Howard Stern: I want to thank you for your compassion. We're lucky to have you in the Oval Office and serving as the father of the country. I want to thank you for providing a calming influence and an organized administration post-COVID
President Biden: The American people… pic.twitter.com/3pdLlf269y
— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) April 27, 2024
I hope this interview was scheduled last night, after the press release from the NYT https://t.co/lF5CI4Q5AQ
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) April 26, 2024
— Caladan Legal (@TonyMoonbeam) April 26, 2024
Yesterday marks a major milestone toward fully reopening the Port of Baltimore by the end of May – the first large cargo ships traveling through the channel since the Francis Scott Key bridge collapsed.
@POTUS will continue to lead a whole-of-government approach to reopen the… pic.twitter.com/gLGg7Ckz5e— The White House (@WhiteHouse) April 26, 2024
140,000 people did their taxes with the free IRS direct file pilot. But program's future is unclear https://t.co/lIiYHQXpuk
— The Associated Press (@AP) April 27, 2024
The IRS said Friday that more than 140,000 taxpayers filed their taxes through its new direct file pilot program and participants saved roughly $5.6 million in fees they would have otherwise spent with commercial tax preparation companies.
The government pilot program, rolled out this tax season in 12 states, allows people with very simple W-2s to calculate and submit their returns directly to the IRS for free. Those using the program claimed more than $90 million in refunds, the IRS said.
But despite what IRS and Treasury Department officials said was a successful rollout, they aren’t saying yet whether the program will be available next year for more taxpayers. They say they need to evaluate the data on whether building out the program is feasible…
The program, which became available to the public on March 8, cost roughly $10.5 million for technology and product development and another $2.4 million for customer service, cloud computing and user authentication.
While the Treasury set a goal of reaching 100,000 users for the pilot, 140,803 completed their taxes using the program. More than 3 million people used the IRS’ eligibility tracker to see if they could use the program, and 423,450 people logged into the program.
“Regardless of where it goes from here, I am proud of the success of the direct file pilot,” Werfel said…
According to the latest IRS data, this tax season the agency has received 119.5 million returns, compared with 117.3 million received in the same timeframe last year. Refunds this tax season add up to $220 billion, compared with $215 billion last year.
Planning for potential presidential transition underway as Biden administration kicks it off https://t.co/CImngZyMmP
— The Associated Press (@AP) April 27, 2024
Baud
As the song says, Never Surrender.
Suzanne
I just adore that Biden trolled the NYT by going on Howard Stern’s show. I need to do garden and porch cleanup later and I will listen to it as I work.
Baud
I’m not planning on listening to it, but I wonder if it was really a softball interview. I don’t care either way, but I’m curious.
NotMax
Music moments.
Now there’s something you don’t encounter every day: Havamonicas.
;)
Quantum man
Would the supreme court be doing anything different than it is now if it were purposely helping pave the way for a trump dictatorship? Irresponsible not to ask.
sdhays
@Baud: And what does “softball interview” actually mean? Not asking questions with the frame that his enemies have workshopped? So many so called “hardball interviews” are either offensive or lazy – asking questions from an asshole frame or asking a question about a difficult subject and not bothering to follow up.
zhena gogolia
@sdhays: Right. I didn’t listen, but it sounds as if it was an informative interview. The NYT doesn’t know what that means. They’re not interested in informing anyone.
prostratedragon
@NotMax: Hey, now!
lowtechcyclist
Someone needs to do a split-screen with the campus protests over Gaza on one side, and 1/6/21 on the other.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
Having first listened to Howard back in the 70s when he was on DC101 in VA, he’s always had more underneath the shock jock image.
I’ve listened to plenty of his interviews over the last 5-8 years. He’s not approaching this from the usual DC Press Corpse “gotcha” perspective or bothsiderism. That being said, he’s not some brilliant, insightful interviewer, the way some people (and himself) try to portray either. He’s more conversational and dare I say it, normal, when interviewing people like this.
Regardless, it’s fantastic that Stern got him and not FTFNYT.
Betty
I guess the MSM can’t stand the idea that someone with a large platform genuinely admires Biden and what he has accomplished or that Biden as part of his campaign would seek to elevate that voice.
delphinium
@Baud: Yup, gotta Fight the Good Fight every moment.
Betty Cracker
Trump VP hopeful Kristi Noem is set to release a book in which she confesses to murdering a puppy, an anecdote that is supposed to demonstrate how tough she is, I guess.
While reading the South Dakota psychopath’s account of shooting a dog she admits in print that she “hated,” I reflected on my own reaction years ago to Mitt Romney’s tale of stashing a crated dog on the roof of his station wagon during a family trip.
What Romney did to his dog was cruel — the poor pooch was so terrified it had explosive diarrhea. But the bar is so much lower today, not just for GOP pols but for the public.
In a just world, puppy murderer Kristi Noem wouldn’t be able to show her face in public without her noggin becoming a target for rotten produce hurled by an angry mob. But in this world, I expect the brouhaha will be short lived, and voters and media figures will soon treat Noem like a normal pol instead of a deranged dog killer. Woof!
TBone
Chef’s Kiss Award of the Day (so far):
https://digbysblog.net/2024/04/27/is-it-the-full-moon/
😆
Ken
Asking easy questions, like “what newspapers and magazines do you read”.
Scout211
I love the puppy pics that President Biden and VP Harris posted immediately after the Kristi Noem book revelations.
I have been thinking about what Noem wrote in her book and in addition to being sickened and appalled, I have been wondering why she would write that in her book. Those fluffy books are often seen as the next step toward higher political office.
