Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Wake up. Grow up. Get in the fight.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. keep building.

Democracy cannot function without a free press.

They don’t have outfits that big. nor codpieces that small.

Dear Washington Post, you are the darkness now.

So many bastards, so little time.

… gradually, and then suddenly.

Not all heroes wear capes.

A norm that restrains only one side really is not a norm – it is a trap.

The real work of an opposition party is to hold the people in power accountable.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

Giving up is unforgivable.

Fight them, without becoming them!

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

These are not very smart people, and things got out of hand.

If you voted for Trump, you don’t get to speak about ethics, morals, or rule of law.

Roe is not about choice. It is about freedom.

The unpunished coup was a training exercise.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

With all due respect and assumptions of good faith, please fuck off into the sun.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

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Monday Night Open Thread

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We’re getting a hard freeze either tonight or tomorrow night.  Sad to see the end of the growing season.  I am not ready for the cold.  I cut some of my flowers before the cold could freeze them tonight.

Monday Night Open Thread 12Monday Night Open Thread 13Harris gave two more interviews.

I haven’t watched them yet, but I love watching Harris give the middle finger to the would-be gatekeepers in the media.

Harris has a lot of energy!

Open thread.

Reader Interactions

66Comments

  1. 1.

    prostratedragon

    Kamala Harris on the danger of Trump (includes the clip):

    “You heard his words, coming from him … Donald Trump is increasingly unstable and unhinged” — oh wow — Kamala Harris at her rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, plays the clip of Trump telling Maria Bartiromo that he would use the military against his domestic foes.

    I’m so glad she did this, and hope she does similarly from now to the election.

  2. 2.

    WaterGirl

    Oh, seeing the postcard stamps in the photo reminds me – I still have 250 postcard stamps that people donated.  If you’re writing a ton of postcards, send me email.

  3. 3.

    cmorenc

    Good for Harris doing these well-targeted interviews while stiffing the FTNYT.  Especially looking forward to how she handles her interview with Fox / Brett Bair, scheduled to air Wed night – I usually only catch brief inadvertent glimpses of Fox for good reason.  But worth it if it defuses the MSM that she doesn’t do tough interviews in challenging rather than friendly places.

  5. 5.

    dmsilev

    @cmorenc: At this rate, she’ll be doing an interview with our own alumnus, the NYT PitchBot, before the actual NYT. And DougJ would definitely ask better questions.

  7. 7.

    sdhays

    @dmsilev: There is literally nothing to be gained by talking to them. No one she’s looking to convince reads the New York Times. They are irrelevant, unless they’re able to lead some kind of narrative. So, the trick is to disrupt their narrative before it sets by dangling some keys in front of other media. Trump does this like breathing (because he just takes a shit and everyone wants to talk about how lovely that shit smells), but the Harris campaign has been adept at working it too in a very, very different way.

  8. 8.

    Nancy

    Your flowers are lovely. You probably prefer to see them outside like I do with mine, but at least they’ll be bright and colorful.

  9. 9.

    HumboldtBlue

    Four years is a long way off…

    The Call Is Out for Mass, Simultaneous Strikes in 4 Years

    The call first came from the United Auto Workers after its fall 2023 stand-up strike, in which the union took on the Big Three carmakers simultaneously in rolling, surprise work stoppages. All three contracts that emerged are slated to expire on the same day: May 1, 2028, International Workers’ Day. This is not the first time the UAW has aligned the Big Three contracts, but what the union did next is remarkable. It put out a challenge to the US labor movement: “We invite unions around the country to align your contract expirations with our own so that together we can begin to flex our collective muscles,” the UAW announced on October 29, 2023.

    This appeal for joint expiration on such a meaningful day for workers opens up possibilities ranging from mass, simultaneous strikes that disrupt industries across the country to a tremendous number of concurrent contract campaigns that increase worker leverage. This kind of cooperation across unions and sectors—if carried out on a large scale—would be unprecedented in the 21st-century United States.

