Real wages are higher, unemployment is lower, and…oh right…there's no deadly pandemic sweeping America. https://t.co/29hmKtKw0y
— Steven Rattner (@SteveRattner) March 18, 2024
An update on Romeo, from cat rescuer & BJ bleg beneficiary Rob:
I wanted to send you an update on our cat shenanigans. Your post really helped!
We bought a LOT of food. I’m am currently working on improving the cat environment. We are converting the guest room in to a cat room with shelves and fun things.
For the moment, it is the private quarantined room of Mr. Romeo. We have still not caught the matrix twin who beat him up. So, we’re bringing Romeo in evenings.
The BIG plan is to catch his outdoor friend Miss Professor Longhair, get her vaccinated and then bring both in for quarantine and eventual release inside to gen pop. I’m expanding the cat patio so there is more outdoor space.– Cheers,Rob
The Biden-Harris administration understands that when we invest in women, ALL of society benefits. pic.twitter.com/SJhjkPfD0C
— CAP Action (@CAPAction) March 18, 2024
A comment from wise commentor Kay, yesterday morning:
… I think a lot of the malevolent MAGA energy has dissipated, at least where I live (75% Trump). Several other commenters in Trump areas say the same. 2020 really felt like there was a heightened risk – I had an actual sort of road rage encounter with one of them in the days before the election and they did these “rolling rallies” where they essentially shut down a highway by going 20 miles an hour in a caravan and no one in local law enforcement would do anything because they were all Trump cultists too. It was really aggressive behavior and meant to intimidate and frightening because it was clear they had co opted law enforcement.
It’s like the air went out of a balloon now though. I genuinely think the high Covid casualties they took disheartened a lot of them. It’s all fun and games and owning the libs until half your friends die.
On The Road – Winter Wren – April 2022 in Arizona – Part 1 (of 2)
Michael Bersin
“…It’s all fun and games and owning the libs until half your friends die…”
Or your expensive MAGA flag decorated boat sinks in the wakes at the boat parade.
Suzanne
Not just this.
The Deep Promise of Trumpism was a restored place on top of the social hierarchy for entitled, uneducated white men. How’s that workin’ out?! It’s not. So I think it’s harder to be enthusiastic.
Trumpism is just Tall Poppy Syndrome, at scale, yeah?
NotMax
Merry sawdust spaghetti day!
waspuppet
The other big difference from four years ago is we have a president who doesn’t openly prefer other countries to this one, is not a broke, rapist, racist game show host, and who has read a book at some point in life.
oldster
I hope Kay is right!
Albatrossity
Apropos of nothing at all, here’s a good giggle from Joyce Vance’s Substack today
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone 😊😊😊
Kay
The GOP primary is to run against Sherrod Brown, the incumbent.
Dolan is the stronger general election candidate so we should want him to lose and Moreno to win BUT
Moreno is Trump’s candidate so it would be fun if Trump/Moreno lost the primary. OTOH, Sherrod Brown beating Moreno (Trump’s candidate) in the general would be a bigger win for for us because that would mean JD Vance and Trump blew an Ohio pickup.
I went to a local charity event last night and while there asked people I know to be active, engaged Republicans Moreno or Dolan and every single one was Moreno but this is a very Trumpy county.
p.a.
And if push comes to shove, this time our guy controls the federal departments of “we have guns too you know”.
Although to be honest I think some of those entities are problematic.
rikyrah
Been wondering..
Is Navarro going to real prison…or a Club Fed?
Kay
@Albatrossity:
I recognize that Michael Cohen is a smidge felonious but I just like him. I also admire that unlike all these other GOP “tough guys” he did his time in prison with dignity and without fucking whining incessantly about how he was being persecuted.
lowtechcyclist
@rikyrah:
Good morning!
satby
@rikyrah: The way he’s been nonstop sniveling about it online you’d think it was a prison in the third world. Four months, the deep, deep injustice of it all.
rikyrah
@Kay:
Smidge felonious…
BWA HA AH AH AH AHA
Soprano2
The pic I took after I got my first Covid shot came up in my FB memories today. How quickly we forget how crazy things were three and four years ago! Almost exactly a year from the day things shut down here to the day I got my first vaccine. That’s amazingly fast.
Ken
“when he was working for me” seems to have been left off that statement.
Kay
This is a better indicator of base enthusiasm than a poll, I think. It doesn’t tell us anything about the willfully blind “independents” who seem to swing wildly from one election to the next (because they’re morons) though.