The excerpt in question paints her in such a bad light (to say the least) that she has been universally criticized. There are even stories in the media declaring that she has blown her chances for the VP nomination. She has been defending her sickening actions in the media as those typical of the tough choices of a ranch owner these days. But the way she defends herself is right out of ranching life in the Wild West, not in today’s modern world with veterinarians, rescue groups and obedience training.
My only guess is that today’s MAGA Republicans are all cosplaying the over-the-top “tough guy/gal” stereotype and are completely unaware when they play that role so over-the-top that they become horrid, frightening cartoon characters of toughness. Just a guess.
But seriously, Kristi Noem, why?
ETA: Betty C said it also @13
ETA2: But still Noem, why?
stinger
Please do not let the Noem confession poison every thread.
lowtechcyclist
@Ken:
Easy if you’re not Sarah Palin, that is!
RaflW
I had no idea who Katie Rogers was. But now that I see she’s a NYT politics hack, that response-xit is perfection.
VFX Lurker
@NotMax: Lovely music. I did not know harmonicas came in different sizes like that (ex: “double bass”).
Kay
@Scout211:
Maybe she just kills dogs. She loudly announced her support for forcing ten year old rape victims to carry the child of their rapist six months ago so the fact that she randomly executes her own pets in fits of rage doesn’t surprise me a bit.
No sympathy for 4th graders! They must be punished for their sins.
MazeDancer
Really wanted to use the new IRS service. Didn’t want to give the gov a video of me for an id.
So, alas, paper tax return again.
lowtechcyclist
@Kay:
Or for their stepfathers’ sins, or whoever’s.
TBone
KBO! 🎶
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yzLT6_TQmq8
Not music: In the man’s own words, and voice:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wVEiskNv1hs
RaflW
@zhena gogolia: I’ve never been a Stern guy, but friends have over the years mentioned several interviews he’s done that I shoulda listened to. My sense is he does a good job of gaining rapport and making the interview flow and hold the listeners interest.
Roger’s softball snark is just obvious sour grapes. The Times really beclowned themselves with the Biden bitterness revelation.
Harrison Wesley
DeSantis – Noem ’28! I smell victory all over this one!
OK, maybe that’s not victory that I’m smelling.
Baud
@Kay:
It’s a one way ratchet for them. Always more cruelty. Otherwise, the dam will break and they’d be wiped out.
Kay
@lowtechcyclist:
Oh, they think the 4th grade girl is the sinner. Trust me. A temptress. There’s an entire genre of online accounts written by young women who escaped various fundamentalist religions. Most of them were either molested or abused. They have whole support groups.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: Good point. She’s thoroughly demonstrated that she’s a horrible person many times over, so we should expect her to do horrible things.
I’m fascinated sometimes by the lengths to which wingnuts will go to excuse objectively awful behavior, so I looked at some commentary on the Noem controversy on hard-right sites. Unsurprisingly, it’s grist for the phony rural vs. urban grievance mill.
TBone
@Harrison Wesley: something is rotten in Denmark.
Anne Laurie
My best guess, having grown up around too many angry drunks: Noem was literally PISSED past her emotional safeguards — teenagers & cranky elders, even when they’re dogs & goats, will do that to ya — and decided (or was persuaded by her ghost writer) to present it as a ‘slice of life on the ranch’ before too many potential opponents started a whisper campaign about her bad judgement.
Glass half full, she doesn’t seem to have shot at, or even threatened to shoot at, her actual human children. Low bar, but better than quite a few Republican candidates can surmount these days.
As others on social media have pointed out, Noem also had a very personal relationship with Corey Lewandowski, who is the epitome of an angry alcoholic. Like calls to like!
sdhays
@Kay: I wasn’t shocked either, although I wonder if the admission of cold slaughter would give Trump pause. He’s probably torn. He hates dogs, but he doesn’t want his VP prepared to take him out back and shoot him either.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
Whitmer and Walz (governors of MI and MN) posted photos of them and their dogs – pretty funny response.
schrodingers_cat
@MazeDancer: I have been using efile.com for years now. Its about $50 for both state and federal tax return with multiple itemized deductions.
Kay
@sdhays:
Oh, he’s cruel. He’ll love it. But she’s kidding herself. He hates women. He’s never picking her, no matter how many pathetic publicity stunts she tries.
TBone
If you can’t train a dog, you’re a gatdamned moron. Ferfukksake, I trained my cats to come when called and never cross our property’s boundary lines on 3 different properties. Cats! And my Dad trained our Siamese to go on the toilet. All he had to do was flush. Which is what should be done with the Noem book and this entire episode.
Captain C
@Scout211:
Perhaps she thinks that TIFG hates puppies too (not an unreasonable assumption) and that by including the story, she could gain his approval, as well as portraying herself as the type of hard woman who could make the ‘necessary choices’ as veep? Add to it being stuck in the bubble of whatever conservatism has degraded to these days, and not realizing that any normies reading this will be appalled (and besides, their opinions don’t count as they’re not ‘Real Americans’, right?).
Kay
NYTimes has a puff portrait of JD Vance up – he’s “wonky and well spoken”, they coo. Also- he attended an Ivy League! The ninnies eat that up.
Clearly their pick for Trump’s VP. What an embarrassing paper.
Baud
@Kay:
The NYT will go full wingnut like Fox in our lifetime.
ETA: I’m probably being too optimistic about the time I have left.
sdhays
@Kay: I hope they gave him the patented NYT dementia test that only NYT can administer.
MazeDancer
@Betty Cracker:
Remarkably, “catturd”, the MAGA Twitter commenter, posted an anti-Noem screed.
Stealing myself, I unblocked his feed long enough to read the comments. 80% angry pet lovers.
Plenty of guys who hunt love their bird dogs. And sound like Rick Wilson, who hunts, and has dogs. He has one pup that couldn’t hunt and is now a pet.
