get him into another county magnet school when her county hired a convicted murder for the principle of the high school over many people’s objections. Friend of commissioner or something. So, we all care deeply about public schools, but have had our problems with them when they would not fix something wrong. Not just a bad teacher and administrator but in both cases dyslexia issues they didn’t want to deal with.
Florida’s school grading system tying into teacher pay results in school systems being incentivized to encourage any child having difficulty to go elsewhere and not be in their statistics. It undermines all the earlier laws about providing help and plans and requiring access.
Alison Rose
@JoyceH: That’s great that you don’t have to wait too long! Thinking good thoughts for good news <3
Another Scott
@Matt McIrvin: +1
Mass-market economics reporting is really, really bad about this. Oooh the NASDAQ went up 40 points today!!1 :-/ Yeah, rates of change in GDP are important. But so are levels and comparisons of $BigNumber with other $BigNumber.
[/DeanBaker]
Cheers,
Scott.
Gvg
@Barbara: I have not found Nextdoor to live down to the hype. You do have to find the settings to make the stupid corporation quit sending you daily summaries and junk ads but you can stop it.
my local is largely about lost pets, overwhelmingly so. People say they lost theirs and often others find it, or they announce they say a loose or lost looking dog with a picture and ask whose it is and get answers, names, “it’s my neighbors, I’ll call them” etc. There are occasional conservative cranks, but they seem to wander off. I don’t think they get the engagement they want. Someone posts beautiful wildlife photos she snaps while jogging in the morning with ID’s and info on the species. Snake ID questions come up a lot. Repairmen questions, who is good at this. I got an answer quickly on who to call for a garage door broken spring replacement with a hurricane bearing down on us when I was already sick, and the recommendation was excellent and quick. The crime reports are of car break ins at the front of the neighborhood, usually kids, usually unlocked cars, please remember to lock your cars. There are some people who report anyone they don’t know as suspicious but not a lot, and it’s pretty clear modern suburban people have begun to tune that out. Just not much engagement, sometimes the response makes it clear others don’t think much of it.
when my cat got lost, they were all very helpful.
sab
I just went to see my dad in his nursing home. He is 99, with cataracts and dementia (not alzheimers.)
They had just finished the Christmas decorations, inside and out. Outside his window, between the path and the pond, they put a big green inflated T Rex wearing a Santa hat with a big red Christmas package in its mouth. He was okay with it yesterday afternoon, but when it was lit up at night he decided it was a cousin of Godzilla and tried to start an evacuation of his floor. He was screaming in the hall that they needed to get out!
Today he was peacefully watching the Hallmark channel, and occasionally eyeing the dinosaur outside the window.
Soprano2
@Old Man Shadow: I think seeing more homeless people also makes people think crime is increasing.
Soprano2
@sab: I have to wonder what they were thinking when they put that thing up.
NutmegAgain
@Albatrossity: Around here NextDoor also includes a very great number of scammers of one sort and another. Every now and then there is a plaintive message from somebody who fell for a scam and paid out $thousands$ for some non-service….
JWR
@Marmot:
So, Bridget is into three-ways, and sucks at her job.
I don’t see the problem. /s
Old Man Shadow
@Soprano2: Yeah, probably.
You know, instead of “holy shit, we need more housing here.”
sab
@debit: Also with cockers consider the kind of cocker. We had field cockers growing up, with sort of a tough long coats, kind of like wavy golden retiever fur. When my uncle died we adopted his show cocker. I was not prepared for the high maintenance fur. He needed lots of brushing every day or his fur matted into felt. He hated professional grooming. He did have a lovely personality.
Citizen Alan
@Brachiator:
Not to defend the vile Betsy De Vos, but I don’t Arne Duncan was a fan of public schools either. Second worst Obama cabinet pick, IMO, after Geithner.
Barbara
@Citizen Alan: Arne Duncan did send his kids to public schools, I should know, because it was in my district. Nearly every special event that he held at a public school was at a school in my district, where there are no vouchers and no charter schools.