  10. 10.

    Chet Murthy

    @HumboldtBlue: In France every fall it seemed like every union would have a strike …. for a single day.  As a way of reminding everybody else why those workers mattered, and why they needed decent pay and working conditions.  I thought it was actually pretty great.  If America got in that habit, it might be progress.

    P.S. And sure, sometimes the strikes lasted for longer, just as they do in America.  But the one-day strikes (even/esp. when their contracts were not up for renewal) were critical to teaching everybody why workers matter.  Or so it seemed to me.

  11. 11.

    Jackie

    TCFG is busy!

    A federal appeals court will weigh whether to allow Donald Trump a second shot to argue that his hush-money case should be moved from New York state court into a federal courtroom.

    The latest move from the former president’s legal team comes after U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein rejected Trump’s request last month seeking permission to make a new argument that his criminal case should be moved into the federal court system in light of the Supreme Court’s ruling this summer on presidential immunity, CNN reported.

  14. 14.

    eclare

    Postcards to Swing States (NC):

    125 done and ready to mail, mail date is tomorrow, and I’ll take them to the PO tomorrow.  I fell behind, but Wednesday is very open for me, so the remaining 75 will go out no later than Thursday.  Others mentioned that they had much later dates for mailing, so I hope this won’t be a problem.

  15. 15.

    hitchhiker

    Something weird (er than usual) happened to him tonight in PA. He had this crowd of standing (there weren’t any chairs) people for a “town hall” moderated by Kristi Noem, and after about half an hour he just … quit. “Who the hell wants to hear questions?!” So they played strange music for another 20 minutes while he just stood on the stage, looking loopy and kind of swaying. They say the room was really hot, and that a few people fainted. This wasn’t dance music.

    Honestly don’t know what to make of that. I guess he just got tired and said, “Fuck it, these people are all voting for me, why do I have to keep talking? I don’t feel like it.”

    She’s going to win. By a lot.

  18. 18.

    Chet Murthy

    @HumboldtBlue: I nurture a small hope that someday Noem will get what she deserves.  Corey Boy will leave her in the dust: there’ll always be a younger simpering idiot he can negg, and her husband will  ditch her for being the unfaithful trash that she so clearly is.

    She can live out her days getting more and more plastic surgery and dreaming of Trump.

  20. 20.

    BR

    Excellent:

    Trump sways and bops to music for 39 minutes in bizarre town-hall episode

    The scene comes as Vice President Kamala Harris has called Trump, 78, unstable and called into question his mental acuity.

  23. 23.

    Chet Murthy

    @dmsilev: “39 minutes of swaying to music at a supposed town hall” is “not normal” but “spouting blood-and-soil and eliminationist rhetoric for days and days” is …. “ho hum, can’t we talk about something more interesting?  I hear Kamala won’t sit down for an interview!”

  24. 24.

    Captain C

    @hitchhiker: If Joe Biden had ever done this or even something close, well, nothing would have happened for a few hours because Pinch the Lesser’s and Joe Kahn’s heads would have exploded at the idea of devoting the entirety of the FTFNYT’s coverage to it for the next week month and thus someone else would have to figure out how to get the special edition out.

  27. 27.

    Chet Murthy

    @dmsilev: The MSM has made their choice.  And each of us also has a choice to make.  I will never pay a thin dime for any MSM product.  I will always pirate their product.  Always.

  32. 32.

    TBone

    @hitchhiker: ooh, Madison Square Garden, bring it! Hahahahaha The Denouement Syndrome is banging on The Weird Meter to see if it’s still taking measurements. “Is this thing on?”

  33. 33.

    Chet Murthy

    @dmsilev: I watched the WaPo clip (courtesy of Kevin Drum’s site) and ….. is the look on Noem’s face what they call “shock and horror” ?

  34. 34.

    Sure Lurkalot

    As I mentioned downstairs, one of Trump’s press toadies told ABC News his aborted town hall turned into an ”impromptu concert” and “the room was filled with joy.”