Wilson was loud anti-Kristi all day.
RevRick
@Baud: According to the NYT any interview that doesn’t frame questions for Democrats in the “When will you apologize to the American people for your failed Afghanistan exit?” mode is, by definition, a softball interview.
Kay
@Baud:
They have another article up about how the same cohort of kids who missed their HS graduation will now miss their college graduation (because the people who run universities are incompetent, panic stricken cowards). The NYTimes is handwringing over this.
Like anyone in this country even likes young people. Please. We want them all to just go away and the NYTimes leads in that.
TBone
Never give up.
https://www.livescience.com/physics-mathematics/quantum-physics/tweak-to-schrodingers-cat-equation-could-unite-einsteins-relativity-and-quantum-mechanics-study-hints
Sanjeevs
Here are the opening questions from the 2019 Editorial board of NYT
There is no indication that you or your son did anything wrong or were part of any corruption in Ukraine. But you still haven’t really answered the question of whether or not you think it’s proper for the son of a sitting vice president of the United States to serve on the board of a foreign company that’s being investigated.
KK: Would you be in favor of a law banning the children of sitting presidents and vice presidents from serving on foreign companies’ boards?
Kay
@sdhays:
They swooned over him right from the start. I wrote here about how the NYTimes coverage of the Vance v Ryan senate race was basically a Vance campaign contribution.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: Oof, what a gross article! Vance is the “intellectual standard-bearer for Trumpism”? Okay, if that’s what Vance is, maybe the Times could share the “intellectual” case for putting a decompensating narcissist criminal defendant and coup-plotter in charge again. Jesus. Also, the normalization of Don. Jr., who is objectively nuttier than a squirrel turd. Ugh!
Bex
Crazy psychotic scumbags…ya noem when ya see ’em. And, as EFG said, fuckem.
Soprano2
@Kay: Yep, the man is never at fault with them, it’s always that the girl did something that “made” them molest her. They couldn’t help themselves, if only she had been less tempting it wouldn’t have happened. 🙄🙄🙄🙄
TBone
Good news on PTSD.
https://www.livescience.com/health/genetics/ptsd-tied-to-95-risk-hotspots-in-the-genome
Jackie
@Scout211: Another post about Noem murdering a puppy.
Maybe the next post will be different. 😞
Cheryl from Maryland
@Scout211: Noem mentions that, after her killings, she noticed she had witnesses.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
It’s so funny how after years of watching this one can tell when they’re promoting A New Right Wing Star. Vance isn’t (actually) likeable or appealing or interesting so Trump may pick him but he’ll end up like Mike Pence – signing books at Right wing grifter events. He’s a dud.
They’re poor judges of character,sure, but they’re also poor judges of political talent. Remember- these are the people who think Biden can’t win, even though Joe Biden has been elected over and over and over.
hueyplong
I say just straight up go to war with the NYT. Let people who read it know up front, in all caps, that negative stories are part of a war and not something to be taken at face value.
If they tank, c’est la guerre. Any entity supporting the junior senator from Ohio is asking for it.
SiubhanDuinne
@NotMax:
That was wonderful!
But … Irish folk song? 😂
Betty Cracker
The NYT reporter who horked up the JD Vance puff piece used to be a foreign correspondent. That’s a data point against one of my pet theories. I used to believe that if the Times (and other outlets that are attempting to both-sides us into a fascist dictatorship) replaced the shitty brand-building national political reporters with foreign correspondents, it would result in less awful coverage. Maybe not!
RandomMonster
@Betty Cracker: I think she’s communicating to Trump and the wider wingnutsphere that she’s not going to let soft-hearted lib sentimentality stop her from doing anything for her cause, including violence. It’s very “When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun” fascistic. To Trump, she’s saying she would not have certified that election.
hueyplong
@Betty Cracker: It’s worth recalling that their foreign correspondents probably fueled the soft caresses they gave Hitler.
Harrison Wesley
Another post full of sneering big-city libtards dumping on rural Merka. Y’all are just too stuck up on your woke nonsense that you don’t see that in the West, the real Merkin West, a little lady’s gotta do what a little lady’s gotta do. Sometimes it’s a puppy; sometimes it’s a goat; occasionally it’s somebody who oughn’t to have wandered off Pine Ridge….
Frankensteinbeck
@Scout211:
Because the core of the conservative movement are hateful cowards who desperately wish they could kill anyone and anything they dislike. She is telling them that she has the guts to do it. A lot of them will love her for it. That she’s killing helpless pets just makes it better.
However, outside of that core, it paints her as a psychopath that everyone else is repulsed by. Since she is clearly part of that core, she probably isn’t aware.
@sdhays:
Yeah, good point. He’s the ultimate hateful coward. A woman who has ever actually wielded a gun might terrify him. At the same time, I guarantee he’s “Fuck, yeah!” on shooting misbehaving dogs.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
I like to think about how wrong they were about Ron DeSantis. My God, they could not have promoted “anti woke” more and it just flopped outside of Florida. I actually looked at Bari Weiss commentary after the midterms and she was genuinely surprised anti woke didn’t carry the country – all her friends were mad at the Oberlin sophomores! Joe Rogan predicted a red wave based on anti woke-ism. Living in their own little bubble.
Vance is kind of a stiff. He really is DeSantis-like in terms of people skills.
Mapaghimagsik
@Baud:
Will their readers notice? It seems like to reflexively say they read the New York Times rather than actually think about what they supposedly read.
Soprano2
@Kay: I wonder how many “hard-hitting” questions they asked him. Because they told us this week how important that is to them. Probably none.
lollipopguild
@Ken: “All of them Katie” I remember watching the interview and thinking that Palin was both stupid and lazy.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Ken: Is the answer “All of them, Katie”
ETA: lollipopguild beat me to it!
