Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Relentless negativity is not a sign that you are more realistic.

People really shouldn’t expect the government to help after they watched the GOP drown it in a bathtub.

They were going to turn on one another at some point. It was inevitable.

“That’s what the insurrection act is for!”

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

Every reporter and pundit should have to declare if they ever vacationed with a billionaire.

They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

Days Since JD Vance Insulted Women Across America: Zero

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

Cole, when it comes to calico cats, restraint is overrated.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

I was promised a recession.

Balloon Juice, where there is always someone who will say you’re doing it wrong.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

Prediction: the gop will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

I really should read my own blog.

This blog will pay for itself.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Somebody needs to explain to DeSantis that nobody needs to do anything to make him look bad.

Compromise? There is no middle ground between a firefighter and an arsonist.

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

Maybe you would prefer that we take Joelle’s side in ALL CAPS?

You are here: Home / Elections 2024 / Dark & Stormy (Open Thread)

Dark & Stormy (Open Thread)

by | 114 Comments

This post is in: ,

We’re having another night like this as Tropical Storm Debby glides north in the Gulf of Mexico:

Post by @bettycrackerfl
View on Threads

We aren’t worried. Should be mostly a rain event for us, and the river is still low enough to have plenty of capacity.

The frogs are singing their little green butts off! The weather is surprisingly pleasant, breezy and mild.

When not ensconced on the porch with an eye on the weather, I’m rewatching “The West Wing,” mostly as background noise that’s entertaining but doesn’t require focus. Despite its famous flaws, it’s a helluva series.

The series is 20 years old, but the political issues explored are in most cases exactly the same, which underscores the Sisyphean nature of the struggle for progress. Good reminder!

Anyhoo, open thread.

Reader Interactions

114Comments

  1. 1.

    pcpablo

    I watched the entire West Wing before, during and after the Trump fiasco, and during his reign I referred to it as a ‘comedy’ with no basis in reality.

  2. 2.

    FastEdD

    Stay safe, BC. My favorite turtle was named Sisyphus. He was so sweet. I miss that boy. He was a painted turtle and I have a rescue painted turtle now named Skittles who is just as nice.

  3. 3.

    opiejeanne

    My middle kid and her husband bought a tiny house in Sarasota for a rental and they’ve been working on turning it into a place someone might actually want to rent, so she’s there right now, trying to paint the outside in between the rainstorms. They’re turning a room at the rear that has a separate entrance into a place they can stay during Spring Training because he’s an Orioles fan.

    She called us tonight to show us the progress and said it hadn’t rained for the past hour.

    I worry because the darling little place they almost bought in Fort Myers is gone, as if scoured from the earth.

  6. 6.

    something fabulous

    wow just watching that from all the way across the country still makes me want to jump and hide under the covers! wowzrs

    [eta: to be clear, the storm, not the west wing! i think i can view that safely, but it’s been quite a while.]

  7. 7.

    HumboldtBlue

    I became a grand uncle for the dozenth time yesterday when my niece gave birth to a baby boy.

    All joy, so much joy.

  8. 8.

    Betty Cracker

    @Martin: The show’s worst sin was portraying Republicans as principled and reasonable, IMO. They weren’t then, and they aren’t now. It made sense as a fictional choice, but anyone who mistook the TV version for reality self-bamboozled.

    @HumboldtBlue: Mazel tov!

  10. 10.

    piratedan

    @Betty Cracker: it made the assumption that they were Americans first, Conservatives second… well, it was nice in theory.

    I hate to say that I also grew up thinking that we all wanted the same things, just disagreed on how to get there.  Have to say that growing up during the time of Watergate sure brought that actual reality home.  While I believe that there needs to be one, maybe even two opposition parties… the GOP has evolved into being a criminal gang with some incredibly fucking weird rituals and beliefs.  The really evil ones are the amoral bastards that just casually use everyone else as a means to an end.

    Unsure if we’re ever going to return to some kind of balance unless we (the sane) get over our squishiness and really fucking stomp on these asshats and punish them.

  13. 13.

