On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
Howdy,
Haven’t seen any from C. S. A. R. Or M. M. yet, so here’s a ground level shot of the crowd at the West side of the State capitol in Denver. Not the best view, so please ignore if you get better ones.
Great turnout compared to the two previous I attended. As others have noted, predominantly white and older(ish), but other demographics mixed in.
Comrade Scott calls me Steve the ultimate Lurker. (Still only lurking. Don’t want to break my record)
Denver, COApril 5, 2025
Keep up the great work!
Burrowing Owl – Hands Off! – Longmont, CO (Open Thread)
WaterGirl
Welcome Ultimate Lurker!
Even if you are only submitting this post and not commenting.
(it’s not too late to change your mind.) :-)
thruppence
I’m such a social media know nothing that while my friend and I got lots of pics of other folks and their signs at the rally in Denver, we didn’t get one of ourselves and our sign. Sign text: “I saw Putin laughing with delight, the day democracy died”.
WaterGirl
@thruppence: That’s a good one!
You can still take a photo of the sign and send it to me. :-)
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
We went to the protests in Brentwood, MO Saturday. I didn’t take pictures. It was cold, rained the whole time, and all of us looked like determined drowned rats.
Suzanne
Bill Ackman tweets:
“My bad”. That’s what I say when I add slightly too much pepper to the chicken.
Betty Cracker
Burrowing Owl
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: Thank you for showing up.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Burrowing Owl: There were hundreds of us. I was surprised by the turnout
Scout211
@Suzanne:
And what, pray tell, gave you that assumption, Bill? Your money?
Sucker!
thruppence
@WaterGirl: Okay, just sent it, hope it gets through
Suzanne
@Scout211: INORITE?!?!
These people lack basic pattern recognition. Why would anyone with an IQ over 80 observe FFOTUS and think he’s rational?! It’s all projection and wishcasting.
It eats me up that, in order to build the coalition, the wisest strategy is to be kind and welcoming to these people.
Elizabelle
@Suzanne: Context please. What does this mean? From Bill Ackman’s tweet:
WTF? It sounds like blaming the passengers for the plane crash. What am I missing from Mr. Genius Ackman? Did he mean to say “Republicans?”
Betty Cracker
@Elizabelle: It’s clumsily written, but I think he’s saying he has no anger toward Dems who are dogpiling his stupid ass all over social media and disappointment in the sociopath he backed for president. He writes as poorly as he thinks.
Suzanne
@Elizabelle: He’s blaming Howard Lutnick right now.
HeleninEire
@Elizabelle: That tweet was in response to a tweeter who said his (Ackerman’s) anger at Dems blinded him to Trump.
WaterGirl
@Betty Cracker: That’s very fun!
scav
@Betty Cracker: Nice of him to cut to the very beating heart of the entire situation. How democrats treat him and how his (retroactively assumed) expectations have been failed. Clearly nothing else compete with these consequences.
WaterGirl
@thruppence: Got your message, but no image. :-( Please try again.
Elizabelle
Thank you. On its own, it made no sense.
Also, fuck Ackman. I just wish we were not losing as much money (proportionately) too. Dreadful days.
By the way: talk about euphemism in this Wall Street Journal headline today:
Trump, Unbowed, Is Enacting Change on Scale Rarely Seen Before
Financial markets, universities, law firms and world leaders are reeling from the president’s agenda. White House officials say this was always the plan.
Change? Change? Call it Damage. Or Destruction.
Off to archive.is to see what else is in that WSJ article.
Scout211
@Elizabelle:
It was a response to a comment in a thread. I hope the link works. Retweeted (reskeeted..) here:
https://bsky.app/profile/robertsilverman.bsky.social/post/3lm6tbg2qqs2k
Original comment from Matt Cully:
ETA: link worked.
p.a.
awww, c’mon, be fair. All he wanted was a Preznit who would put the uppity proles back in their proper place after Biden made the first real moves in a generation to balance the socio-economic scales. What’s a billionaire sociopath supposed to do?
Betty Cracker
Hmmm, will SCOTUS hear this case?
His agenda to (checks notes) deport innocent people to foreign gulags.
I am not a lawyer, but if we wrest our country back from these fascist thugs, I want to see these goddamn minions disbarred.
Elizabelle
Scrolling through the WSJ website now.
Top photo on website: Musk, in a red hat that says “Trump was right about everything.”