Elizabelle
The FTF NYTimes just reeks of elitism and nepo babies with no self awareness. You have Putz Sulzberger, and editor Joe Kahn is from a wealthy family, with a Harvard degree. It shows. They are SO out of touch.
I hope Biden never does another interview with them. Unless maybe with their book reviewer, Dwight Garner.
Biden is invisible on their website. Which is a Trumparama. That is ridiculous.
We laugh at DougJ’s trolling, but if he’s pulled back the curtain on the wizards at “the paper of record,” that is an enormous service.
Soprano2
@Kay: Yeah, he was “brave” enough to write things about poor rural whites that have been said about poor urban blacks forever. 🙄 They lap that stuff up.
Scout211
I know that this subject is horrific and truly sickening, as are many comments and posts about Trump’s behavior, and the ongoing wars we are all discussing. There are a lot of things going on in the world that are hard to read.
If you read my post I did not describe what she did, which your comment actually did.
But even though I hate that we are talking about this, IMHO, we do need to understand this Republican tendency to highlight the cruelty of their behavior as an actual campaign strategy. Maybe others don’t need to know this, just condemning it is enough. But I really am wondering why this behavior was not edited out of her book or advised against it by her team of political advisers. Because if it works, we absolutely need to have something that counters this.
The puppy pics with POTUS and VPOTUS were a very good response.
Old Dan and Little Ann
Biden spoke freely and easily with Stern for about a 70 minutes. He shared some wonderful family stories. He talked about drumpf, the Supreme Court (admitting he had to be careful). He also made it sound like it was his mom at a family meeting that helped him see the light on accepting Obama’s VP offer. I’ve always enjoyed Howard Stern fwiw. Going way back to being a dumb kid watching his late 80’s or early 90”s TV show.
Frankensteinbeck
@Kay:
Yep. This. I know these people too well. A woman/girl had sex, so she must be punished. Consent is irrelevant. They don’t care about consent. Not just ‘They do it anyway’, the whole worldview considers consent unimportant. Remember Limbaugh saying in horrified mockery that liberals would approve of any kind of sex if both partners consented?
So that it was rape doesn’t matter. The man might, maybe be judged, because it’s an inappropriate pairing. Mostly he’s just being a man. It’s the girl who’s done something bad. With that as the baseline, they just pick their favorite explanation.
Soprano2
@Kay: Oh it’s not gone. Bill Maher still thinks that if Biden loses it’ll be because of “woke”. I see that he had JFK, Jr on his show this week. It’s funny, he always cites the same few things when he talks about it. You’d think if it were a huge problem he could come up with new examples.
Ksmiami
We also don’t shoot puppies in the face but hey…
Chief Oshkosh
@Scout211:
I think part of what you said is correct – she wrote the story about killing the puppy and goat because she thinks it will play well with the electorate. She’s that far into the bubble, a bubble that she thinks includes over half the electorate.
However, she actually did the acts because she is, simply, a monster. Electing a sociopath is exactly what I would expect of the GOP.
cmorenc
@Betty Cracker:
Had Noem instead focused on a reason for putting the dog down such a track record of becoming unpredictably aggressive and biting people, her tale would be relatable and understandable, even though we might still not be on-board with her putting the dog down via gunshot rather than via veterinarian-assisted euthanasia. What makes her case so repulsive is her focus on her annoyance at the dog’s failure as a hunting dog as a prime reason to put the dog down. She also mentions the final straw being the dog got loose at a neighbor’s place and killed a couple of chickens running around their yard. Um…one of the most predictable phenomenon is that an unrestrained dog from a breed with hunting instincts will have their prey-instincts triggered around a bunch of chickens running loose. It was her fault the dog got loose and killed a couple of chickens. Nevertheless, the question that screams out to me is: had the dog instead shown promise in its training as a hunting dog, would Noem likely have abruptly put the dog down over the chicken incident? I don’t think so.
I do get the rural mentality about putting down seriously problematic animals via well-aimed gunshot. My father-in-law was an elderly farmer who one Sunday afternoon called me over to his lawn chair, where he sat with a shotgun in his lap. He said “Chris, that cat (pointing to a beautiful large snow-white cat about 50 feet away) is attacking and chasing away my barn cats I keep around to control rats. My hands aren’t steady enough anymore for me to accurately take a shot – I need you to shoot the cat for me.” Now to be fair, beautiful and on first glance harmless-and-pettable looking as this cat was, he was actually completely feral and would have ripped your face off if you tried to even get too close to it. Even though I was a city-boy who hadn’t shot a gun in 20 years, it was a request I could not refuse without extreme loss of face. I shot the cat, killed it cleanly with one shot.
In the circumstances, there was no other way to humanely put down this problematic feral cat other than to shoot it while we had a clean kill shot at it – my father-in-law didn’t hate the cat, but had a sound practical reason for needing it dispatched so it wouldn’t kill or chase off the barn cats needed to control the rats.
Geminid
If I could take over the NYT‘s assignment desk I’d task a couple correspondents with writing an in-depth article about the Missouri Senate race. They’d be like “Wow! Hawley and Kuntz are both Ivy Leaguers! We’ll get right on this.”
Then I’d tell them that reporting from diners would not make it into the article, but that reporting from beauty parlors, barber shops, Starbucks shops and farmers markets would.
I’d wait until the reporters were on their way to give those instructions. Hopefully, they would produce the article before the other editors figured out something funny was going on at the assignments desk and called security.