    JoyceH

    I haven’t watched the West Wing for a few years, but though the heroes were all pretty dang noble, I recall plenty of careerism, venality and double dealing among the larger cast. What makes WW seem like such a pleasant fairy tale these days is that what was missing from the show was what we see too much of these days – crackpottery, abject stupidity and outright insanity. Even the dense characters (Governor Ritchie etc) were merely GW Bush level dense, not Tommy Tuberville dense. And I think the same could be said of the contemporary reality. Twenty years ago people as stupid as Tuberville or as crazy as Empty Gee couldn’t get elected.

  14. 14.

    Gvg

    Gainesville should get a lot of bands of rain, not quite get the full head of the storm. It’s  UF’s summer term exam week starting Monday so shut downs for weather are a little harder than usual if necessary. The interim President started Thursday, former retired one was available.
    I have so much to get done today instead of a restful weekend. Things have to be put away so they don’t fly away in a hurricane. Everything needs to be washed in case we lose power. Don’t expect to, but you can never count on a hurricane to do what it’s predicted to. This time though they say there are two pressure systems herding the path or something like that. Woke up early thinking of everything I have to do.

  16. 16.

    rikyrah

    Peanut just started watching the WW. Told her that there is no such thing as a good or decent Republican. Her values aren’t their values.

  20. 20.

    RedDirtGirl

    I love it! So dramatic! I remember a burst of lightening one summer night up in Maine that was like daylight had switched on for a split second.

  21. 21.

    JWR

    I just watched a great program on PBSwrld called “The Speech We Hate”. It looks at the whole censorship movement, from Gutenberg through the Nazis to Mario Savio with his great speech about letting the gears on the machine grind to a halt. Oh, and right at the end, Bill Maher explains why Cancel Culture is, with rare exception, the fault of the Left, because the Left has a stick up its ass and no sense of humor. Yeah, he cracks me up, too. ;)

    And looking at the The Speech We Hate site, where it seems it’s available to stream, I see that what I saw is the second of three parts. Next up: “Thought Police.”

  22. 22.

    RedDirtGirl

    @eclare: There is a really cool online sound generator. The creator has come up with hundreds of sounds that are adjustable. And as I understand it he actually has gone out and recorded them himself.

    Mynoise.net

  23. 23.

    NotMax

    Never seen The West Wing.

    At the moment watching A Family at War (early 1970s Brit series) on Prime.

  31. 31.

    TBone

    Wapoo headline last night:

    Trump congratulates Putin over deal that brought Evan Gershkovich home

    Response:

    @Weinsteinlaw
    1h
    No candidate for President of the United States should ever congratulate Vladimir Putin for anything

  32. 32.

    TBone

    @NotMax: I once had a lawyer threaten me with “liable” and I was laughing so hard I almost couldn’t respond to inform him that my defense was ironclad (and I had the photos to prove it).

    Then I told him to get a better assistant.

  33. 33.

    lowtechcyclist

    @TBone: ​
     

    Jeez, how many times does he have to tell people exactly whose side he’s on before the normies finally believe him??

    I hope the Harris campaign turns this into a theme because it’ll just be a one-day thing in the MSM.

  36. 36.

    lowtechcyclist

    @piratedan: ​

    I hate to say that I also grew up thinking that we all wanted the same things, just disagreed on how to get there. Have to say that growing up during the time of Watergate sure brought that actual reality home.

    For me, Watergate seemed to be more about Nixon and his henchmen than about the GOP generally. I remember the way Lowell Weicker questioned the henchmen who appeared before the Watergate committee in 1973, and that 7 out of 17 Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee voted for impeachment even before the ‘smoking gun’ – and once that came out, Rep. Wiggins, Nixon’s main defender on the committee, went on TV, said he was now for impeachment, and that if the Committee had to vote again, it would be 38-0 for impeachment.

    Well this time, we’ve had ‘smoking guns’ galore, and the GOP has excommunicated the few who’ve been willing to speak out against TFG. It’s a whole different ballgame.

    I’d argue that even through most of the 1980s, the trope that we all wanted the same things, just disagreed on how to get there, was still largely true. I think what changed that was Rush and Newt; they were all about tearing down Democrats so they didn’t have to make much of an argument for GOP policies, which gradually withered from that point on.

  37. 37.

    TBone

    @lowtechcyclist: they’ll never see this and, thus, it never happened.