Soprano2
@Kay: I like him too because he doesn’t have any illusions about himself or what he did for TFG, and he doesn’t try to make excuses for it. He’s unusual among the people who worked for TFG.
Soprano2
@Kay: I’d quit giving too if I thought the money was going to pay his legal bills rather than re-elect him.
Bupalos
I think I agree that there seems to be marginally less loudly transgressive Trumpism out and about right now. What that is a sign of is really hard to say. I don’t really think it’s covid demoralization. My first thought is that the perceived center of our opposition from their point of view has changed from BLM to reproductive freedom. I think that is a “demoralizing” change in opponents to exurban trucknuts.
Jeffro
Catherine Rampell in the Post: would YOU put up a $464M bond for this guy?
His own petard, it is hoisted! LOLOL
Have a happy Tuesday jackals!
Jeffro
@Kay:
@rikyrah:
“Smidge Felonious” – totally swiping that, thanks Kay!
It’s probably the 7th band down on the Lollapalooza lineup this year. =)
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
Kay
@Soprano2:
He’s reformed. Rehabilitated. A success story for the criminal justice system. The whole discussion about how he’s a “LIAR!” so cannot sully a courtroom is a joke in terms of trials, too. A lot of witnesses are liars in one area/situation or another. Both sides still use them.
rikyrah
@Jeffro:
Which is why I have been wondering..does the State of New York investigate the background of those who would help him post bond?
Like, say, some shady Russians wanted to give him the bond money…would they investigate the source?
Harrison Wesley
The Biden-Harris administration wants to invest in women? It should contact Willard Romney; he’s got binders full of them.
mrmoshpotato
Like a wet, juicy fart – which is what they all are. 💩💨🌊
Geoduck
I hate the Shiatgibbon as much as most folks here, but people are still dying from COVID. Keep getting your boosters and think about still wearing a mask in the supermarket…
RevRick
I read the replies to Rattner’s tweet and they were filled with the usual MAGA whataboutism. They are desperate to erase and rewrite the ugly history of the Trump years.
mrmoshpotato
@Suzanne: It’s all fun and owning the libs until a bunch of your friends die in a hospital because they refused a free vaccine.
Ken
@Jeffro: I have always enjoyed the ending of Trading Places, where the head of the Exchange confronts the Duke brothers and says “All accounts to be settled at the end of the day.” Seeing a variation applied to Trump is delightful. It will be especially pleasant if, after adding up all the assets and subtracting all the debts, he turns out to be worthless.
kalakal
@mrmoshpotato:
Given that “a trump” is English slang for a fart* seems a fitting analogy
*long predates TFG
Princess
Some Maga dude left a comment on a friend’s meme FB post so I clapped back. In the old days, someone like that would have clapped back at me even harder, but nothing. bupkis. zilch. Sad, low-energy trolls. I agree that some kind of spark has gone out of the whole operation.
debit
@Geoduck: Yep. I work at a long term/senior care facility and covid is still merrily romping through the populace. We just (literally yesterday) came out of outbreak status. For now.
If you’re going to see someone in assisted living/long term care, please wear a mask. You could be saving a life.
mrmoshpotato
@Princess: To co-opt Wonkette’s feelings about the NRA – WEAK. SAD. POOP.
Kay
I was at a charity event last night and talking with an aquaintance. Her son has just finished “match day” (physician residency matching) and did not get his first choice (Cincinnati) but instead got Lancaster PA. She IMMEDIATELY followed telling me this with telling me that she thought Cincinnati used “diversity” as a factor and “not one of their picks was a white man”. So what should have been a very happy day for her family -their son is moving toward his dream of being a physician, let’s celebrate, turns into this bitter, ungenerous nasty assumption that everyone who beat him on this one measure didn’t do it on merit.
This isn’t even good for white men. Blaming women and black people and immigrants every time they come up short is just not a recipe for good people.
TBone
@rikyrah: I don’t know but 4 months in federal prison in Miami might be uncomfortably hot soon. Do they get A/C? Now let’s do Gym Jordan’s defiance of a Congressional subpoena for a matching pair.
NotMax
@kalakal
Welsh invective: Dim gwerth rhech dafad.
Not worth a sheep’s fart.
Suzanne
@mrmoshpotato:
It’s also all fun and games until you and your friends still make less money than women who still won’t date you.
Princess
@debit: I was recently the victim of a superspreader event. One guy travelled across an ocean for a party and infected 75% of the people there (of about 20 people). One of them infected me even though we were both wearing masks and avoiding close contact. Frankly, I think the current variants are too infectious for masks to do much good and are giving people a false sense of security. I suspect that’s the real reason they are no longer being recommended. The CDC has it right: if you’re sick stay the fuck home until you feel better.