Ksmiami
@Elizabelle: they spoofed themselves, Doug just amplified it best…
RaflW
@Sanjeevs: Hopefully Biden went off non-stop about Kusher’s side deals, Ivanka’s Chinese purses and the Trump son’s tissue thin ‘separation’ of the Trump D.C. hotel (rented by every consigliere seeking succor) from Daddy Don.
Followed by one of ol Joe’s patented “Look, if the American people want to ban adult children of sitting presidents and vice presidents from backroom deals and scams, I’m for it — just look at the record I just cited. But Congress hadn’t put those rules in place, and I don’t control my son, he’s a grown up and makes his own decisions. But he also never had a desk in the West Wing nor even a WH security badge, so let’s get serious here and move on to questions that matter to normal people.”
lowtechcyclist
@Kay:
It’s a tough contest who the most loathsome person in the U.S. is, besides Dump himself. IMHO, it’s a dead heat between Vance and Stephen Miller.
The FTFNYT should check out his Xitter feed to see how ‘wonky and well-spoken’ he is. (I haven’t been on that site since last fall, but unless he’s cleaned up his act considerably, I’d think it would be tough for even the FTFNYT fellators to deal with.
catclub
Pretty sure that Trump hates dogs.
Chief Oshkosh
@cmorenc:
Agreed. But also…
She shot the dog because it embarrassed her in front of her neighbors. Plain and simple.
She is an absolute horror
ETA: Yes, growing up in the country, I saw examples of euthanasia. As you note, Noem’s killing of the puppy was not that.
Frankensteinbeck
@catclub:
Yeah, but he loathes strong women and is enough of a con man to be aware that most people think killing dogs is repulsive.
wenchacha
Mistermix may have commentary?
Monroe County, NY DA Sandra Doorley, who I do not like, is about to go through some things. I hope.
https://13wham.com/news/local/body-camera-video-of-monroe-county-district-attorney-sandra-doorleys-traffic-stop-webster-speeding-da-phillips-road-police-chief-officer
George
@Scout211: Why? Because psychopaths gotta be psychopaths. What Noem did is a nod to other psychopaths in the country, and to those people who are flying monkeys on behalf of psychopaths.
As long as there is no accountability for what people like Noem do, they will keep doing it. If shooting her dog because she claimed it was not trainable does not turn the stomach of MAGAts, then nothing will. And there will, of course, be no accountability from News Nation or Fox or any other source of rightwing swill. They are in a continuing state of doubling down on malice.
These people are sadists.
TBone
Ya can’t shake a fascism tree and expect a hippie to fall out.
lowtechcyclist
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
I beat you both to it all the way back @18. :-D
Ken
It all makes sense now. Noem asked herself, “who was a successful Republican VP” and decided to emulate Dick Cheney.
JPL
@wenchacha: Whoops!
Frankensteinbeck
@George:
The cruelty is the point. Why would it stop at other humans?
JPL
@George: Corey Lewandowski better watch his step. She might decide he’s unruly and deserving of the gravel pit treatment.
TBone
I love these weekly recaps.
https://www.jefftiedrich.com/p/this-week-in-stupid-april-27-edition
Inimitable
sab
@Kay: My ten year old granddaughter just had her first period! We are all in shock. She is just a baby still.
ETA I don’t know what we are feeding the kids today but we need to fix it
ETA Contrary to the nutso feminists in the UK maybe all our kids need a brief stint on puberty blockers.
The Kropenhagen Interpretation
Best sentence I’ve seen at the NY Times in decades.
George
@Chief Oshkosh: Or, more likely, she shot the dog because she is a sadist, unrelated to any embarrassment that the dog allegedly caused her. Don’t rationalize the behavior of a sadist. Noem simply finds pleasure in harming or killing things that are vulnerable and innocent, then concocting flimsy reasons to camouflage her behavior. Having dealt with psychopaths in the past, and currently, I guarantee you that Noem gets an ego boost when she sees the outrage she caused.
RaflW
@Elizabelle: Another thing I’m sure the Times hates: this Admin has, at least to my perception, been even more watertight than No Drama Obama.
It’s very telling that none of the ‘Biden is old’ bullshit ever got even an unnamed source inside the WH to whisper any worries.
And basically nothing leaks. Sure unnamed sources share things, but it basically comes off as authorized pre-placing of things the admin wants out there.
It’s an incredibly tight ship, and that competence irritates the NYT even more than it seems to bug the local Beltway bloviators.
The Kropenhagen Interpretation
Points for consistency. Republicans clearly believe that various populations contain inferior stock and such elements need to be…excised.
kindness
What I don’t get and I haven’t seen explained is why Noem didn’t just give the dog away if she didn’t like it. It would have taken zero effort to do that.
laura
Back to the interview- Howard Stern is a curious and nimble interview subject and he does a tremendous amount of preparation so that when his interviewer goes a roaming, he can go too, and the conversation does not suffer, but is improved as a result. On occasion, you can hear “the flow” and it is as good as an interview can get. The Bruce Springsteen interview is an example, as is the Steve Martin and Jane Fonda, but the Hillary Clinton interview was one of the absolute best in it’s warmth, humor and humanity- and it crushed for what could have been. Had she done that interview as a candidate, it would have been a bracing tonic against emails and Comey. Le sigh.
Love him, hate him, or know little about him, Howard Stern is a very competent and insightful interviewer and his subjects are very interesting individuals who open up in surprising ways. I have Sirius xm in the car and hope to catch the entire Biden interview on a pleasant drive, but I appreciate that Stern dressed in a manner that signaled to the viewer that this was an honor and that respect for Biden and the Office was on offer as well.
Kay
@RaflW:
That’s loyalty. Biden’s hires are loyal to him. Its a real “tell” for a manager- Trump’s hires either hate him and leak shit about him or are afraid of him so embarrass themselves with groveling.
