He has 12 kids, doesn't talk to several, and spent Thanksgiving with none of them. He's also aggressively campaigning to cut childcare, benefits and education. Stop lying https://t.co/PkhMAQaF70
— Mustache Bob (@MustacheBob2) December 5, 2024
Bethany ‘Call Me A Grandma Killer‘ Mandel, professional homeschooling Mommy & also point-person for trial running new terrible ideas for the Wingnut Wurlitzer, wants you to know: Mr. Musk is such a good Daddy! His kids mean everything to him… so long as they’re small & cute & too young to talk back.
(See also: Dave Anderson’s latest post.)
So the updated slash-benefits Repub talking point will be: We’re only taking away your Social Security / Medicare / veterans benefits / social services because Our Children, They Are the Future.
And the Repubs also plan to make sure there’s plenty more children, especially children whose parents will be desperate enough to accept whatever abuse the GOP cost-cutters can invent to shovel more money at billionaires, like Elon Musk.
NEW:
Remember RBG PAC, the group that used Ruth Bader Ginsburg to defend Donald Trump on abortion?
It was entirely funded by Elon Musk.
$20.5 million.
Our original scoop:https://t.co/vqZtpu9o69 pic.twitter.com/Zm4QQEPqZJ
— Teddy Schleifer (@teddyschleifer) December 6, 2024
Like the billionaire mafia is coming for my little paycheck. https://t.co/laJvcRLgqh
— Karen Piper (@PiperK) December 6, 2024
trollhattan
If their scheme is to keep the grift coming so fast and hard nobody can follow it, mission accomplished! I’m completely lost and exhausted by these people.
laura
How do I feel about that photo? These are the mofos coming for our earned benefits. To which I say Try Me Bitch.
Leon Scum traipsing around the halls of power with the wee ‘un he is currently cosplaying “parent” with is, I believe, one of a couple few he’s had with music artist Grimes and they’ve been battling in court over his refusal to return her children to her.
RedDirtGirl
That kid looks like he’s had his eyebrows waxed.
dmsilev
When you die, will your children mourn or celebrate?
I think we know the answer for Elon’s mob of descendants.
The Audacity of Krope
October 25, 2024.
Original choice to draw attention:
Still waiting. I don’t subscribe but I still check their damned homepage.
Baud
Does anyone know how to follow a hashtag on Blue sky?
ETA: I figured it out.
Chief Oshkosh
“How does this photo make you feel?”
It makes me feel like someone missed an opportunity?
It makes me feel like guns should be allowed in the halls of Congress?
It makes me feel like I picked the wrong week to become a Buddhist practicing non-violence?
It makes me feel like I’ll need more hands to slap the smarmy smiles off the faces of a lot of people going forward?
It makes me feel like I’m really beginning to understand that whole French Revolution thing?
Old School
A.) Relieved that I have no idea who the back row is.
B.) Glad that I’m not in the photo.
prostratedragon
I feel triggered by that photo. Also, Stauffenberg lacked committment.
trollhattan
@Old School:
C. Note to self: do NOT get on the elevator. Repeat, take the stairs.
RaflW
Bethany Mandel is one of the worst people in the whole conservative ‘movement’. Just a vapid pit of stupid & immoral shit. Wrapped up in a faith veneer that is such a flimflam. But Christianists love her, because they can say “See, Jews think like us!” Ok, one does. Big whoop, as Linda Richmond might say.
Jeffro
This mega-billionaires’ Cabinet (including Shadow Prez Elon) is really shaping up to be quite a thing! In fairness, they paid for it fair and square – over a half billion dollars, including Elon’s $250M+. Smells like democracy and freedom to me, fer sure.
They better figure out how to keep milk, eggs, and gasoline prices low, though. That appears to be Americans’ (only) red line.
Baud
@Jeffro:
What do you have against Freedom Prices?