Agree that Duncan was a weak pick.
NutmegAgain
@debit: Otherwise known as “Cocker rage” not completely sure how real that is, but years ago I was consider a spaniel adoption, and talked to some people who had 3. They wanted to rehome 1. They all had some pretty awful bite marks/scars. I soon discovered a Newfoundland mix at a local shelter, and it’s been all swells of hair & drool, ever since. Super sweet dogs. Temperament is the single most important characteristic of the breed for heritage breeders/AKC. (Yes I realize that 100-135 lb dogs are not for everyone…)
sab
@catclub: We have a school board member who is an assistant principal at a private charter school. What were we thinking when we elected her?
After the current school board’s term runs out at the end of the year I am never voting for another teacher on the board. They have a union to look out for them. We need some people with a clue about government finance to look out for the kids and the parents since the state is giving all our tax dollars to Catholic schools as vouchers.
Barbara
@Gvg: I am sure it varies, and even my much calmer neighborhood yahoo group (or whatever it is these days) can bring out the most annoying people in the neighborhood. My overall view is that if you have so much time for social media, you probably should be looking hard for something more useful to do. A little goes a long, long way.
Omnes Omnibus
@debit: Getting an English rather than an American Cocker helps with that. The English are still bred as hunting dogs as well as pets and are less likely to be overbred. They are better looking as well.
ETA: I am NOT biased. What a silly suggestion.
Barbara
@NutmegAgain: the first time I ever saw a newfie was as a summer helper to a family in semi-rural Ontario, Canada. It was sitting on the stoop in front of the post office, and I stopped dead because initially I thought it was a bear, before realizing it was a dog.
A dog that big has to be bred for temperament first, but I wish all dogs were, really.
sab
@debit: I had a friend with a springer with rage syndrome and he was a scary little guy. He had these epileptic seizures where he went insane and ran around attacking. Then he’d snap out of it, be vague for while, and then return to his usual little sweetheart self. I doubt if he even remembered being berserk.
JWR
From ABC:
Attempting an internal coup is a funny way to say he was just redressing his grievances.
sab
@WaterGirl: My uncle’s cocker was that color- spotted black and white. They call it parti color and it’s common.
sab
Jager
@debit:
Having had Cockers over the years, people have to realize they are doggie athletes, full of energy. They are tough as nails and can be relentless. I used to take our little black female hiking and backpacking. She had a “puppy cut”, and she was trotting ahead of me on a trail, I heard screams, “It’s a bear cub, watch the mama bear has to be around!” I came around the corner, they were surprised to find the Mama Bear was wearing a a North Face pack. Cockers are great dogs and can be as tough as German Shepherds.
MazeDancer
Apparently, this clever young man is the guy who used “curly hair” as code for “gay” in his widely heralded, anti-don’t say gay, validictory graduation speech.
NutmegAgain
@Barbara: There are always a couple of news stories per year of people thinking a Newfie is a bear. (Never heard of the reverse though!) I have a safety yellow vest type thing for doggo for woods walking during “let’s fire guns while drinking beer” season, aka hunting season.
All moot at the moment, but I believe there is a dog in the rescue pipeline for me. So potentially exciting. Early Jan he is supposed to be ready for his new home. He’s a brown coated fellow, often known as “brown clowns”
And per your observation about size & temperament … I wish it were true that big dogs are all that way. Some are (Hi TaMara) like Danes. But so many dogs like Cane Corsos and some of the Mastiff breeds are both giant and protective. So easily protective defaults to aggressive, especially with idiot owners who get big dogs to prove how tough they are.
Anotherlurker
@Jager: After adopting 3 Golden Retrievers and one who looked like a Golden , I am now dealing with a Cocker. She and her brother are jet black with small white markings under their chins and on their chests.
They are super sweet and wicked smahrt!
Jojo
@Soprano2: this kind of thing makes me crazy. Luckily for us, our local print media was surprisingly skeptical of them (they usually both sides everything), which helped undermine there bullshit somewhat. There was also a lot of public pushback here, which also got media coverage. That isn’t necessarily the case everywhere, unfortunately.