Trump never should have been hired. Besides all the cruelty and stupidity he’s just a shitty executive. He can’t run anything.
RaflW
@Scout211: I won’t dip into what Noem did, but her behavior seems to sync with the whole GOP becoming a Christian death cult.
Really, folks. Give it a read. The party denying carpenters and laborers rest & water breaks is part of it. Removing health and safety regs from workplaces (and saying that 14 year olds are ‘adult’ enough to work in those hazardous places).
Obviously, denying life & health of mother access to abortion is part of the death cult.
I’m glad to hear that, outside the crazed bubble, normal people are expressing serious revulsion. But I can’t help but think Noems bizarre admission may still move the window of at least partially-accepted violence further open.
sab
@laura: I too am a Stern fan.
zhena gogolia
@Jackie: It’ll peter out, someday. (I hope.)
sab
@kindness: The cruelty was the point. Lesson to her kids and signal to her fans.
Kay
@kindness:
Ownership is a big deal to authoritarian Right wingers. She owns the dog so can kill the dog. We joke at the courthouse that Right wingers don’t “have” children, they take title to children. Like a truck.
Everything around an authoritarian belongs to them. The “other” only exists in relation to themselves.
It’s all “my, me” but most especially MINE. It’s why absusive spouses kill their spouse rather than divorce – the person belongs to them.
sab
@RaflW: They forget that Jesus was a carpenter.
laura
@sab: the list of things I admire about you grows longer every day. I’m glad we share an admiration of the king of all media😚
Ceci n est pas mon nym
I would be disgusted and appalled but not entirely surprised if I found out MAGA-land was on the side of that guy who shot a girl for turning around in his driveway. Stand your ground, right?
pat
@RaflW:
Is that a verbatim comment from Biden? If not, please say so. Otherwise it might end up somewhere that it doesn’t belong, as a verbatim comment.
sab
@Kay: So very very true. Small town lawyers do live in the real world.
lowtechcyclist
@Kay:
But more important, he didn’t hire people who were already loyal to him. He hired talented, competent people, and they’re loyal to him because he trusts them and gives them full responsibility. Which is also why his Administration has accomplished so incredibly much.
TBone
@sab: my brother’s son went through puberty really early as well. My brother was shocked when he needed deodorant before junior high. Maybe growth hormones in our food supply was a bad idea.
TBone
@RaflW: 👍
I have particular insight into the phenom of wanting to die, celebrating because Heaven can’t wait! from a very close friend who was thusly brainwashed and cuckoo bananas. It is to laugh because it was the only thing that worked on her. I used to tell her “Where you Russian off to? I thought you were an American!”
lowtechcyclist
@RaflW:
Well sure, if 10 year olds are old enough to give birth, then what can’t a 14 year old do, amirite?
Frankensteinbeck
@Kay:
I would expect them to act like this in court, and it is oddly validating to hear that they do it enough it’s a cliche. A lot of evangelical public policy is based on their desire for legal and societal support in their having absolute ownership of their children.
Yeah. Thank you for phrasing it that way. I knew, but hearing it put in those words gives me some personal insights.
TBone
@sab: Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenters!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raise_High_the_Roof_Beam,_Carpenters_and_Seymour:_An_Introduction
sab
@sab: My periods were never a problem. Messy but no pain no cramps. Her mother’s were debilitating. I hope hers are like mine. I know women with migraines who had hysterectomys to stop the pain.
Frankensteinbeck
@TBone:
Half of Hans Christian Andersen’s writing, right there. It’s part of the moral of The Little Mermaid, even.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: I’ve noticed the “like a truck” attitude toward children in my neck of the woods too. And sometimes the kids even get truck names (i.e., place names that are truck names). I know a Sierra and a Dakota. No F-250s though. ;-)
Uncle Cosmo
Interesting. Did you need special glasses to see him? Did he use a medium or an Ouija board or both?
(Yeah I know, Fingerfehler. Just having some fun.)
Elizabelle
@RaflW: True. And, I have not read the Politico story about Putz, but clearly some folks at and around the FTF NYTimes have been leaking themselves, no?
Re Biden: Personally, I find competence sexy.
TBone
@Frankensteinbeck: my grandmother gave me an illustrated, leather bound and gold-leaf trimmed volume of all Hans’ works when I was wee. I was too young to know anything but how strange it all seemed. She didn’t give me my first Bible (paperback) until years later. Her name was Marion Strange and she taught second grade for 40 years.
ETA the music box jewelry box she gave me had a pop up ballerina and played Lara’s Theme from Dr. Zhivago.
Kay
@Frankensteinbeck:
I think about it a lot. Right wingers make fun of how liberals speak to children – that we have a dialogue, a back and forth. They just give orders. But there’s a lot research that says a dialogue (although more difficult than giving orders) produces better adjusted adults. They’re learning how to manage conflict – “use your words” – learning that a conflict with a parent can be resolved calmly and peacefully. They take that into adulthood.
Giving the dog away would remove the dog from her control, and she can’t have that.
lowtechcyclist
@RaflW:
I did. I won’t go into it here, but that was one pathetically weak argument.
Frankensteinbeck
@TBone:
Strange and creepy. There’s a level of public knowledge where people think he told fairy tales like The Little Mermaid movie. There’s a level of public knowledge where people know those stories weren’t as cute, but think the difference was violence. Then you actually read HCA and it’s just so WTF. All the stories whose moral is ‘Life sucks and the only real happy ending is going to heaven’ is just the start.
I like to read source material, and it leaves me with a terrible urge to share the horror.
3Sice
The Vance noise puts self funding at the top of the job requirements list. Chumming to see if Thiel will hit on Donnie’s wallet inspector routine.