Another Scott
I’d like to think that January 6, 2021 was a wake-up call for lots of people. That it wasn’t just rooting for one’s home team or one’s tribe, that there were dire consequences for the country in continuing to support TIFG.
I’d like to think that Dobbs (released on June 24, 2022, but leaked weeks/months earlier) made more people realize our rights are always tentative if we put monsters in charge.
So, I don’t know if it’s an all-at-once thing, or more a matter of things don’t change until they do.
We make our future every day.
Forward!!
Cheers,
Scott.
TBone
@Kay: how does she know that every pick was a person of color? Seems like a laser focus on the wrong subject and she needs her glasses adjusted. With a fire hose.
TBone
@Princess: I agree about the heightened infectiousness! I’m so sorry 😞 to hear this. I hope you heal quickly and completely.
Soprano2
@Kay: So what will their excuse be if right wingers are successful at getting rid of diversity programs? Too many white men think they will always come out on top of everything, and that they deserve to.
Frankensteinbeck
@Suzanne:
I think it’s closer to this than Covid. They’ve done a great job of convincing themselves that Covid is other people’s problem, even when their friends and family members die of it.
They’re much less enthusiastic because Trump failed. In 2020 they thought they were on the verge of crushing their enemies forever. Even during the interregnum Trump told them they could do even better, and win no matter what the vote. They were hungry for that.
Then he failed. They like what he’s still promising, but it’s a whole lot harder to get excited by the guy who finally said the right words but still didn’t deliver.
@Kay:
This isn’t news. It’s wonderful and I think it’s important as a measure of how enthusiasm for Trump has dropped. It’s just that it’s been going on for awhile now. Trump’s base have not been ponying up the cash like they used to. He peaked when they thought he could overturn the election, and it’s been downhill ever since.
sdhays
@Bupalos: I think it’s simply the losing. The wind started to seep out of the balloon in early 2021. Trump is supposed to crush his enemies, and instead he lost to Joe Biden and Democrats took Congress. And there hasn’t been an opportunity to feel that rush of crushing the Democrats since. The Republican House has been a disaster.
Suzanne
@Kay: So many white dudes are mortally offended at the idea that women or any people of color might be better than them at something.
I tried to explain this to a white dude colleague once who espoused a bunch of this kind of crap. At the higher professional levels, higher education levels we’re talking about…. everyone is good. Everyone is skilled. Variation in measures like tests is so small as to be irrelevant. There’s not some imaginary ranked list of people from “most merited” to “least merited”.
Instead, there’s relative strengths and weaknesses, and everyone has them. People show differentiators in ways that are difficult to measure but are important. (This discussion started when I noted that a student I had interviewed for an internship sent a beautifully calligraphed thank-you note, and I said, “This person is awesome, let’s hire her.” And building a team or a class or any sort of group is going to try to account for those weaknesses. And experience with various communities, cultural sensitivity, an ability to communicate with various people is absolutely a thing you want your group to be able to do. It is a vital aspect of success.
BellyCat
@Kay: Ugh. The bigger problem with “Match“ is that it is anti-freemarket.
The number of residencies are limited based on the type of specialty. The situation creates scarcity for some specialties, which drives salaries up for some and down for others. The most ambitious/talented generally pursue the highest salaries, gutting some much needed areas.
This is essentially why we have something like 1/3 the number of geriatricians needed in the United States. Harvard’s medical residency did not even have a single applicant.
As boomers continue to swell senior status, a healthcare crisis for the elderly is being completely ignored.
rikyrah
@Kay:
because, of course, he was ENTITLED to his first choice.
phuck outta here.
Melancholy Jaques
@Another Scott:
I’d like to think both of those things and a couple more were true, but if they were, Biden would have a double digit lead in the polls. We don’t live in that country. We live in a country where people do not base their votes on things the government actual can and does control. Instead, they believe that the president is responsible for the price of gas, the cost of Five Guys hamburgers, and the marketing decisions of beer companies.
Jeffro
100%
Also, the irony of a white candidate* complaining that (paraphrasing here) he worked twice as hard and was still treated unfairly is just wow. Sooooo close to getting it!
*or his mom!
Geminid
@mrmoshpotato: Lemmings probably tell each other they’re owning the Lynx as they run off a cliff.