    ABC ate that up. By tomorrow, the NYT will make no mention that it was supposed to have been a town hall and the people who fainted, well you do remember the Beatles and their fainting fans.

    https://balloon-juice.com/2024/10/14/live-event-harris-and-walz-in-pennsylvania/#comment-9391115

  36. 36.

    Harrison Wesley

    @Chet Murthy: So Gov. Noem says VP Harris is stupid. Blinked a couple times after seeing that.  I predict the guv’s next hookup will be with RFK JR.  She’ll shoot the domestic animals, he’ll  cook ’em.  They’ll claim, if questioned, that they were trying to get back to rugged Merkin frontier roots by making their own version of Haitian Hotdish.  Can you get any more downhome and family-togetherness than that?  America, Fuck Yeah!

  37. 37.

    Chet Murthy

    @Harrison Wesley: Heh, I think you’re going too far with that.  RFKJr will hump anything female on two legs, and I doubt he goes further than that with any of ’em.  Noem’ll find that out, and honestly, I DGAF.

  39. 39.

    Harrison Wesley

    @Chet Murthy: In my own defense, I’m drunk as a skunk, so perhaps I’m carrying this trope way, way too far.  Time to forget politics and reality for a bit and go back to watching Flash Gordon on Amazon Prime.

  43. 43.

    smike

    @Chet Murthy: I was stationed in Heidelberg, Germany (c. 1968), where I experienced the SDS protesting rising public transportation costs. They stopped the trams from running, while providing stations for people to wait for a ride provided by citizens pulling over, loading some people up, and taking them on their way. It worked very well and even had a positive outcome. I was impressed by the whole thing.

  44. 44.

    Anyway

    @BR: yep, that’s great. Also showing clips of Dotard’s crazy comments during her rally was effective — they should run ads with just Crazy TCFG spouting crazy stuff for the next 3 weeks. Unvarnished. It’s disturbing and scary and will show the normies what the lamestream has been sane-itizing.

  46. 46.

    Mike in Pasadena

    @hitchhiker: i think he’s getting weirder cuz he’s aware of honest polls that say he’s losing. Well, he is The Loser Trump.

    WG: beautiful flowers. I hope you enjoy them

  47. 47.

    A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)

    @Nancy: I love Astromeria as cut flowers and at this stage of being open, they should last at least a week. Nicely done, WG!

  48. 48.

    danielx

    @dmsilev: ​
     Had to look that up and that is some seriously weird shit. This is watching someone’s brain turning to jello in real time.

  49. 49.

    danielx

    @Anyway:

    I thought Oddjob – er, Cheung – had been replaced by Tim Murtaugh, but as usual in Trumpworld the lines of authority have many dots and dashes. It says something about how campaign managers think things are going when the Trump campaign replaces (brings in?) – a communications director three weeks before election day. Something about rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic comes to mind.

  50. 50.

    rk

    I asked my colleague at work (who is from Vietnam) if she was a citizen and was voting? She said she always did her duty and voted. I wish more people thought of voting like that.

  51. 51.

    Bruce K in ATH-GR

    @danielx: Based on the polls they’ve been crowing about, per Colbert, it’s more like they’re rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg. :)

    But yes, if the future is kind to us, we may end up looking back on the 2024 campaign with a very Titanic-like lens, complete with J. Bruce Ismay demanding to know when the ship could resume course for New York (and presumably sometime later we’ll get a tell-all book from someone insisting that they stated at the time that the only direction the ship was going was straight down to the bottom).

  52. 52.

    hitchhiker

    It says something about how campaign managers think things are going when the Trump campaign replaces (brings in?) – a communications director three weeks before election day. Something about rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic comes to mind.

    @danielx:

    I thought that exact thing in 2016 when fucking Paul Manafort arrived.