Headline underneath:
Musk Knocks Trump’s Trade Philosophy
LOL. Good shade by WSJ. Although: Philosophy? Philosophy?
Elizabelle
@Scout211: Thank you.
Ackman is a wanker, so I don’t care why he carries “anger against Dems.”
Scout211
Ha ha ha. Afraid of all those tariff questions?
. . .
So the reporters from Fox, Newmax and OANN?
thruppence
@WaterGirl: Okay, resent. Was more meticulous this time.
Elizabelle
@Scout211: Thinking about your warning the other day that a raft of books about “Biden was senile; we saw it at the White House” may be landing this week, or very soon.
LOL. People will say “but I was not awake all night watching my 401K and investments dive like the Titanic. Bring back Joe!”
That would be justice.
President Biden did an excellent job, overall, and how he was treated throughout is one of history’s tragedies.
Belafon
@Elizabelle: Being charitable, I don’t think the second sentence applies to the first. I think it’s talking about being disappointed in either himself or the events that have happened.
Belafon
@Betty Cracker: Maybe El Salvador will take them for a little while.
Liminal Owl
This is beyond shameful. Yes, just another such entry in this year’s ledger, but…
https://www.aol.com/national-park-services-removes-references-193924634.html?soc_src=social-sh&soc_trk=ma
Belafon
The markets are right around 0 right now.
Suzanne
I can’t get over how much is being destroyed because uneducated white dudebros are jealous that nerds, women, and minorities make more money than they do.
Baud
You know who’s got no anger or disappointment?
This guy. 👈
Because he always put country first and did the right thing in the face of fascism.
It’s not that hard.
trollhattan
@p.a.: They (corporate overlords) hated the Biden economy for the ever-increasing jobs report, which shifted power towards workers and away from those corporations who prioritize lowest possible wages and high control over workers.
That’s it. That’s the Democratic Party sin and they’ll support a mendacious idiot narcissist over that happy smart lady. Funny how the rabid pitbull now fails to come when called.
Baud
@trollhattan:
Too bad the workers hated it too.
trollhattan
@Baud: “I slept in” is a hellova political stance.
MisterForkbeard
@Belafon: Nah, he’s saying he was very disappointed in Dems but not angry at them, and that disappointment is what made him support Trump.
MADE him, you uunderstand.Theres no way he could have forseen this, other than Trump’s plainly stated words.
Martin
@Elizabelle: Ackman was mad about the Gaza protests and how they were handled. He’s been leading the charge to tell universities, particularly the Ivies what to do since long before October 8. I would put him pretty solidly in the camp of anti-zionism is antisemitism.
MisterForkbeard
@Belafon: Which is nuts – the news isn’t any better than over the weekend, except for a lie that Trump might walk back tariffs and which he denied.
Everything is still awful and Trump is threatening much higher tariffs. The markets aren’t rational and we know that, but everyone is apparently hoping that the dip has ended – and that collective hope is sort making it happen.
It’ll just take the next piece of bad news before it tanks again.
Manyakitty
@Elizabelle: your last sentence, forever.
Martin
@MisterForkbeard: The market is responding to the EU free trade offer, hoping that Trump will take the win. That was new information this morning. Equally the threat to further increase China tariffs is keeping everything off balance.
Suzanne
Dr. Laura Robinson on Xhitter:
Belafon
@Suzanne: Plenty of educated white men are ok with it as well.
When I was in middle school, I was the one kid from the poor part of the town that was in the gifted program. I had to deal with the bullies in the program itself that were from the wealthier part. Taught me a big lesson that anyone can bully. And we were all white.
trollhattan
@Belafon:
Put ANY random group of kids together and there will soon be a pecking order with winners, mid-packers, losers, and I can’t evens.
p.a.
@Baud: I once said if the Democratic policy did all the good things Biden started/implemented, and affirmed as a bedrock principle the absolute authority of the 2nd Amendment as well as providing yearly vouchers for the purchase of one gun a year, they’d still lose the WWC for reasons I think everyone here knows…🤢
Bupalos
@Martin: I know people get a little perturbed if you accuse Trump of deliberate actions resulting in intentional outcomes, but we’ve got The Couchfucker objecting to the decline on Thursday not being big enough, and now Trump seemingly trying to fight Wall Street wanting to put in a bottom on this tariff crash.
For whatever reason (and I think mostly because he’s enjoying himself and it’s filling up his narcissistic needs) Trump wants more carnage and fear and anger.