    As painful as it is, this is why I go to tankie websites or watch Fux Snooze intermittently.  The news (and opinions sprouting therefrom) are like being on another planet.

    They’re dunking hard on Kamala, trying really hard to find something that’ll stick.  A critique of her statement at the hostage exchange.  Her “accent” changes from Black to Indian depending where she is.  Those two are merely the tip of the shitpile.

    Fercrissakes, she doesn’t even have an accent that I can discern, so deep fakes must be involved.

  38. 38.

    Betty Cracker

    @JoyceH: I thought it was amusing that WW’s dumbass Gov. Ritchie (R) was from Florida and a UF alum. IIRC, the most recent Gator gov was the last Democrat who held that office in the state — the great Lawton Chiles — and the destructive Repubs who followed him were all products of the Ivies.

  39. 39.

    lowtechcyclist

    @TBone:

    they’ll never see this and, thus, it never happened.

    As painful as it is, this is why I go to tankie websites or watch Fux Snooze intermittently. The news (and opinions sprouting therefrom) are like being on another planet.

    I’m talking about normies, not tankies or cultists.  People who don’t follow the news closely, let alone watch Faux News for hours each day.

    Like I said, it’ll take the Harris campaign making an issue of it, having a commercial that hits people over the head with how many times and ways he’s cozied up to Putin.

    But the cultists are out of reach, and who cares about the tankies.

  40. 40.

    Tony Jay

    Race riots spreading across the UK as the Far-Right uses social media to incite anti-brown people violence in the wake of an horrific knife attack on a group of little kids in Southport. Turns out the attacker was a deeply troubled Christian teen, but by the time that came out the usual suspects had already spewed lies about Muslim Murderers and organised the mobs to target mosques and asylum hostels.

    Yesterday Liverpool saw thousands of scumbags running riot in the Town centre, attacking overrun Police, fighting with smaller groups of antifa, just basically making a show of themselves. Then later that night a ‘protest march’ on a mosque in the Walton area turned into a full-scale riot that saw local wankers come out to burn a community centre while outside scumbags filmed them.

    I used to live in that area. That was my local library they burnt. Absolutely fuming. The brave new Government is making noises about ‘bringing the rioters to justice’, but I haven’t heard shit all about proscribing the Far-Right groups organising this, adding them to the Terrorist Watch List, banning any protest or gathering organised by or with them and arresting their leaders, which is what should be happening.

    Maybe Sir Starmer will have a look after his summer holibobs. Bit busy packing his starched shorts right now to worry about potential newnewlabourinc donors funding race riots. 😡

  41. 41.

    JWR

    @NotMax:

    Fingers crossed they don’t give short shrift to John Peter Zenger.

    If they covered him at all, it would’ve been in the first 15 minutes of the episode I saw, because that’s when I came in and he wasn’t mentioned after that. Too bad. But thanks for that link!

  43. 43.

    TBone

    @lowtechcyclist: where are normies going to see it though?  That was my point.  I digressed into a separate point to highlight our ‘Earth One’ and ‘Earth Two’ situation that causes a lot of people to simply tune it all out.  I am led to believe that most people get their news from social media now, only serving to further exacerbate the planetary problem.

    My hubby is my “normie” touchstone and he is thoroughly sick of the entire news situation.  He started watching old TV reruns instead of news each morning about a month ago.

  45. 45.

    lowtechcyclist

    @TBone:

    My hubby is my “normie” touchstone and he is thoroughly sick of the entire news situation. He started watching old TV reruns instead of news each morning about a month ago.

    First of all, the Harris campaign clearly knows their way around social media.  So I trust their ability to raise issues with people who get their news that way.

    Second, like you say, a lot of normies still watch TV.  I believed I mentioned commercials.

  46. 46.

    What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?

    @JoyceH: You can, of course, put TCFG in the too dumb to get elected back then pile, obviously. Also too racist. Back then then the is she black or is she Indian would have gotten him hounded out of politics. Ditto for half the other stuff he says. Now too many people including in the news media just accept it or ignore it.

  48. 48.

    narya

    @HumboldtBlue: I became a great aunt for the first time last week, via older nephew’s girlfriend. Younger nephew, OTOH, is apparently going to drop out of college a few credits from his engineering degree. He hasn’t discussed it w/ me yet, so we’ll see what’s up eventually, but it’s a wildly stupid idea. (He’s extremely bright, and his preferred careers would require the degree, so I have no clue what this is about.)