Nelle
@Soprano2: Well, according to my satiate on a flight from Auckland, NZ to San Fran last week, too fast. She’s happy with taking Ivermectin. She was a bit abashed after I talked about the decades of research by Jennifer Doudna (Nobel prize winner) and others on Crisper and gene editing , about how fortuitous it was that all that good research was there just when needed (or, for the religious, was it the generous hand of God?? God works in mysterious ways, right?). I knows my Bible and can use it strategically.
Melancholy Jaques
@BellyCat:
Are boomers still swelling senior status? I thought they – or rather we – were starting to die off. They’re all over 60 now.
Jackie
@Kay: Mayhaps small donors aren’t millionaires or billionaires and don’t see why they should help finance a self-acclaimed billionaire’s attorney fees?🤔
The Biden campaign should rerun that clip of TIFG’s 2016 campaign pitch telling everyone he would self-fund his own campaign so he wouldn’t be beholden to corporations and the like. 🙄
Frankensteinbeck
@Soprano2:
The same thing, just unofficial. People in charge hiring minorities only because they’re minorities.
Chris
@Suzanne:
This is part of why despite the fact that I’m in no way an optimist by nature, and despite the fact that I knew Trump would be their 2024 nominee very early in 2021, I actually do think that if we beat him this year, we won’t be seeing him again. At a certain point, the loser stink hits a critical mass. You can only fail so many times before you go from being “another righteous victim of liberal cheating and persecution” to “another asshole who can’t close the deal and needs to get out of the way so somebody else can have a shot.”
geg6
@oldster:
Like Kay, I live in a pretty Trumpy area and I’ve noticed the same thing. There are still diehards with their stupid flags with Cheetolini’s head on top of Stallone’s Rambo body or some such but not in the numbers seen previously. It really trickled down to just a few within a few months of 1/6. Now if you go to some of the less populated, more conservative areas of PA, such as where our cabin in Titusville is, you still see MAGA decorations but not in the aggressive, loud way it was a couple of years ago.
dmsilev
@Kay: “Give to Trump so he can run for President. MAGA!” is, while evil, at least a message that makes sense. “Give to Trump so he can pay his legal bills, now that the lawyers insist on being paid up front” is rather less compelling. Sure, he can rant and rave and Truth and so forth about how he’s being persecuted by the Deep State (*) , but its all about _him_ not about a broader “take back the country for the poor oppressed white Christian men” theme that resonated with his base the first time round.
(*) I originally typo’d that as “Depp State”, which I guess would be an entirely different conspiracy theory. The judges would also have accepted “Derp State”.
Chris
@Princess:
In complete fairness, that could also be because Facebook as a social app seems to be pretty much dead, even compared to what it was four years ago.
Bupalos
@Soprano2: the story of pique here is about a (presumably) white woman.
Ken
@sdhays: Trump’s supporters got a little fix of winning when Trump got enough delegates to cinch the Republican nomination.
But — the deadline for the financial fraud case is soon. There are subtle signs that he won’t be able to scrape up the money for the appeal, like his lawyers going into court and saying “he won’t be able to scrape up the money for the appeal”. So in all likelihood, the State of New York is going to start seizing his assets, which will spray another layer of loser stink all over him.
geg6
@rikyrah:
Pretty sure it will be a Club Fed. Would be thrilled if it wasn’t though.
TBone
Biden Allies Pledge Over One Billion Dollars:
https://digbysblog.net/2024/03/19/are-you-better-off-now/
Requires scrolling to see the allies.
Frankensteinbeck
@Geminid:
Fun fact: Lemmings do not run off cliffs. Disney people pushed them over the edge for documentary footage, and it became popular knowledge because Disney wouldn’t lie, right!? Same with drowning themselves.
BellyCat
@Melancholy Jaques: 65 is official age that geriatric status is assigned in the medical treatment world. And more people are living longer.
yellowdog
@rikyrah: I think the financial monitor has to approve the source of the funds. That is, partially, what her job is. Make sure no money laundering or other shenanigans.
Chris
@sdhays:
That’s another thing. If Trump loses this year, the fact that he, Republicans, and the media have all been portraying Joe Biden as a senile doddering old mummy who’s one broken fingernail away from death isn’t going to do Trump any favor. After all, if Biden’s such a dead man walking, what does it say about Trump that he couldn’t even beat him?
Geminid
@Frankensteinbeck: Yeah, I’ve seen that. Lemmings have become a staple of popular belief as a metaphor for mass self-destructive behsvior and I used them in that sense.
Jackie
@Kay: Cohen lied FOR TIFG! That minor detail keeps getting omitted. He went to prison FOR TIFG.