Jeffro
“…one grenade…just one…lousy…grenade…”
Jeffro
@Baud: which Freedom Prices – the eggs, or democracy?
all I know is I was told eggs better stay cheap or else
democracy is apparently unavailable at any price
prostratedragon
Adam Serwer in The Atlantic writes on something I’ve been concerned about, the exaltation of antiheroes and using them as positive role models [with my emphasis]:
An aspect of what some people mean when they say we have a cultural problem these days, supporting the moral one.
cmorenc
How exactly are all the military and reserves who have put in their 20 years, in part for the retirement and health benefits, going to take getting shafted by Trump if he goes along with Elong on cutting veterans benefits?
I sort of hope the first 6 months of the Trump Administration will prove to be a “King Louis & Marie Antoinette” moment that set up the French Revolution, except that got real ugly and nasty for the whole society for awhile. I’d love to see Trump being paraded along on a tumbrel being pelted with rotten cabbage instead of in a black limo.
Baud
@prostratedragon:
White guys behaving badly is a popular genre.
WereBear
@prostratedragon: If one is
The problem is that people who like cruelty will be drawn to villains.
Isn’t this one of those old as time problems? On a world where people voted for cruelty, I think that’s putting a heavy burden on our dramatic workers.
Now, the absolutely awful Disney & Prime adaptations where everyone was crawling with moral flaws but it only “made them stronger” in a psychopathic way.
That’s on purpose from sick minds. But they were so awful few watched them.
I didn’t want to emulate Walter White. if someone read Sherlock Homes and decided to be Moriarty it has nothing to do with the work.
feebog
Josh Marshall predicts in his post today that Trump and Musk will inevitably clash and that the breakup will be ugly and (hopefully) hilarious. The question is how much damage Musk can do before that happens. Most of the cuts he and the mini-billionaire are proposing will take legislation. With a 3 vote majority in the House, what are the chances that a sizeable number of Republicans (meaning well north of 3) will chicken out on any cuts to social security or medicare?
Chief Oshkosh
@cmorenc:
They will be ab-so-fucking-lute-lee fine with it once Felon and Dump explain to them how it’s all the fault of the Demon-rats.
Bank on it.
dexwood
The photo makes me feel like there’s never a firing squad available when one is needed. Buncha smarmy Russian assets.
New Deal democrat
Okay, since this is an open thread . . . Putin receives very bad setbacks on two fronts, via Mark Chadbourn:
https://bsky.app/profile/chadbourn.bsky.social
Their situation in Syria is hopeless. They have fled their bases and their military are evacuating the country. Assad and his family have fled. As a result,
Second,
He also says that even before that:
I’ll take wins where I can find them.
WereBear
We must insist on ethics and background investigations. Independent media is growing fast, from MeidasTouch Network to lone journalist Brian Tyler Cohen.
Morning Joe lost half his viewers recently. Even if they want to take up knitting instead, they can still follow the news.
If it’s ethical and accurate it’s better than corporate news.
It wasn’t fun back in the Gutenburg Era either. And things move much faster now. It might be that the pace is just leaving some people in the dust, unable to keep up.
And if they started behind the pack and can’t function, what do we do with them? Look what they do when left unsupervised.
Mcat
@prostratedragon: That’s exactly how I feel. Thanks for saying that.
Old Man Shadow
One’s actions do not define one’s virtue in the land of conservatives and fundamentalists. One’s beliefs and one’s image do.
Elon is a “good” father because he appears to be a “good” father in the picture. Doesn’t matter if he’s an abusive shit all other times. Right that moment, he pretends and it’s conservative fundie reality. Same with the pastors and deacons who prey on women or children. “He can’t be doing that. He’s such a godly man!” As long as you have the facade, the reality doesn’t matter.
eemom
Not that it matters, but I really wish you would stop fixating on that piece of shit.