  50. 50.

    zhena gogolia

    @NotMax: I started watching when the West Wing was first on, and I couldn’t make it past the first 10 or 15 minutes. I found it insufferable.

  51. 51.

    lowtechcyclist

    @TBone:

    We think we’re tuning stuff out, but the number of commercial jingles I remember from 60 years ago, despite having not been much of a TV-watcher even then, says otherwise.

  53. 53.

    Baud

    @Tony Jay:

    I’ve already had a lovely time whenever I’ve visited UK. Hope your country and ours wakes up to the right wing agenda to sow hate.

  56. 56.

    Betty Cracker

    @Tony Jay: It’s a horrible situation — stay safe. Looks like we have fascist oligarch Elon Musk to thank for reinstating the far-right accounts that organized the riots.

  57. 57.

    narya

    @WereBear: Thanks–it’s completely nuts. I heard it from my mom, who found out through my other nephew. I decided to wait for him to tell me himself (we talk at least once a week most weeks, and often text about food, so. . . .).

  58. 58.

    lowtechcyclist

    @narya: ​
     

    I became a great aunt for the first time last week, via older nephew’s girlfriend. Younger nephew, OTOH, is apparently going to drop out of college a few credits from his engineering degree. He hasn’t discussed it w/ me yet, so we’ll see what’s up eventually, but it’s a wildly stupid idea. (He’s extremely bright, and his preferred careers would require the degree, so I have no clue what this is about.)

    Holy shit, I certainly hope you, or his parents, or someone can dissuade him from this insanity. He’s put in >90% of the work for a fraction of the benefit. You stop short, and you’ve got to convince potential employers of what you know, and you don’t get that many chances to even do that. But once you’ve got that degree, that credential never goes away, its presence on your resumé gets you through those doors.

    Hell, just hearing about it makes me want to jump through the internet and explain the facts of life to him personally.

    And Humboldt Blue, enjoy your latest round of great-unclehood!

  59. 59.

    Geminid

    @lowtechcyclist: Foreign matters typically are not very salient isssues in American political campaigns. Ukraine could be an exception this year, I think. There are Republic and Independent Ukraine Hawks who will vote Harris this November because they see support for Ukraine and NATO as paramount issues.

    There may not be a lot of these voters, but most would otherwise be reliable Republican voters. And the Ukraine issue implicates Trump’s character because he so clearly is in Putin’s pocket on Ukraine and Nato. That is, obvious to anyone who pays attention and these people do. And when it comes to Trump, the general issue of character is the sticking point for many Republicans and Republican-leaning Independents.

  61. 61.

    TS

    We had a cyclone Debbie in 2017 which caused mayhem down the Queensland Coast & into Northern NSW ( East coast Australia). I didn’t think names were reused (although Debby has a different spelling)

    Does anyone know if names are reused across the N/S hemispheres?

    Best thoughts for staying safe for all those in the vicinity of Debby.

  62. 62.

    Geminid

    @lowtechcyclist: I like the idea of billboards showing the picture from the Helsinki summit, where Trump is trailing a beaming Putin like a whipped cur. That picture is worth a thousand words.

  63. 63.

    TBone

    @lowtechcyclist: 👍

    I just questioned hubby much more closely about why he tuned out.

    “Kamala is going to win.”

    Why don’t you watch political news anymore though?

    “I’m sick of it all.”

    Where are you seeing news, Facebook?

    “I’m reading MSNBC on the laptop now.”

    He turned off and tuned in to reading, gladdening my heart.  Reading was formerly not a treasured activity for him like it is for me. I thought I couldn’t love him more than I do but he always surprises me.

  65. 65.

    TS

    @NotMax:

    A Family at War

    Watched that on B/W TV many moons ago. (No colour here until 1976) Barbara Flynn became one of my favorite British actors.

  67. 67.

    Betty Cracker

    @Geminid: I like that idea too — what a shameful moment it was. Also when Lavrov and Kislyak visited the Oval Office and Trump blabbed classified info. That might be too inside baseball for most viewers, but the images are disgraceful too, with Trump looking like a not-too-bright intern who just got the keys to the executive washroom.