Mousebumples
@WaterGirl: it looks like my English Springer Spaniels from when I was younger, with liver coloring. ❤️
Agree that they have tons of energy. My dad used to practice his golf swing and have the dog fetch the golf ball for exercise…
Jager
@Anotherlurker:
Ours was the “boss” when we got our German Shepherd she was about 12 years old. When the Shepherd was fully grown she could still back him into the corner. She was a good girl.
catclub
I suspect the Goldens are super sweet.
OGLiberal
@Ohio Mom: When I was a pre-teen/teen my mom was involved in a lot of board of ed elections – not as a candidate but volunteering for various different campaigns. At that time most voters in the town were Democrats (major shift over the last 30 years – it’s a Maga town now….very white, although not as white as when I was growing up), which meant you had Dems running against Dems. (from a party ID perspective, the board elections were non-partisan) Most of the candidates either had kids in the schools or recently had kids in the schools. Very blue collar town so not a lot of folks sending kids to private schools. And not at all Christiany – cafeteria Catholic, at most.
My experience showed me that in these board elections the “bad guys” are almost always the ones who never, ever want to see a school budget pass as proposed/drafted. They would canvass the local senior residences with absentee ballots, scaring these folks – many of whom never had kids/grandkids in the system – about how the school budget was going to put them out in the streets to pay for class trips for kids they don’t even know.
I think it’s still that way today – these Moms for Liberty types scare people about trans monsters coming for their daughters in the bathroom or gay stag films in the library media room but it’s really about slashing school spending – ie, tax cuts….because that’s always the underlying reason – starve that which you don’t like or care about, especially if you they have to PAY for it.
Torrey
I’ve just done a quick scan of the comments, and I may have missed something, but it doesn’t look like anyone else has posted the link for the YouTube video of the student taking down Bridget Ziegler, so here it is.
jackmac
AWESOME takedown by the student.
Also, anecdotal evidence suggests that these Moms for Liberty types (like the shouty tea-baggers of the Obama years) largely suck at doing the jobs whenever they manage to get elected. Governing is actually hard and these people are typically gone by the next election (if not before).
I can’t work up an smidgen of sympathy for her or her sleazy husband. There will be no wingnut welfare circuit for them (although maybe they’ll find Jebus and tour the country’s mega-churches and preach about how Demoncrats and the left-wing media destroyed them).
OzarkHillbilly
He/she/they are my newest hero. (I don’t know the history here).
brantl
@Miss Bianca: Good, you don’t need his little shitheads infecting innocent kids with stupid and ignorant.
brantl
@Old School: WTF is this hair-splitting shit? Either they are OK, or they aren’t FRANCIS, MAKE UP YOUR FUCKING MIND, GOD DAMN IT.
This halfway shit really pisses me off. Don’t get me wrong, Francis is infinitely better (and I mean that literally) than any pope in the last several hundred years, but JFC, get all the way on one side, or the other, the middle is indefensible to EVERYONE.
VeniceRiley
My wife has had loads of dogs. None with a better temperament than our St. Berdoodle puppy. He’s so empathetic and kind. Great with kids, adults, strangers, other animals like sheep and horses. Instinctively knows to leave swans and ducks alone. Belly crawls to small dogs and toddlers so they won’t be afraid. Just a gentle giant that loves everyone.
He’s gorgeous and everyone adores him.
brantl
If that dog is clean, then you’ll never be able to tell that he’s dirty.
JAFD
@Another Scott:
Somewhat off topic, but if you’re looking for Yule gift for an Econ major, or something like that, check
https://ritholtz.com/2023/12/2023-the-big-picture/
If I had the wall space ….
Another Scott
@JAFD: Nice.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
kalakal
That was terrific. Point superbly made. I’d love to see her face as she had to sit their and listen
Paul in KY
@brantl: I think Paul VI was pretty good, for a pope and in his time. John XXIII also.