He’ll try to sell the VP seat to the highest bidder, and when that falls apart, make a self defeating impulse choice on a tarmac somewhere.
It won’t be Noem, not matter how willing she is to debase herself.
sab
@Kay: I have always thought that RWNJs think that sociopathy is a useful life skill. They do not want our schools to train it out of their children.
Frankensteinbeck
@Kay:
A good point, but also, it’s her property. If she doesn’t like it, she’s entitled to destroy it. She ought to destroy it, she’s proving her virtue, because it has no purpose if she isn’t enjoying it.
TBone
@Frankensteinbeck: I read a volume of Russian fairy tales while I was detoxing from pain meds. Talk about horror! 😆 DARK
Kay
I have to go trim the boxwood at the law office. The lawn service does an aggressively bad job at it so I told them to leave my boxwood alone- maybe they hate boxwood because they smell like cat pee? Understandable.
Luckily there’s only four of them. I need them perfectly rounded.
Soprano2
@Uncle Cosmo: Yeah wrong initials, you know who I mean. It’s early for a Saturday.
sab
@3Sice: Yep. However awful Noem is, to them she is still just a chick.
Matt McIrvin
@TBone:
Charles Mingus, of all people, wrote a pamphlet on how to do this. His seems to have been a painstaking process of teaching the cat to use a cardboard litter box on top of the toilet and then gradually tearing the box away.
sab
@Kay: Hehe. Life is full of problems.
TBone
@Matt McIrvin: that’s exactly how it’s done. Dad practiced exercising his patience muscles on me. I was a study! 😁
sab
@Matt McIrvin: My five cats all defiantly think outside all their boxes.
TBone
@sab: 💙
ETA a favorite meme: ten boxes sitting on a dirt road, all filled to the brims with cat ass. “The cat traps are working!”
Frankensteinbeck
@TBone:
The first edition Brothers Grimm fairy tales, before Wilhelm started editing them to reflect his morality, aren’t all that horrifying. They’re weird. Batshit weird. Like, the Frog Prince? The princess doesn’t turn the frog back to human with a kiss. She turns the frog back to human by flinging him at a wall when he asks to sleep in her bed with her. When he does turn human, she is delighted for him to join her in bed.
Wilhelm thought that was a bad moral, so by the seventh edition most modern Americans know he’d completely changed it.
EDIT – Oh, and how can I forget the story where the Virgin Mary steals babies?
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: My mom was a school psychologist, and she’s never come across as the kind of warm person who love-bombs you–she’s got a cynical edge, but kids love talking to her almost universally. It’s because she always treated kids as intellectual equals, even very little ones. That respect is like a magnet.
TBone
@Frankensteinbeck: yep. Strange!
🎶
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-Wtj59opWKg
TBone
@Matt McIrvin: my mom student taught at my elementary school. She and grandmother used to print flash cards for their students. One day, taped to the door of my kindergarten classroom door, I saw a flashcard in grandmother’s handwriting. It said “voila” and that’s how they taught me to speak French at 4 y.o. without a single clue. I turned that word over in my mind for a long time before blurting out “WAH LA!!!”
Matt McIrvin
@sab: The two I’ve currently got are very good about it, but they’ll dig very energetically and if you’re not really on top of keeping that box clean, there will be ejecta.
TBone
I saw Heart up close at a tiny venue in Houston
🎶
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zxrbU2pgiPI
opiejeanne
@pat: Note the word “hopefully” at the beginning of the comment.
sab
@Frankensteinbeck: I remember that story about the virgin Mary stealing babies. I loved the book because I love Kay Nielsen drawings.
MazeDancer
@3Sice:
That is so right on. But it has to be a pliable rich guy. No smart, independent thinker types.
prostratedragon
DougJ:
Frankensteinbeck
@3Sice:
This sounds correct to me. Nobody is going to be willing to pay the millions it will take for selling the VP slot to be worth it to him. Even considering how cheap a chiseler he is, the amount of money he needs makes anything less than a million worthless.
Ken
@prostratedragon: Works on multiple levels, since the only reason Dean Phillips was a challenger was certain media outlets pushing him as if he had a chance.
Melancholy Jaques
@hueyplong:
I enjoy Biden’s trolling from time to time, but I’d prefer he be the happy warrior selling his accomplishments. Let others get into it with the FTFNYT. Just tell the truth about it over and over and over and over and let them get into the business of defending themselves.
Melancholy Jaques
@Ken:
Everyone knew he had no chance, the media and other forces pushed him so that he could be a source of negative stories about Biden that were sourced to a Democrat.
Baud
@Melancholy Jaques:
Agreed.
Juju
@Kay: Japanese or Asian boxwood does not have that cat pee smell. English boxwood does smell like cat pee.
TBone
😆 was supposed to be a reply to Prostrate Dragon on DougJ
Frankensteinbeck
@Melancholy Jaques:
I think it’s a little more layered than that. The media, even the liberal elements like MSNBC, were slavering for a contested Democratic primary, and especially someone to replace Biden. Honestly, same with Trump. They pretended every possible non-Trump was a real prospect to win. I can think of many possible reasons, but whatever their motivation, the national press was all in on this idea that it might not, probably would not be a Biden/Trump rematch. There are still people only waking up now to the fact that this is what we’re facing.
TBone
@sab: I bought this one!
https://www.wikiart.org/en/kay-nielsen/east-of-the-sun-and-west-of-the-moon-1914-1
Ksmiami
@Frankensteinbeck: a lot of old Croat and Romanian folk tales are like that. Like they don’t translate well and are puzzling to a western reader
Prometheus Shrugged
@Betty Cracker: Ever since the Mittens story broke, I’ve jokingly threatened misbehaving dogs (and even kids) in the car by shouting “ok who’s ready to ride Romney style.” I’m sure some PETA activists would be offended by that joke. I can’t even begin to imagine adapting it to Noem. I think this finishes her even if it’s a short lived headline.