  68. 68.

    kalakal

    @TS: The names get reused on a 6 year cycle. Ones that were espescially deadly/ destructive get dropped eg there’ll never be another Katrina.

    The bands from Debby should here in Clearwater in about an hour, my only real worry is a tornado and power outages.

  69. 69.

    Betty Cracker

    @sdhays: An evil wretch who got rich/continues to generate obscene wealth off US government contracts. I sure hope there’s a plan to put an end to further enriching the scumbag.

  70. 70.

    TBone

    @Betty Cracker: 😆

    My brain just jumped to visions of Jack Lemmon versus Fred MacMurray in The Apartment.

    Donold is not smart enough to hold a candle to either character.

    Geminid’s and your ideas of the visuals of that both meetings being plastered everywhere is a very good idea.

  71. 71.

    Tony Jay

    Cheers, everyone. Still fuming, but come into Town for a game of darts and a beer and since I’m winning all is becoming good.

    We’ll just have to do the work of organising a big tent coalition of Not Nazis to overwhelm the actual Nazis and punch them repeatedly in the face until boredom sets in.

    Euphemism? Sure, why not.

  73. 73.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    @Betty Cracker: One of our favorite comedies, probably because of the stars, is My Fellow Americns with Jack Lemmon and James Garner. They are ex-presidents from opposite parties who end up running for their lives together and having to cooperate.

    “Opposite parties” means one of those likable guys is supposed to be a Republican. I forget which one and it doesn’t really matter. I accept that premise for the purpose of comedy but… yeah, I don’t think so.

  77. 77.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Geminid:

    Foreign matters typically are not very salient isssues in American political campaigns.

    Well yeah, but this is bigger than any particular ‘foreign matter.’  I realize things have changed, but in the America I grew up in, few would have shrugged at the notion that a politician at any level, let alone a candidate for the Presidency, was beholden to a foreign power.

    I think that started losing a good deal of salience since the end of the Cold War, and I know that carries no weight at all with Trump’s cultists, they’re the ones with t-shirts saying “better a Russian than a Democrat,” but I still think it would make a difference to a lot of normies if the message can get through.

  78. 78.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Geminid:

    I like the idea of billboards showing the picture from the Helsinki summit, where Trump is trailing a beaming Putin like a whipped cur. That picture is worth a thousand words.

    YES. That picture IS worth a thousand words, and any Trump quote re Putin should be on the background of that pic.

    And billboards in swing states just showing that pic – I’d contribute serious money just to help fund that.

  79. 79.

    SFAW

    @piratedan:

    it made the assumption that they were Americans first, Conservatives second… well, it was nice in theory.

    Among my (many) pet peeves is the use of the term “conservative” to describe the GQP and RWMFs in general. They’re not conservative; they’re radicals, nihilists, and fascists, or some combination of those three.

    They’ve been that way for at least 30 years (thinking of serial adulterer Newtie and his GOPAC as a possible jump-off point, but it was probably earlier than that), and they continue to get worse.

  81. 81.

    kalakal

    @Tony Jay: That tosser Farage is really pissing me off. I know Southport pretty well, my mum was in sheltered accomodation there for the last few years of her life. Success with the organizing, is the ANL still around? ( I’ve been away quite a while)

  82. 82.

    MagdaInBlack

    My parents were active republicans* but thought ( I now see ) more like liberal democrats. I thought at the time Nixon was an aberration but now see it was my parents who were the aberrations.

    (*Republicans because my grt grandfather fought in the Civil War, so party of Lincoln.)

  83. 83.

    SFAW

    @WereBear:

    Thanks for the recommendation. Haven’t read Conason for years — no particular reason, just haven’t sought him out, nor done much dead-tree political reading — and will add it to my too-effing-long reading list.

  84. 84.

    TBone

    After reading the BBC story and Tony Jay, I just remembered something from the very recent past that I blocked out.  Our contractor here miscommunicated to his underling (or underling just thought he knew better) and that led to underling informing us that instead of calling the head honcho, we should have called him directly.  When I pointed out that we had no contact info for him, that led to hubby having a conversation about the more than several bad experiences we’ve had with other contractors (TMI in my opinion but it was too late for me to squelch).  The underling then expressed surprise, since “surely they were all white, no Blacks or Puerto Ricans are in the building trades around here.” Except he used slurs and my skin crawled.  Found out he’s a transplant from Illinois.