    I mean, it’s probably true that their polling — assuming Wiles is paying for real numbers — looks grim. But this is the chaos team, and we’re in the chaos part of the story. They think bedlam helps them.

    What makes me optimistic, though, is that I believe women are going to show up in unprecedented numbers, just for the double joy of filling in the bubble next to Harris’s name AND knowing that they helped put the screws to that thug.

    We have the numbers, and we have the intensity — meaning, there are more of us, and we don’t just disagree with his policies. We loathe him, and we have loathed him nonstop for 9 straight years.

    We marched against him in 2016, we voted against his pals in 2018, we voted against him in 2020, again against his buddies in 2022, and now we get to do both on the same ballot. We’ll be showing up. Bet on it.

  53. 53.

    Quinerly

    @hitchhiker:

    Sounds like 2 people fainted.

    Then

    “Would anybody else like to faint?” Trump said as the second person made their way out of the Expo Center.

    Trump then requested that “Ave Maria” be played again and remained on stage as more music was played.

    He continued, “Let’s not do any more questions. Let’s just listen to music. Let’s make it into a music fest. Who the hell wants to hear questions right? Isn’t that beautiful?”

    The former president, adamant about playing his music, stood on stage for nearly 45 minutes swaying to several songs on his playlist as the crowd sang and danced along.

    The crowd slowly dispersed, but many stayed for the entirety of the campaign event.

    “To lighten the mood, President Trump turned the town hall into an impromptu concert and the crowd loved it,” Leavitt told ABC News, adding, “The room was full of joy.”

    ABC reporting

  54. 54.

    piratedan

    @BR: back to back medical emergencies in the crowd, and while I get that could certainly cause a delay in the town hall, they just stood on stage, no words of compassion for the ones with the issues, no words of support for those rendering aid…. just nothing.

  55. 55.

    Chet Murthy

    @hitchhiker: Apropos of: https://jabberwocking.com/everyone-wants-more-babies-except-for-women-of-childbearing-age/

    “Everyone wants more babies—except for women of childbearing age”

    All over the world, women are slowly getting power over their own lives.  And maybe, just maybe, women are about to really change the course of events in the US (and influence them all over the world as a result).  If women turn the bastard out, hopefully they also end up taking control in  a more substantive way in our country, and for the long-term.  That would be a thing devoutly to be wished.

  60. 60.

    Chet Murthy

    @Quinerly: oh come on I like some versions of Ave Maria, like the one by Christina Perri and also the arrangement by Paul Schwartz  On one of his Aria albums.

  61. 61.

    Quinerly

    @Chet Murthy:

    New thread up with the playlist. Now I am interested to learn which versions of some of these songs and whether anyone has given permission.

    Ave Maria

    Time To Say Goodbye

    It’s A Man’s World

    YMCA

    Hallelujah

    Nothing Compares 2 U

    An American Trilogy

    Rich Men North…

  63. 63.

    Quinerly

    @opiejeanne:

    I figured they were using her version. I assume we all know that Prince wrote it mid 80’s and had his version. Out of curiosity, do you know off hand which Hallelujah they are using? Leonard Cohen would be furious. (Adored that man).

    The misappropriation of music is so defining of Trump…he and his crew just think they can just take what they want, that’s not theirs, and do with it as they please. …music, women, the country.

  65. 65.

    2liberal

    “We’re getting a hard freeze either tonight or tomorrow night.”

     

    Here in Tempe we’re expecting to get to 99 degrees F today.  First time in a while we haven’t hit 100.

  66. 66.

    Gvg

    It’s been chilly in the mornings since the last hurricane. Down in the 70’s at least. I have had to wear a sweater. Frost is a ways off though. Last year we never really got a hard freeze and some things like the winter sage and a white begonia never stopped flowering.

    Camellias are starting. This year my local club is hosting the national convention in January. I will try to take photos for a garden thread. My own camellias are mostly too young for many blooms. Right now it’s just roses and a few other surprises, but the osmanthus/tea olive is blooming and the scent is wonderful.

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