Or at least stop posting pictures of his disgusting face. Having to look at trump’s for the next four years is punishment enough for my multitudinous sins.
scav
I don’t know if the space-time continuum can take the concentration of egos in that elevator, let alone in the upcoming “administration”. Could be a singularity event. The infighting should be epic though and undoubtedly more real than the WWE.
Starfish (she/her)
Elon is a terrible father. The child is X Æ A-12. Elon kept him from seeing his mother for five months.
cmorenc
OT and unfair, but does anyone else notice the superficial resemblance (except for hair color) between Elon Musk and Conan O’Brian? Unfair to Conan to be mentioned in that context, yes because Conan might actually be fun to share an elevator ride with, and deserves a presumption that he would not turn out to be an asshole if you met him in person.
NotMax
@eemom
Once again glad to routinely web surf with images disabled in my browser. Easy enough to selectively click to view any one(s) deemed of particular interest or necessity.
NotMax
@cmorenc
Musk aiming for the full Odo from Deep Space 9 look?
//
prostratedragon
@WereBear: Oh, I put no fault on the artists trying to depict how these things affect people. Whether it’s The Sopranos, Macbeth, or what, some things need to be said, and nothing wrong with trying to engage the imagination in doing so. And both humor and glamour can be tools for the artist to promote the engagement of the audience, explain the fatal attraction of other characters to the villain, or give a tragic sense of what might have been; we’ve all known handsome devils. But if those trappings have taken over the assessment of what has finally happened, there has been a failure somewhere, and in the cases cited I think it’s up to the audience.
karen marie
@cmorenc: I was thinking he’s starting to look like Bill Gates.
WereBear
@NotMax: You will believe a man can sleep in a bucket.
RevRick
@Old School: I am with you on the not knowing.
It also makes me feel that six dicks are six too many.
RevRick
@cmorenc: The French Revolution got nasty… for a while. Only a while? The Macron government is just the latest example of the instability in France. They’re working on their Fifth Republic, interspersed with dictatorship, empire, restoration of the monarchy, empire, Vichy.
Mike S. (Now with a Democratic Congressperson!)
@Starfish (she/her): But what does his nanny call him whan she’s telling hin to eat his vegetables?
waspuppet
That photo makes me feel like I’m watching Idiocracy again. Or, more accurately, starring in it.
Martin
@prostratedragon: FD Signifier has a nice video about this.
His take is that subtext doesn’t work on a lot of people. It’s an extension of the adage: ‘there is no such thing as an anti war film’. No matter how hard you work to show some asshole as a terrible person, part of the audience will identify with the power of the asshole and admire and want to emulate it.
He thinks dystopian media just makes shitheads like Musk want to emulate the dystopia so he can be in charge of it. I’m reminded of the guys who created Decentraland, a crypto metaverse who said they were inspired by Snow Crash and Ready Player One – and like buddy those things were bad and dehumanizing and allowed people to be controlled – that was the moral, and you decided to side with the baddies and then put it in your pitchdeck as a feature. And I guess the joke is on us – it got funded by the techbros – they were into it
Starfish (she/her)
@Mike S. (Now with a Democratic Congressperson!): And do the crazy rich people get pissed at her for giving him a human nickname?
prostratedragon
@Martin: So art can be useful, eh?
Miki
Just. Fucking. Ugly. That my final refrain for these muthafuckers
Shifting to something much more appetizing, get a gander at my Beyond Awesome Gelatinous Turkey Broth.
You’ll need 1 carcass of an approximately 11 lb turkey roasted a la Ina Garten (dry brine then stuffed with lemon, thyme, and onion). Make the broth in a pressure cooker using Alton Brown’s Pressure Cooker Chicken Broth recipe. (Link keeps breaking, sorry.) I cook it for 70 minutes, not 40. It matters.
Now to find a perfect soup recipe ….
Citizen Alan
@The Audacity of Krope: “Original scoop,” they say. Ten dollars says that the author of the story knew about this a year ago and sat on it until after the election.
brantl
@NotMax: Odo looked better, even when he was a puddle of slime.