    It was too late in the progression of the job to fire them.  But that guy won’t be coming back for ANY reason.

    I hate Illinois Nazis!

  86. 86.

    TBone

    @MagdaInBlack: awwww, you are the best!  Was quoting the Blues Bros to make myself feel better but you did it even better.

    I hate the power imbalance when a guy has you by the short hairs because he’s got your dwelling in a state of “you need to be nice to me, or else.” I’d have punched him otherwise!

    Writing the check that included extra because of their screwup was really hard that day.

  87. 87.

    delphinium

    Love your swamps storm videos BC-so cool! One of the things I enjoyed about living out West as a kid was watching the lightning storms over the mountains.

  88. 88.

    delphinium

    @zhena gogolia @NotMax: I’ve never watched The West Wing either, and at this point probably won’t bother trying to track it down on a streaming service since not really into political shows.

  91. 91.

    MazeDancer

    @delphinium: West Wing, like much great TV, is really a soap opera about compelling characters.

    These just happen to have the same politics as you do.

    Wonderful acting. And, back then, Aaron Sorkin could really, really write.

    It is, unfortunately, not free right now unless you have “Max”. (Brand-downgraded from HBO). Or, like me, have the series on DVD.

    It’s $1.99 an episode elsewhere, like Amazon or YTTV.

  92. 92.

    Tony Jay

    @JWR:

    What else are they supposed to be called? 😂

    I mean, not so funny when on fire and used as battering rams, but that’s true of anything.

  94. 94.

    Denali5

    @Tony Jay,

    Please keep us informed as to what is going on. We living in England for 18 months in the 8o’s, during the troubles in Ireland. I realize that things in England have changed dramatically, but this turn is very frightening.

  97. 97.

    Another Scott

    @narya: It may be fear of the future and a bit of depression mixed in.  Graduation is a big change.

    Let him know, if that’s it, that it’s a normal feeling.  Part of figuring out life is recognizing that and figuring out how to work through it.  Having others be higher in various graduation rankings isn’t a sign of failure or not being good enough.  School is only one part of our lives, and our worth is much much more than that.  Lots of people peak too early ;-) and we figure out ways to keep learning and keep growing.

    Best of luck!

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  98. 98.

    lowtechcyclist

    @kalakal:

    The bands from Debby should here in Clearwater in about an hour, my only real worry is a tornado and power outages.

    You’re in Clearwater? I’ll wave at you from Anna Maria Island a week from now. :-) Very glad that Debby’s track has taken her as far west as she is now.

  99. 99.

    Betty Cracker

    @TBone: When we moved to the swamp cabin several years back, one of the many urgent renovations was replacing the AC. The ducts had to be ripped out and replaced as well as the central unit. It’s hard to get contractors to drive down a 1.5 mile dirt road, but we found a normal-presenting one who provided a reasonable estimate.

    But the guy who showed up to do the work arrived in a giant TrumpMobile — truck and trailer festooned with shitgibbon images and stickers disparaging Democrats. Pissed me off! I wanted to tell him to fuck off at the gate, but we desperately needed the work done.

    The MAGA dope kept his mouth shut, thankfully. So did I when he left a Tupperware bowl containing his lunch unattended and our boxer dog stuck her tongue all the way to the bottom of it and scooped up a mouthful of noodle salad. Oopsie!

  100. 100.

    Trivia Man

    @delphinium: there are a few clips worth watching. Hypothetical conversations that succinctly make a point with snappy writing.

    President Bartlett asking the “christian” all sorts of pointed and awkward Bible questions. Something like, “if i find out my brother  is having an affair am i obligated to kill him myself ir should i call the police? I am not supposed to have any contact with a woman in her period,  but it gets awkward if i ask her if she is.”

    Many excellent scenes but the Hollywood plot twists and ham handed GOOD GUYS!!!! and BAD GUYS can be wearing.

  101. 101.

    artem1s

    @TBone: ​

    Fercrissakes, she doesn’t even have an accent that I can discern, so deep fakes must be involved.