JML
@Martin: I mean, there’s a part of me that thinks the Ivies deserve everything they’re getting right now (except for Brown and Cornell. They’re ok). they’ve been arrogant, insular, elitist in all the worst ways, and deeply beholden to wealth. they treat C-suites, senior government positions, the justice system, etc as if it’s their own personal fiefdoms that they get to run as a little club and only those that walked their halls are allowed to pass. They’ve sneeringly looked down on higher education everywhere else, and helped make people distrust a college education more than any time in history.
And of course they’re capitulating to the current BS; the leadership at the big, powerful institutions are generally led by cowards who are motivated more by preservation of their own status than anything else.
but no matter how much they suck it doesn’t make what’s going on now right.
Martin
@Bupalos: Yes. People keep mistaking this for an economic plan when it’s clearly a domination plan. He doesn’t care about the economics – he cares about wielding the power and getting others to conform to his will
You’d think Ackman would understand this because he does the same thing.
Elizabelle
@Suzanne: Show us Dr. Robinson’s work, there. “Some … pieces” might be doing a lot of work there.
Not every male is an incel. And how much do people think — yeah, cut my partner’s income in half, that’s the ticket.
PS: Not getting after you today, Suzanne! Purely a coincidence. With social media, I do not like to take anything at face value without seeing context and realistic evidence.
People can say all kinds of things on the internet. Sadly, probably why we have Trump.
p.a.
@Martin: Wouldn’t you like to be in the room when his time comes, and the doc says “I’m sorry there’s nothing we can do.”
Martin
@JML: Yeah, no disagreement there. But none of this is going to change the baseline. Higher education is still going to collapse until we get some much broader cultural changes in the US (rejection of credentialism, the cult of ‘you are what you earn’, the perverse need to rank everything, etc.). Even this is relatively unimportant compared to the real underlying problems which is why I’m not terribly worked up about it. It feels bad, but only because people can’t appreciate how much worse it’s going to get.
Percysowner
From David Brooks, gift link from the AtlanticI Should Have Seen This Coming Because, I should have been paying attention or maybe even cared about sexism, racism, homophobia, etc. sounds like he had an actual responsibility to form this country.
Martin
@p.a.: I’d feel better if there wasn’t a parade of people behind him seeking to do the same thing.
Suzanne
@Elizabelle: I don’t know how to embed tweets or yeets or whatever Bluesky calls them….. but Dr. Robinson is a good follow and she’s got a long thread on both platforms about it.
JML
@Martin: I don’t know how i feel about credentialism; on the one hand having a credential isn’t a sinecure…but at the same time we have an even bigger problem with the issue of the death of expertise, and devaluing credentials makes that worse, not better? I’m bloody sick of the idea that everyone’s opinion on everything should be treated with equal weight. That’s how you get more people listening to Joe effing Rogan about vaccinations than medical doctors. that’s how we got the Current Occupant making up tariff rates based on the trade deficits and a chorus of know-nothings pretending it’s all perfect and correct.
Credentials should matter? So should experience. We can have both.
The “you are what you make” issue is a bigger one societally than I think we’ll ever really get to, especially in this country. especially when management seems designed to make people not be able to enjoy their jobs, whatever it is…
Belafon
@Suzanne: The bsky creators call them posts, and so do I since I refuse to use the y word.
Martin
@Percysowner: Strip away all of Brooks defenses there and it’s nothing more than ‘the rich want to take it all’, with some quibbling between who are the biggest baddies – the liberal rich or the conservative rich.
I don’t know how it’s going to end, but it should end with guillotines.
Belafon
@JML: A credentialed person with experience is worth more than just a person with experience, (then, far far away a person with credentials is worth more than one without, but there’s almost no difference between these two groups) but it all still boils down to what they have or can provide as evidence to back their claims.
Elizabelle
@Suzanne: I’m on bluesky. I will look her up.
I can’t do anything except cut and paste!
Baud
@Percysowner:
Fixed.
p.a.
@Martin: I made my way through most of Brooks’ drivel, until the “but teh left made us like this” tone drove me off. Sadly, grieving fools like him will always have a microphone, podium, etc for their half-assed mea culpas. He’s attained the level where there are no real consequences on a personal level.
Kristine
I was at the Gurnee IL rally. We could tell there were a lot of folks but the crowd was estimated at over 3000.
One pickup with Trump flags rolled coal, and one young guy hung out of the passenger-side window of another pickup and shot us double-birds. But the honks of support came in waves and at times were walls of sound.