Harrison Wesley
@Kay: The resentment was itching to be let out and would have found some way, regardless. He got Lancaster, PA? That’s a terrific assignment – Lancaster is one of the best of the many great small cities PA has, and if you must have a big city to play in it’s about 80-90 miles from Philly. It’s not Thule AFB.
Suzanne
@Chris: Yeah, I agree with you. (Much of the time, not just on this point.)
He scratches an itch for them in a way that other politicians do not. We call that racism a lot, and sometimes anti-elitism, and sometimes patriarchy, and sometimes nostalgia, and those are certainly part of it. It’s a general sense that other people are more successful than they are — fuck, even their kids think they’re kind of backward and embarrassing — and so they double down on it.
The Wall Street people aren’t die-hard Trumpers. They’ll vote for him, sure, but their vote will shift easily to someone else. The dead-ender MAGAs don’t have anyone else, though. And Trump’s administration didn’t shift what really matters: no one thinks they’re great. Their kids still think they’re embarrassing. California is full of Those People and yet property values are still higher there. Liberals are still doing better.
japa21
Currently doing my election judge thing in suburban Cook County. Extremely slow. So far 12 voters have come through. The encouraging thing is that all 12 have voted in the Dem primary. About 15 years ago this was a solid GOP area.
rikyrah
@Kay:
this takes me back to last year. Stanford released the picture of the surgery residents that they chose.
Damn near all women
Maybe 3 guys,only one of them White.
I literally looked up how much surgeons make in California, and I was so happy for those women..LOL
The response and hysterics. They had to close the comments section.
The thought…the mere thought…that STANFORD has to lower anything to get qualified applicants…
Ridiculous.
What…does that mother think that those other folks got their medical degrees in crayon through the ‘diversity’ entrance?
That they didn’t go through the EXACT same curriculum that her son went through?
And, on that level, I bet the interview itself is the most important thing….because everything else evens out.
Bupalos
@sdhays: I’m sure losing is part of it too. Though generally fascism is kind of based on losing and mythological victimhood, so that should cut both ways.
geg6
@TBone:
I have the same question. How does she know this? It’s just a bitter hag who blames every little set back on the “others.”
Baud
@japa21:
👍
Eyeroller
Of course, the headline I saw on my Echo Show this morning was “American wages not keeping up with inflation.”
Suzanne
@geg6:
YES.
The percentage of women in medical school classes has been growing for decades. I bet her son just…. got beat.
geg6
@Kay:
Well, she should be happy to know that in Lancaster, he’ll be working with an almost exclusively white, MAGA population. Whereas in Cincy, he might catch cooties from all of “those” people.
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: In 2016, I remember hearing about a lot of incidents in which some MAGA type confronted a woman or a minority or a liberal with “you’re going to have to change your tune once Trump gets in.” They thought he was going to shut us up somehow, maybe by force.
And it didn’t happen. We just got louder, really. So the rhetoric is getting more openly violent this time around. He was holding back before, but boy, no Mr. Nice Guy this time! Implication is that he’s going to either do mass arrests of people who openly disagree with him, or just use the military to mow them down.
Well, he’s certainly going to try.
But I wonder if they believe it as much as they did before.
Baud
@Kay:
Maybe Cincinnati takes account of the quality of the applicant’s parentage.
Kay
@rikyrah:
It’s a selective residency in family practice – apparently a good one. There were only 8 selected. I just don’t know why she would assume her son “should” get one. I don’t even know what that means.
Later in the evening I met a woman with a daughter who was accepted at an elite med school – the girl has an undergrad in biomedical engineering with a 4.0. I thought “wait till she gets a good residency – the mothers of men will think she robbed it from their sons” 🙂
TBone
@geg6: exactly. Gawd forbid they EVER understand that a rising tide lifts ALL boats and that, if someone else gets “more” that doesn’t mean they “took” something from the “deserving” that will thus get “less.” I want to say to these people: BITE ME.
TBone
@geg6: I was gonna say that but tryna be nice today ha ha.
frosty
And thanks to global warming, my kids won’t be able to find an ice floe to shove me out to sea on.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Yeah, and they’ll be in for a shock at the reaction if he wins again. It’ll be a lot worse. But It’s something we’d like to avoid because we’re decent folks.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
I’d say it was less COVID deaths, because in most communities the death rate wasn’t that high except in nursing homes, and more that COVID restrictions are gone. That motivated a lot of Trumpers. Overnight, their businesses got shut down, kids were home, couldn’t go to church, etc all while Fox kept telling them it was fake. They were absolutely enraged about it.
