Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Never give a known liar the benefit of the doubt.

People are complicated. Love is not.

The media handbook says “controversial” is the most negative description that can be used for a Republican.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

I’m just a talker, trying to find a channel!

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

The Giant Orange Man Baby is having a bad day.

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

Bad news for Ron DeSantis is great news for America.

The choice is between normal and crazy.

SCOTUS: It’s not “bribery” unless it comes from the Bribery region of France. Otherwise, it’s merely “sparkling malfeasance”.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

The Supreme Court is corrupt. Democrats must win in November and force court reform.

‘Museums aren’t America’s attic for its racist shit.’

I also would like a pony to improve my balloon juice experience.

Biden: Oh no. We’ve upset Big Pharma again.

Narcissists are always shocked to discover other people have agency.

If you’re looking for someone who’s young and athletic, go watch a fucking movie.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

This country desperately needs a functioning Fourth Estate.

If you’re pissed about Biden’s speech, he was talking about you.

If you are still in the gop, you are either an extremist yourself, or in bed with those who are.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Monday Evening Open Thread: Readership Capture

Monday Evening Open Thread: Readership Capture

by | 49 Comments

This post is in: , , ,


In the ‘national divorce’ the GOP loves to talk about, Dems already got ice cream, football, Taylor Swift…

Genuinely good news, assuming it happens:


 
… Aaand, another development from the Trump Crime Cartel:

Reader Interactions

49Comments

  2. 2.

    SiubhanDuinne

    Glad to see Teller and Penn saying good things about Democrats. Last I knew, they were raving Libertarians.

  10. 10.

    Matt McIrvin

    I don’t know about Teller, but Penn seems to have had some kind of revelation when he realized that antivaxxers were assuming he was a natural ally.

  11. 11.

    dr. bloor

    @Matt McIrvin:

    Jillette is a long-standing libertarian.  His response to COVID was the outlier in his politics.

    He endorsed Yang last cycle.  I hope Raskin took a long, hot shower after touching him.

  12. 12.

    Starfish

    @Kayla Rudbek:

    This article is weird. I have seen some concerns with the Christian app’s lately, but Gloo is not explicitly Christian and has an office where I live, and I knew people who worked there.

    People need to take their concerns about data harvesting and generalize concerns about TikTok and some Christian apps to hammering out some privacy rights legislation out of them instead of saying “Be afraid of this app or that app.”

    This app and that app collect as much of your information as they are legally allowed to. Their purposes are probably aligned with capitalism as opposed to aligned with some nefarious intent. All this tech is old enough that it should be regulated.

  13. 13.

    The Kropenhagen Interpretation

    @Matt McIrvin: Might also help that he legitimately was interested in a less authoritarian government and that is emphatically not on offer from the Republicans.

  15. 15.

    The Kropenhagen Interpretation

    @HumboldtBlue: See this guy earning a living at his parents’ house making pocket change from Uber Eats? I have more money than Donald Trump right now.

  17. 17.

    oldster

    When I first saw Manafort’s involvement with the Trump campaign back in 2015 — that’s when I knew that Trump was a Putin asset, or as good as one.

    I had already watched Putin use Manafort to try to rig the elections in Ukraine, and if he couldn’t rig them, to disrupt them. Manafort is Putin’s guy, his fixer.

    Jailed for being a Russian asset, and now he’ll go back to destroying democratic elections. Because Putin is still trying as hard as he can to destroy the United States, and the Republicans are helping him.

  21. 21.

    danielx

    @Omnes Omnibus: ​
     So, begging your indulgence, that means…what? That the judge has already laid out the prevailing rules regarding evidence and procedure in his/her court and therefore a lot of SFB’s usual tactics of delay and obfuscation won’t fly?

  22. 22.

    Sure Lurkalot

    Washington Post…canceled them last year! Vying to be as clueless, bothsidesy and malevolent as the FTFNYT. We’re at the point that no news they believe is fit to print is fit to read.

  24. 24.

    Eolirin

    @SiubhanDuinne: Penn was always a quite bit less crazy than your median Libertarian, and Trump and then COVID opened his eyes on how insane the rest of them really were so he jumped ship completely. 