Ksmiami
@catclub: but he is decent at marketing and don’t shoot a dog is like one of the biggest advertising precepts…
cmorenc
@Scout211: Had Noem cited the reason she put the dog down was because it had created a track record of unprovoked, dangerously aggressive attacking behavior toward other people, it would have been understandable as a tough thing she had to do, even though the dog could at times be joyful. But instead, she focused on her annoyance at the dog’s hunt-spoiling failure to be trainable as a hunting dog, and the chicken-killing incident at which she was at fault for letting a dog from a hunting breed loose in her neighbor’s yard where chickens were running loose. Quelle surprise – the chickens triggered the dog’s prey-pursuit instincts. So basically, she killed the dog because she was pissed off at it and embarrassed by the dog chasing down and killing a couple of her neighbor’s chickens – because she had irresponsibly failed to keep her dog leashed or contained in her vehicle so it wouldn’t get loose around her neighbor’s chickens. But of course it’s extremely unlikely she gave her kids an honest explanation why the dog went missing instead of some tough-love bullshit explanation.
Fair Economist
@sab:
Chemicals – and they are everywhere; water, food, and air. The effect of just one:
There are dozens of others known. And, literally, as in literally literally, tens of thousands of others that haven’t even been tested.
Fair Economist
@prostratedragon cites DougJ:
Yet strangely Biden is far better at his job.
like a metaphor
@Kay:
I think I see the problem here
Matt McIrvin
@cmorenc: One of the elements of rural farm and hunting culture traditionally has been a lack of what they see as hypocritical sentimentality about animals and the death of animals, and I think that was what Noem was trying to convey here (“effete urban liberals would find this shocking but you and I know that in this tough world sometimes you have to shoot Old Yeller,” etc.) But the way it was framed it does just come off as disturbed.
And, of course, it’s not as if urban liberals are unfamiliar with having to euthanize their pets–there just has to be a good reason.
wjca
So now we understand why TIFG cannot be simultaneously president and not-president. Not that his cult is interested in elitist stuff that you have to have an education to understand.
David 🏀Caitlin Clark🏀 Koch
@MazeDancer:
try https://www.freetaxusa.com/
Been using them for 15 years. Thorough and easy and I itemize.
NotMax
@SiubhanDuinne
Inorite?
:)
wjca
This.
You can tell something about a manager by how he manages people he inherited. But you can tell more by the people he hires himself.
Another Scott
Speaking of not giving up…
Nikki Fried is doing good things in Florida. Voters need to turn out and support her efforts.
Fingers crossed.
Cheers,
Scott.
Baud
@Another Scott:
👍
Tehanu
Me too. And when I downloaded the forms and support docs to do it on paper, it was ONE HUNDRED & THIRTY-EIGHT pages!! We ended up (luckily) finding an accountant who did it for less than $200 — and ours was “simple” as we didn’t itemize or have any investment income.
@Kay: If I were Child Protective Services, I’d get Noem’s kids out of there so fast it would be like teleportation. No child should be exposed to that kind of sadism and cruelty, let alone left under the control of a sadist.
@sab: Oh yes, Kay Nielsen! Wonderful pictures.
Eyeroller
@Matt McIrvin:My ancestors had farms and lived in rural areas and they never had this attitude. My grandfather hunted anything he could during the Depression (and before–they were poor) and once he could afford to buy meat, he stopped. He told me it was wrong to kill an animal for any reason other than you needed the food or it was sick. This was a guy who was intelligent but grew up in a hillbilly family and didn’t quite finish high school (because some itinerant preacher told his parents that too much book larnin’ was bad for young people).
Miss Bianca
@sab: My mother told me she got her first period at the age of 10. She was born in 1922. So…your granddaughter’s a little earlier than usual, but not freakishly so
ETA: the range of “normal” ages for first period given when I was a young one first learning about these things was “anywhere between 9 and 16.” I was 12 – right in the middle of the pack.
Denali5
It seems to me that our esteemed Congresswoman Lauren Boebart was reported by a neighbor to have shot her dog after the dog went after the Congresswoman’s sheep. We don’t understand this mentality, but it is out there.
wjca
I grew up rural, too. One time, the (suburban) mother of one of my classmates gushed to my mother “How wonderful for your children to have all these pets!” My mother looked blankly at her, and replied “The children don’t think they have pets. They have chores.” Which was exactly true.
We had lots of animals, generally for food. (There were cats — who were where cats belong: in the barn catching mice.) But no pets. As a result, I’ve never had pets since either. But I am still appalled by her behavior.
Miss Bianca
@prostratedragon: Ah, DougJ- on point and en fuego, per usual!
prostratedragon
@Kay: See Twin Peaks. That sense of “ownership” is one of the main, pervasive themes.
rikyrah
@Baud:
Softball?
As opposed to those hard questions from the NYT? 🤨🤨🙄🙄
rikyrah
@Kay:
They spent a year and a half fluffing up DeSantis.
Citizen Alan
@Betty Cracker: OTOH, I think the FTFNYT would be vastly improved if they fired 100 of their highest paid reporters and replaced them with 100 reporters from the top 20 college newspapers in the country.
Citizen Alan
Bold of you to assume that producing “better adjusted adults” plays any role in conservative/fundie child-rearing.
SteverinoCT
@lollipopguild:
I hate to have to defend Palin, but my take on that quote was that she was offended by the question: she took it as implying that there weren’t any “real” newspapers available in the provincial backwoods town of Anchorage. No, Katie, we get all of them. Bitch.