From what I could see, the crowd tended older and overwhelmingly white. My state rep and senator and county board rep were all there, and Brad Schneider, our US Rep, was there for a half hour or so talking to folks—it’s my understanding that he was going to hit other rallies in his district.
Martin
@JML: Devaluing credentials doesn’t necessarily make it worse. Depends on how it’s done. Credentials create a few incentive problems:
I’m not saying we shouldn’t credential people – but you have to actively work against the feedback loop that is set up above, and we don’t do that, even when it’s not that hard to do. Everyone is invested in it both personally and professionally, and everyone is afraid of what they would lose if it goes away.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
Hiya Steve!
I was up on the Capitol steps where we hung last time. It was packed. What was funny is that I ran into a Denver City Councilman I know, Paul Kashmann, who was trying to squeeze by in order to get closer to the base of the Capitol. The metro area and Front Range in general has exploded in population over the last 15 years (although Denver proper is declining) but at some levels, Denver remains something of a cow town on a person-to-person level, at least in terms of, if you want, you can definitely get to know specific CC people by basically being a loudmouthed preservationist and developer/development critic. I massively digress.
I didn’t march but mistermix and his wife did. We finally connected for about five minutes.
Since everybody’s favorite wanker has been mentioned, I’ll repeat what I said this morning:
David Fucking Brooks, the Republican Testicle Cozy, is simply, for the millionth time, channeling his Republican Detachment Disorder (Driftglass coined that term).
Brooks continues to peddle the notion that he had nothing to do with the general madness growing within the GOP during his decades as a party functionary and water carrier. He continues to sell Hair Furor and the MAGAts as some inexplicable anomaly that popped into existent a decade ago instead of what this is really about: the natural, predicted end-state of where the GOP has been heading for 50+ years.
Brooks is simply embarrassed that the id of the modern GOP has been given a second chance with a ravenous pack of like-minded people in Congress.
His piece is another in a long-series of him busily ejecting clouds of ink to obscure the fact that his decades of mainstreaming the worst impulses of the GOP helped create the shambling monster now ravaging their castles and 401Ks with the pitchform and torch-wielding villagers at the monster’s side.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Martin:
There was a guy near me at the Denver rally with an actual guillotine mock up that he could hold with both hands.
Or other references like:
Dear 1789
Picture of a guillotine
Now I understand
Or
Make
Guillotines
Great
Again
Martin
@Belafon: The main problem is there is no effort to assess expertise. We take the credential as such a measure, and it’s not. See the fuckers running the country right now, almost all of whom have degrees from Ivies. I mean, Peter Fucking Navarro has a PhD in Economics from Harvard and a MPA from there. He taught economics for years. He’s as credentialed as they come, and the tariffs are his economic policy, using evidence taken from a persona that is just an anagram of his last name. He doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing, and hasn’t for decades.
How’s that working out for us?
I don’t begrudge the right too much on this point because everyone has experienced the MBA asshole swaggering in and fucking the place up because they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing, compared to the guys who actually do the work. All too often that MBA simply bought their way to a bigger paycheck and gave fuckall whether their incompetence would hurt everyone else. Go watch The Big Short to be reminded just how badly this whole system can go. See also: most of the Supreme Court.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Suzanne:
@Scout211:
@Elizabelle:
All because Joe Biden (deservedly) called him an asshole…
The Week (2017)
Belafon
@Martin: On top of that is the issue that expertise is not a requirement for an office. And then, as you point out with SCOTUS, even those with experience can still be evil.
Baud
I’m told no credentials are needed to become a blogger. You don’t even have to attend a blogger ethics panel. #VintageMemes
WaterGirl
@thruppence: Okay. I will use it in another post. thank you!
Elizabelle
@Martin: I agree with you there.
I have met some well credentialed people without much native smarts or common sense. Look out!
And it is a matter of having the time and money to obtain the credential. Not an equal sorting out.
trollhattan
Utterly OT listening to this John Prine Tiny Desk Concert from 2018 soothed my ragged soul, and also made me miss John Prine.
https://youtu.be/sOg7mAkrKJw?si=JRCfkKHM6nFS0cPC
Jay
Credentialism,……………………………………….
Hum.
Here, in many sectors, in my personal experience, Credentialism vastly outweighs Proven Ability.
Elizabelle
@Baud: Or own a wardrobe! Just cover that camera.