    Teller afaik has never really been as ahem, vocal, about politics.

  25. 25.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @danielx: The Trump people asked for a bunch of things to be excluded from evidence and the court basically said no to all but one.  They can’t use Stormy Daniels’s lie detector results.  It was a sweeping loss for the defense.  The trial should go forward in April.

  26. 26.

    Pete Downunder

    @danielx: I was never a New York lawyer but on the left coast motions in limine (at the threshold) were used to dispose of procedural issues and anticipated evidentiary problems so as not to have issues in front of the jury

  28. 28.

    Jackie

    @HumboldtBlue: I hope it’s televised LIVE. Navarro is almost as big a baby as TIFG. I also hope he leaves prison aged by four years+ in the four months he’s incarcerated. And TIFG sees it and really goes off his rocker!

  29. 29.

    Eolirin

    @HumboldtBlue: Yeah, and pro science and staunch atheists. The current GOP is entirely anathema to their worldview. They really detest conspiracy theories. Right now only the Democrats are pro-reality and that’s done a lot of work. 

  30. 30.

    Anoniminous

    I am thinking we are looking at the same kind of shift in politics that happened with the societal shift in Gay Marriage. A number of factors came together in 2011 in a Black Swan Event that decisively flipped public opinion from Anti to Pro.

  31. 31.

    NotMax

    @Eolirin

    “It doesn’t seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil — which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama.”
    – Richard Feynman
    .

  32. 32.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Eolirin: Years ago they were giving a platform to anti-environmentalist hacks like Steven Milloy and were case studies in the infection of the skeptic movement with libertarian politics. Penn Jillette already expressed regret for doing that years ago and also seems to really hate Donald Trump on the basis of having met him. So he’s been evolving.

  33. 33.

    NotMax

    @NotMax

    Or, more succinctly,

    “[I call myself] an atheist. Agnostic for me would be trying to weasel out and sound a little nicer than I am about this.”
    – Richard Feynman
    .

  34. 34.

    Marmot

    @Matt McIrvin:

    Penn Jillette already expressed regret for doing that years ago and also seems to really hate Donald Trump on the basis of having met him.

    Off to look that up!

  36. 36.

    geg6

    @SiubhanDuinne:

    I saw an interview with Penn Gillette a while back where he discussed his conversion to reality.  I do not remember exactly what it was that triggered it but he realized that libertarianism was just stupid and cruel.  And he didn’t want to be stupid or cruel.  Now he’s a total liberal.

  37. 37.

    Marmot

    @Matt McIrvin:

    Aw man, now that I’ve looked, I just want a conservative / libertarian to join Good without it being about some personal impingement.

    (I don’t know this source, the Review-Journal.)

    At the time, the reason seemed to be that Jillette had run afoul of Trump by making fun of the then-TV star in his 2012 book, “Every Day Is an Atheist Holiday!” A passage from the tome: “We’ve chosen to make this whack job, with the cotton candy piss hair and the birther (crap), into someone we want to please.”

    And that was eight years ago.

    Trump evidently never forgave the jabs, exacting his revenge by giving the “Apprentice” title to Adkins.

    Two years later, in July 2015, Trump dug in again, just after he announced his run for presidency. Early in his campaign he took what would be a familiar Twitter tone, blasting Penn & Teller’s Broadway show: “I hear @PennJillette show on Broadway is terrible. Not surprised, boring guy (Penn). Without the Apprentice, show would have died long ago.”

  41. 41.

    rikyrah

    @oldster:

    Because Putin is still trying as hard as he can to destroy the United States, and the Republicans are helping him.

     

    No lie told. It’s quite obvious.

  45. 45.

    Melancholy Jaques

    @SiubhanDuinne:

    What does in limine mean?

    Literally it means on the threshold. The almost always involve evidentiary issues. A movant wants the court to order before the trial starts that certain evidence will or will not be permitted (most often the latter) and if the latter, that such evidence not even be mentioned. The phrase is, can’t unring the bell.

Comments are closed.