KatKapCC
Dry as the Sahara.
Geminid
@New Deal democrat: Russia’s defeat in Syria will have effects on its operations in Africa. Many of the private mercenary cadres they are using to support governments in the Sahel region got their combat experience in Syria.
Now these mercenaries are being chewed up by insurgents similar to those who have run Assad’s army out of northern Syria. The insurgents’ funding may be from the same sources as those in Syria too. Gulf Arabs like Russian influence in Mali and Chad little more than they like it in Syria.
Libya could be the key for Russian influence in the Sahel. In 2019 Russia’s Wagner Group teamed up with General Hiftar, the warlord based in Benghazi who had controlled eastern Libya for years. Hiftar and Wagner almost conquered Tripoli, where the UN-recognized government was located. Then Turkiye intervened and helped drive Wagner forces back.
Russia can still supply its forces in the Sahel by over land routes from Libya, but now General Haftir will face pressure to expel Russian forces or face Assad’s fate.
Turkiye’s Libya operation was engineered by Hakan Fidan, head of Turkiye’s intelligence agency M.I.T. Now Fidan is Erdogan’s Foreign Minister and he and M.I.T. head Kalin are doing a more thorough job on Russia’s Syrian assets.
This is sweet revenge for R.T. Erdogan, Turkiye’s President. In 2017(?) Russian jets bombed Turkish Army troops helping defend the rebel enclave of Idlib, killing 33 of them. Back then Turkiye was in a weak position vis-a-vis Russia and had to pretend Syria had done it.
Turkiye’s subsequent air campaign against Syrian forces enabled the rebels to hang on to Idlib, the same city they attacked from last week. But Erdogan knew it was the Russians who had killed Turkish soldiers, and he never forgets something like that.
brantl
I think I’m going to start calling Elon and Smarmy together the SmarmyBros. The look on their faces are different kinds of smarmy, but very smarmy all the same, the little condescending shits.
RSA
Off-topic: Blog favorite Ken “Popehat” White has a story to tell about justice prevailing:
NotMax
FYI.
Ebony
@prostratedragon: I think part of the problem is the confusion on the antihero trope. Neither Walter White nor Tony Soprano are antiheros they are villain protagonists like Macbeth.
frosty
@eemom: I’m with you. I’m tired of reading about Musk and sick of looking at his (and Trump’s) pictures. Wonkette had the right idea when they replaced the Felon’s picture with cats.
And OT pet peeve. Can we stop with the stupid nicknames? Leon, Elmo, Elno, Skum, etc. That’s a very Trump thing to do.
Starfish (she/her)
@frosty: So long as we can keep the fun nicknames for Mango Mussolini, I am fine with getting rid of the stupid ones.
Eric K
Someone had a good idea, line up Musk’s 12 kids and the mothers and challenge him to match which kids go with each mother.
KatKapCC
@Eric K: Hell, ask him to name the kids. Dollars to donuts he’d only get about half of them right.
Quinerly
@frosty:
Totally agree with you on stopping the nickname stuff. It’s childish and Trumpist.
Glidwrith
@frosty: The original reason Muskrat wasn’t discussed by his proper name was because there were people that had alerts set for it and show up in the threads to drown out any criticism. We’ve probably moved beyond that, but the habit stayed.
Kristine
Anyone else remember Dan Rostenkowski being heckled and chased down a street by a group of olds when he was helping put some changes to Social Security in place—iirc this was when the retirement age was increased depending on birth year.
I recall one lady yelling and banging on the hood of his car with her handbag, but I could be imagining that. It was a long time ago.
Guess I’m just saying that things could get boisterous.
Shalimar
@frosty: As far as I remember, the original reason for the Musk nicknames is he liked to google himself and no one wanted to give him the satisfaction of knowing he was being talked about. I think we’re terabytes of conversations about Elon past that point now. Asshole is everywhere.