Gin & Tonic
@Baud: So? Where’s your blog?
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@trollhattan: John Prine will always be one of the greats! I miss him too.
Jay
@Elizabelle:
One can blog naked, one can comment on blogs naked. You can Pod Cast naked on Soundcloud.
You only need some clothes for a You Tube podcast, clothes are optional for an Only Fans.
Elizabelle
@Jay: Indeed. It’s getting chilly in here. (Kidding.)
Jay
https://mockpaperscissors.com/2025/04/07/some-fries-with-your-stupid-doug/
Jay
@Elizabelle:
Apparently, pants are also optional for Faux “News” Anchors.
Rusty
@Percysowner: Fuck David Brooks. Moral scold, making conservatives seem palatable to a cosmopolitan readership. He should start with an apology for that. Even in that article he takes digs at the left, they somehow kicked conservatives out of universities? Complete bullshit, they just called the right for what it was. He continues that utter crap of equating protesting, powerless students, with wealthy, powerful, rightwing institutions and politicians. He holds himself out as some exemplar of moral standards. I thought when he ditched his wife and kids to go bang his wealthy and decades younger intern, he might have finally shut up about that, but that wouldn’t be David Brooks. Go away David, until you can actually take accountability for your actions, something you only expect of others on the left.
Martin
@Jay: Understand the difference between credentialism and credentials. Credentialism is the tendency to believe the degree is a better measure of a persons abilities than demonstrated capability.
This is not an argument against getting degrees. It’s an argument against the degree being a sole proxy for competence. Nobody has ever really tried to measure whether a Harvard graduate learned more than a graduate of your local state school, and nobody has ever tried to correlate whether having the degree means you learned anything.
I once had a contract job very early in my career working at a small business that did market valuations of estates. They were all USC MBA grads and very fratty. They would only interview people who came out of the USC MBA program, and then would complain that they didn’t know basic things like what a P/E ratio was or even that a ratio wouldn’t have units when they would guess at it. And I gave them a bit of a hard time over it, that they were so determined to hire a USC MBA (a limited pool) but couldn’t accept that maybe that degree didn’t mean that the person holding it knew what the fuck they were talking about. Thankfully they were doing the knowledge check, but they were also doing credentialism, in part because they understood the value of the private degree which was to limit opportunities to only that degree in order to increase the value of the degree (which they also happened to hold). See also: US Supreme Court.
The degree is useful, and gets more useful the less credentialism takes place. It’s a decent proxy for who you should be interviewing, but it’s not a substitute for evaluating actual knowledge, skill, experience, and so on. And it can have value above pure experience when it brings new knowledge into the organization, but that needs to be present in the person.
Martin
@Rusty: He’s not wrong. I’ve told the story of my first computer science professor who on the first day announced that every woman should drop the class because he would flunk them regardless of how they did on exams. He got run out just for being a conservative.
Scout211
As an old, I guess I don’t get it.
But I do get just how popular Jack Schlossberg is on social media. We need young Democrats to be able to speak to young people on their platforms and in words that get their attention.
. . .
. . .
Yeah, I don’t get it. But I am most definitely not his audience.
ETA: And Jack Schlossberg has rizz. Even I can see that. ;-)
Ksmiami
@Betty Cracker: disbarred, jailed, impoverished
Jackie
Well crap.
Rep. Donald Norcross (D-NJ) has been hospitalized with no indication of when he will return to Congress.
His office issued a statement Monday saying the 66-year-old had an “emergency medical event likely related to his gallbladder.”
Without Norcross, the House has 220 Republicans to 212 Democrats.
Belafon
@Jackie: We wanted younger Democrats to take over. God is answering our prayers.
Jay
@Martin:
I was interviewing for a GM position. 120 person company, Manufacturing and Product Service/Repair. I had a Cert from BCIT, (and a bunch of others), and a 25 year proven track record in MFG, Repair, Inventory, Planning etc including successfully managing a 245 person, 3 shift Union Manufacturer back from the red and bankruptcy into the black.
The winning candidate, 2 business degrees, 1 MBA, 8 years track record of managing a 10 employee pet shop.
When I asked why I wasn’t considered for the job, (I have always asked since the 90’s) the answer was:
“We can’t have someone who is little more than a High School Graduate being the face and in charge of our Company.”
Jackie
@Belafon: Gall bladders don’t care how young or old one is. Hopefully he’s not incapacitated for long.