    Well this was always going to happen the closer she got to being POTUS. It’s just happening earlier than the GOPer disinformation machine was prepared for. They made a mistake that Dems have been able to take advantage of and for the first time our best defense is pointing out how desperate (and weird) their methods are. We have another advantage in that TCF-SD9/18 has now completely decimated many of the state wide parts of the disinformation machine that Karl Rove so carefully put into place. The various factions of the ‘fuckyouIgotmine’ GOP are infighting over who gets control over donors and where the money is going. The Chutkan decision that dropped last week is going to return at least part of the MSM attention to exactly where we need it to be. And the more TFC-SD9/18 is in the news because of his legal problems and upcoming sentencing day (9/18), the more the various factions of the GOP are going to start fighting over money (that they aren’t getting for downstate races).Then Johnson and others started to distance themselves when they told TCF and others to stop saying the quiet parts out loud, but then that disastrous appearance at the NABJ just amplified the voices racists parts of the party even more. There is a tipping point with the Karl Rove style attack campaigns and whether they actually take hold and develop their own momentum. Problem for the GOP is the Dem argument against ever letting them back into the WH given SCUTOS and P25 aren’t disinformation attacks. They have a momentum of truth behind them. They aren’t just weird digs at his hair or mannerisms. All of the GOP chaos is keeping eyes on their weirdness and will help keep the attacks on Harris from taking hold.
    Also,too, I think there’s a good chance that someone like McConnell or even McCarthy will start back door conversations about whether they want to keep TCF at the top of their ticket. I think there’s a good chance Apartheid Clyde is gathering names with his fake voter registration bot to put Vance at the top of the ticket. They’ve seen how ‘easy’ it was for the Demoncrats (LOL) to replace Sleepy Joe. And now that TCF disavowed the Couch Fornicator last week I can see Thiel being pissed that his money is going to paying legal fees and not putting his guy in the WH. I think the GOP Edge Lords are completely capable of Dunning-Kruger-ing themselves into believing they could flip the ticket.There is going to be at minimum another 45 days of chaos coming for the GOP and TCF.​​​

  103. 103.

    SFAW

    @artem1s: ​
     
    Your comment may be the most inside-baseball-ish comment I’ve read in years. [And frankly, if you hadn’t written out “sentencing day (9/18),” I probably wouldn’t have figured out that part of “TCF-SD918.”]
    Not disagreeing with any of it, of course, was just a little surprised I had to be wearing my Captain Midnight Decoder Ring throughout.

  104. 104.

    lowtechcyclist

    @SFAW:

    Your comment may be the most inside-baseball-ish comment I’ve read in years. [And frankly, if you hadn’t written out “sentencing day (9/18),” I probably wouldn’t have figured out that part of “TCF-SD918.”]
    Not disagreeing with any of it, of course, was just a little surprised I had to be wearing my Captain Midnight Decoder Ring throughout.

    Same here.  Let’s not start talking in code like the RWNJs do.

  105. 105.

    narya

    Update, in case the thread is still live! Nephew called this morning (he moved yesterday, so yesterday’s food consultations were about what to serve w/ stuffed shells, plus pics of the cookies baked in the new oven). I asked how far the new place is from work and school, and chatted a bit about school (not mentioning anything I heard, just assuming he’d be going to finish up), and . . . I think that he’s planning on going part-time, rather than full-time, to finish up. He only needs two classes, being taught in succession, so two more semesters; he’ll end up w/ a major & two minors, etc. etc. So I think “not going full-time” has been interpreted as “not going at all/not finishing.” I’ll double check with him next time he calls, but I think that’s what’s been going on (I hope).

  110. 110.

    TBone

    @Betty Cracker: 😆

    I am very glad I checked back in down here to see your mood improvement suggestion for any future “surprise !” discomfiting run ins with fascist contractors.  💜💪🇺🇸

  114. 114.

    Ruckus

    @Betty Cracker:

    Decades back there were more republicans that wanted their viewpoints carried out but they weren’t willing to destroy the county to get it done. They could compromise some. But that didn’t get them what they wanted and many on the right seem to have decided that it’s their way or no way. Which does really not fit in any large human anything very well at all

    Half a century ago, my rep was a John Birch Society member. And better than maga.

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