Bupalos
@geg6: only on a partisan blog can a county split like 60/40 somehow render forth near 100% white maga medical patients.
TBone
@Bupalos: have you been to Lancaster, PA?
Kay
@Baud:
This will shock and amaze you but this woman’s husband inherited a manufacturing business – they make lower end kitchen and bath countertops. He succeeded his dad as CEO.
Her sons were good kids though. Cheerful, easy going boys. I hope her bitterness doesn’t infect them.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: I did think he might order the National Guard to open fire at the Women’s Marchers.
For all I know, he did, but they didn’t do it (we probably would have heard about that by now though). I know he tried to put down some of the BLM protests in DC with armed force and it didn’t really work.
Eyeroller
@Kay: Residency slots are an even bigger chokepoint on the supply of physicians than medical-school openings. He should be (and probably is) pleased he got a good one, even if it wasn’t his first choice. I see some commenters projecting the mother’s attitude to the son and I am not making that assumption.
They use a mathematical algorithm in which applicants rank their choices and residency committees rank theirs, and there are rounds of elimination. Mathematically, it is called the “stable marriage problem” (or stable matching problem).
frosty
@geg6: One of my neighbors down the street just hung up his new Trump 2024 flag: “Take America Back” so the enthusiasm isn’t dead yet down here on the Mason-Dixon line.
OTOH he’s got the only one so far.
Chris
@rikyrah:
Most of my friends in college were white working-class kids from the Rust Belt, who were often the first in their families to go to college. At some point it occurred to me that any just system would reward these guys more than me, not less. After all, we both ended up in the same place, but they had to travel farther to get there.
And that’s just White Upper-Middle-Class East Coaster vs White Working-Class Rust Belter, which isn’t even close to the biggest gap I encountered among classmates. Let me tell you about the friend who was literally born in one of Saddam’s prisons and came here as an early teen not speaking a word of English, which is the kind of origin story that would get any Hollywood writer laughed out of the room for being over the top… This is the kind of person wingnuts take one look at and whine “but they only get in because of diveeeeeersity initiatiiiiives!!!!“
geg6
@Bupalos:
I have spent quite a bit of time in Lancaster and the surrounding area. The only faces of color I saw were service people at the hotels, restaurants and malls. It’s fucking whiter than printer paper.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
It’ll be a lose-lose situation for both sides, but they will lose more bigly.
rikyrah
I know I shouldn’t be this invested..
But, I don’t think it was Kate Middleton in that TMZ video
Why can’t they produce this woman for a short 3 minute video interview with one of the royal press sychophants?
frosty
It might not be so dead if they’d let my friends’ posts leak into the feed now and then. I swear, I see one or two and then it’s just ads and sponsored and “We think you’d like this”.
TBone
@frosty: my neighbor tried that exact same slogan back in 2021. I got out my big, pink sharpie and scrawled a huge sign for the front lawn: We Already Did.
I forgot to include the word “Moron.”
Baud
@Kay:
Glad to hear about the kids. I hope they don’t suffer the fate of many families where the old folks get drawn ever deeper into the cult.
TBone
@geg6: yup. And reactionary as hell.
rikyrah
@Matt McIrvin:
I honestly believe that they thought we were going to cower .
That we didn’t, and not only did we not do it
But, made plain that we felt their vote for him, as our Kay so brilliantly pointed out..
SHOWED THEIR LACK OF CHARACTER.
Kay
@Eyeroller:
Both her sons went to high school with my two older children and they were both good kids – just nice boys. I preferred the younger who was an underachiever but funny and kind, but I’m sure the MD is a fine person too.
Redshift
@Kay:
More to the point, the credibility of a witness is a question for the jury and cross-examination; it’s not a legal basis for excluding them.
Which means this is another case of lawyers following TFG’s idiot whims rather than actually lawyering (which I am all in favor of!)
SiubhanDuinne
@NotMax:
No earthly idea what happened to the comment I wrote and sent a minute or so ago, but wanted to thank you for that really interesting article. As a general rule, I don’t crave pasta at this time of morning, but the photos and that recipe have me drooling like a Pavlovian canine.
Chris
@frosty:
It’s a vicious cycle. The ads crowd everything else out, which means fewer and fewer people bother to post, which means the ads make up an even greater amount of what’s in the feed, which means even fewer people are interested in posting, which means…
geg6
@frosty:
Yeah, there are still a few diehards around here, too.