Another Scott
@frosty: There was a famous tweet of (one of?) his ex-wife(s) where she did not refer to him by his name, but a variation similar to those some of us use here. (I think it was the tweet where she replied to his claim of holding their newborn when it died.)
I don’t see a problem with mangling of his name myself.
He doesn’t respect the rest of us (he a troll and worse), he’s spent a fortune to elect a monsters to the presidency, he advocates dismantling of our federal government, and worse. Why should we feel the need to treat his name with respect?
YMMV, and apparently does, and that’s Ok.
Best wishes,
Scott.
WTFGhost
I just realized, foreign bot farms could be laundered by Musk (who could delete logs, etc.), and claim the problem is nonexistent, citing doctored statistics.
I didn’t say anyone *did*. I just said, they could.
Chris Johnson
@Martin: But anyone familiar with Dan Olson knows the joke’s on them as Decentraland is nothing, the dead mall Dan says it is but even less useful, a laughable joke worse than five game console generations ago.
But then the joke is still on us… because a vast amount of financial resources that could’ve saved countless lives through taxation funding responsible government services were just burned to accomplish nothing, like energy burned to eke out one more crypto token. This stuff doesn’t come from nowhere and the wastefulness really isn’t funny. It’ll end with our lives being even more deeply shit than they already are, in the service of waste so profound that it’ll be impossible to identify even a token winner out of the mess. It’ll be a guy being able to claim ‘I named the world after the cute doggie token!’ and that was it, that was what you got out of all the destruction. Bragging rights over something incomprehensibly stupid.
Chris Johnson
@Ebony: This. I’ve been saying for some time that Trump is painted and seen as Han Solo: cocky smirking mercenary with a heart of gold. THAT is an antihero. An antihero is able to pull rank in terms of manliness on the actual hero, easily, but will come through in the final victory just as if he was also the hero: if he betrays the hero, he’s a different trope, like ‘Bond henchman that gets a particularly spectacular death after being unkillable the whole movie’.
SFAW
@Chief Oshkosh:
Re: that last Xit (or whatever):
Many years ago, one of my co-workers — a former bomber pilot, WW2 and Korea, purportedly most missions of any active pilot when he retired — when he’d see a few of us (then) young ‘uns standing around BSing (i.e., not working), would say “Gee, someone lob a grenade in there, he’d get the whole bunch of ya.”
Not sure why I thought of that.
Ramona
@feebog: until special elections fill the seats of the vacating Gaetz, Waltz (sp?) and Stefanik, the House is 215 D – 217 R which means that Republicans cannot have a single defector vote against because a tie in the House means that legislation doesn’t go through.
Dems should try to encourage a strong Independent (or Libertarian (?)) candidate to run in each of these three districts.
I think the special elections to fill these seats will not be for 3 months after Congress convenes. If this is right, I don’t see how Thune can push through his aggressive 90 day agenda without the Democratic votes in the House.
Ella in New Mexico
@Chief Oshkosh: Like someone, somewhere is etching dark, menacing catch phrases on a few bullet casings?
Ella in New Mexico
@frosty:
Nope. Calling them by their real names gives them legitimacy, regard, acceptance. As if they deserve our respect because they’re good faith actors.
They’re not.
So it’s Eloy Incel Mush, Mikey Creeper-PornBot Johnson and Villainous Cuck Smarmywarmy until further notice.
Tony G
Does Elon actually live with any of his twelve kids? If not, that’s beneficial to the kids.
Nancy
@New Deal democrat:
If only. . . .
Nancy
@NotMax:
I liked Odo. He’d fit right in with his snarky sense of humor– not cruelty, actual humor. And he was capable of love and sacrifice. Elon can try but he can’t make it work.
Nancy
@Ella in New Mexico:
I prefer flaming douche a)
flaming douche b)
Etc. But personal preference is to be respected.