But I’m happy to see that the most MAGA house in my neighborhood seems to have learned his lesson. He and his wife are at least a decade older than I am and he’s a Vietnam vet. In 2016 through 2020, there so much Trumpy swag festooning his house (a really lovely and charming farm house style home they remodeled) that you could barely see the porch railings and front door. Despite his yard signs being torn down a few times, he kept it all up there, sometimes wiring the signs to his lamppost and porch railings. On 1/7/21, all the signs, etc. were gone. And they haven’t come back. I wonder how many people like him are out there?
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin:
Exactly. They seem to have thought that he would bring a new social order, or restore an old one, and that we would feel all embarrassed.
Eyeroller
@Suzanne: Not embarrassed, silenced.
Suzanne
I will note that my neighborhood is very blue — like when they called Pennsylvania for Biden in 2020, there were air horns and megaphones and cheers — but I had one neighbor with a huge sign that read “TRUMP 2020 MAKE THE LIBERALS CRY AGAIN!”. And that is really all it’s about. That’s it. That’s the entirety of the goal.
frosty
@TBone: @geg6: Lancaster is reactionary? Don’t cross the Suskie and look at York, then. Lancaster seems nicer and is one of the places that we might move to when we can’t manage getting up and down the stairs here any more.
I’d rather go back to Maryland if I had my choice. Although Carroll County and northern Baltimore County are almost as Trumpy as where we are now.
Geminid
So according to a ABC News review of Pennsylvania county presidential vote in 2020, Lancaster County yoelded 160,209 votes for Trump, 118,847 votes for Biden, a 57-41% split.
The only Lancaster County residents I know are my brother and sister-in-law. They moved there from Columbia, Maryland when my brother retired from his job doing math for the rocket scientists at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. He and his wife are very white, and they were 2 of the 118,000 Biden voters in 2020.
Citizen Alan
@TBone: I am reminded of when I was 20 and did not get a summer job.I had applied for at the university because I wanted to stay in the hip college town rather than go back to my parent’s home for the summer. I did not get the secretarial job for which I was not particularly qualified, and my mother felt the need to share that with her friends at church. The next sunday, no less than four people, one of whom was the Preacher, made a point of coming up to me to reassure me that they “probably had to give it to a black.” I think that’s the first moment I actually understood what white privilege was
frosty
@Geminid: York County in 2020: Trump 61.5%, Biden 36.9%. During one of the Obama campaigns, the local precinct captain told me “If we get York County over 35% we win statewide.” I looked it up, he was right.
Then I was like “35% ?????” That’s really sad.
Tenar Arha
@Kay: Oof, I hope the guy’s happy with his match and is taking pointers from his classmates & not his mother. Otherwise, he’s going to be a terrible resident and colleague. Feels like his mother actually setting him up for dissatisfaction rather than happiness, blech.
Citizen Alan
@Kay: Perhaps up topic, But I still remember being absolutely thunderstruck during the Kavanaugh nomination, when my RWNJ Sister basically announced that she was far more afraid of her 2 sons being falsely accused of rape than she was of her daughter actually being raped.
Lobo
@Suzanne: This!
Citizen Alan
@frosty: In 2012, obama only needed fifteen percent of the white vote vote in mississippi to carry the state. He didn’t get it.
Tenar Arha
@Kay: That’s good to hear.
TBone
@Citizen Alan: ugh. I’m sorry you had that “close-up.” I am otherwise keeping my trap shut because I could write a book on this subject and I just can’t even with this shit – “not today Satan!”
Steeplejack
The equinox is at 11:06 EDT tonight. For druids who celebrate: Coltrane, “Equinox.”
...now I try to be amused
@geg6:
Perhaps the most valuable lesson I learned from economics is: Everything happens on the margins. You can apply that lesson to electoral politics too.
The core of Trump’s appeal is transgression. But Trump keeps transgressing, and each new transgression might cross a line with a Trumper like your neighbor.
In 2020 Trump ran for re-election as an impeached president. Now he runs as a twice-impeached president with 88 criminal counts against him, and personal bankruptcy is looming. That’s pushing multiple margins in the wrong direction.
Mousebumples
@Kay: Might just be me, but I’m wondering if the son wanted PA and ranked that one as #1 and didn’t want what his mother wanted him to want. No idea, but it seems plausible.
Soprano2
@rikyrah: It never occurs to these white guys that maybe the women and people of color are better because they have to work harder to get on the same playing field as the white guys, because they don’t get the benefit of the doubt that they belong like the white guys do. Even for white women it’s harder. Yet these white guys think they were cheated if they don’t get exactly what they want.
sdhays
@rikyrah: I’m not familiar with the TMZ video, and I don’t care at all about Kate Middleton or the royals, but that situation is very weird.
I guess it’s a nice distraction from the UK’s Brexit woes, so mission accomplished, Royals!
Cheryl from Maryland
@Mousebumples: Agree. I remember when I applied to colleges in the 1970s, my father wanted me to select one very close to home. My first and second choices were over four hours away – and my first choice, which selected me, was one of the top ranked schools in the state. So he couldn’t fault my choice, and I got the distance needed to be on my own and adult.
sdhays
@Mousebumples: Heh, in the movie he wants to be in Lancaster to be near his boyfriend.
NotMax
frosty
How far back? The 1920s? 1820s?
//
Chris
@NotMax:
Oh, probably back to before there even was an America in the nation-state sense. Trump would be happy to be King George III.
Wait. Old George actually had plenty of checks and balances on his behavior, didn’t he? So further back even than that. … when was the Magna Carta signed, again?
JML
@Cheryl from Maryland: after taking one class at the university my dad taught at, and having the prof talk to my dad about me in the faculty locker room, I knew I was going away for college. :P
Suzanne
@Soprano2:
I was born in 1980, and I remember so many of my white dud high school classmates just having this optimistic floating-through-life outlook. Like, got a B or a C on a math test? Good enough, that’s fine. Not like they were fuckups, but just…. not stressed out. Things would just work out and be good enough. Meanwhile, I and some of my other classmates (who were mostly PoC and not-religious girls) were always pushing, pushing, pushing. Competing.
Not to say this is a healthy attitude, but it produces different results.
ETtheLibrarian
Most people can’t maintain that level of anger, energy, etc. for years. Those kind of emotions take a lot to maintain and it pushes everything else out and keeps other things from even making an impression even if you live in a bubble of that. Practicalities of life and other things that are necessary pop up and take out some of that attention/energy that anger requires. Anger is a jealous emotion and will not tolerate anything else.
Some of the people are tRump people ’til the day they die but they have stuff to do.
gwangung
@rikyrah: Oh, yeah.
I went to Stanford, and the “stupidest” students (relatively speaking; they were still pretty sharp) were the white guys. Everyone was REAL competitive (in every sense of the word).
And Stanford med school is wayyyyy more competitive than undergrad.
planet eddie
I’m late to this party, but the statistics are clear: Anti-trans rhetoric is on the rise, and there has been a significant rise of 32.9% in hate crimes specifically related to gender identity in the last year.
Just because your experience is better doesn’t mean that it’s better for everyone. The rage has been refocused and honed against a very particular community, and anti-trans sentiment continues to grow.
From translegislation.com: In 2023, an unprecedented 37 bills were introduced at the federal level across categories like healthcare, student athletics, the military, incarceration, and education.
In 2024, 11 anti-trans bills have passed so far.
As I’ve said on this blog, the trans community is continuing to suffer in ways that other communities are not, and among the folks in my community, many of us feel left behind and forgotten.
Mousebumples
@Cheryl from Maryland: I felt the same. My mom made me apply in state as a backup, but I went to college about 6 hours away, which was perfect for me!
@sdhays: 😅
satby
@planet eddie: I’m so sorry, planet eddie. Your allies haven’t forgotten. Fortunately, that includes the President, so a blue wave should help. We’ll be working hard on that.
satby
@geg6: They’ve gone quiet, but they aren’t gone.
RevRick
@Suzanne: Unstated, but assumed, by white guys is the assertion that some woman/minority stole MY admission/job/promotion. It’s the arrogant belief that such things rightfully belong to ME by virtue of my being a white guy (since white guys are automatically superior).
What clearly never occurred to the entitled jerk who whined about being left out of the residency at the Cincinnati hospital, which desires good health outcomes, might prefer a minority applicant, because that would lead to better outcomes for the population they serve. And his whining proves that the Cincinnati hospital made the right decision.
Daoud bin Daoud
@Kay: Michael Cohen is the only person formerly within the Orange Obscenity’s entourage to have something like a redemption arc.
Soprano2
@Suzanne: That was the guys in my class. To a boy (except the two guys who moved there from somewhere else in junior high or high school) they were low “B” and “C” students, but didn’t seem to think that would make any difference because they were all going to get good jobs at a factory in Springfield and make good money. Nine of the top ten in my class were girls. It was seen as being “sissy” by the boys if another boy made good grades. They didn’t think they needed to succeed in school.
Kayla Rudbek
Ksmiami
@Mousebumples: any sane young person wants to gtfo of Ohio