Video: Sen. Tim Kaine Says Virginians Are NOT Talking to Him About What Joe Biden Should Have Done in 2024, They “are talking to me about can you get rid of the Trump economic chaos,” etc. (Sen. Kaine also talks about Trump's Middle East trip, Russia-Ukraine, etc.) bluevirginia.us/2025/05/vide…
— Blue Virginia (@bluevirginia.bsky.social) May 18, 2025 at 12:55 PM
beginning to think this whole doge thing might have been a big scam
— Patrick De Klotz (@patdeklotz.bsky.social) May 16, 2025 at 8:25 PM
There are no trade deals. None, zero.
The only thing that even tiptoes towards a so-called trade deal is the agreement with the UK that is 'an intent to work toward a deal'— @NewsJennifer (Jennifer Schulze) (@newsjennifer.bsky.social) May 18, 2025 at 9:34 AM
2/ So much winning:
-Prices are expected to keep rising
-Unemployment expected to inch up
-Economic growth expected to slow
www.cnn.com/2025/05/13/b…— @NewsJennifer (Jennifer Schulze) (@newsjennifer.bsky.social) May 18, 2025 at 9:34 AM
— Mike Luckovich (@mluckovich.bsky.social) May 15, 2025 at 3:00 PM
On The Road – Albatrossity – Spring advances
satby
Good morning from Cork Ireland, where I spread word about the resistance and Trump’s cratering popularity everywhere I can. And ask people either to pray for or keep their fingers crossed for our country to recover soon.
Oh, yeah, and now I’m 70 😲
Baud
Long live COBOL!
Baud
@satby:
Happy birthday!
ETA: You’ll be my ambassador to Ireland.
Professor Bigfoot
I know it was a foolish idea, but I decided to check out the comments ont he CNN story.
Jesus, these people are dumb.
Professor Bigfoot
@satby: Happy Birthday, and joy of the day to you!
Baud
@Professor Bigfoot:
Rupar is a big shot on social media when it comes to reporting on Republicans so he attracts a lot of trolls.
ETA: or were you talking about the CNN business story?
MagdaInBlack
#Dode Is A Heist: He got his data.
MagdaInBlack
@satby: Happy Birthday ! Mine was last Thursday.
prostratedragon
@Professor Bigfoot: Kinda makes you hope a lot um are bots, eh?
Baud
@MagdaInBlack:
Belated happy birthday!
MagdaInBlack
@Baud: Thank you. Took a long weekend, lived a life of sloth.
TS
This may have been reported earlier, I’ve just seen it
https://wapo.st/4j63gp1 gift link
The centrist, pro-European mayor of Bucharest defeated a right-wing Euroskeptic on Sunday in a presidential election that analysts called Romania’s most consequential since the 1989 fall of communism.
Another moderate politician that trump helped to defeat the maga type candidate?
prostratedragon
@satby:
@MagdaInBlack:
Happy Birthdays, all! My mother’s was also Thursday.
Glory b
But Amanda Marcotte tells us that in the next few weeks, the media will be laser focused on grilling every Dem elected official about Biden’s medical condition, exactly what dud they know, exactly when they knew and how terrible his lying staff members are.
It’s just how it goes folks! Don’t blame her!
https://bsky.app/profile/amandamarcotte.bsky.social/post/3lpi2yvmxrk2f
Baud
@Glory b:
Doesn’t sound wrong. The media is terrible.
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@satby: Happy b-day.
prostratedragon
@Glory b: Wonder if he has aged out of some routine exams. Under good standard practice it does happen, e.g. Pap smears.
sentient ai from the future
@Baud: yeah but Marcotte is basically pre-excusing herself for going along with it instead of having a modicum of integrity, which prior work might have led you to think she had.
Baud
@sentient ai from the future:
Then she’s decided to be part of the problem.
sentient ai from the future
@prostratedragon: PSA tests stop at 75. PSA is also a terrible test diagnostically.
If things turned that aggressive that quickly in an interval surveillance period thats just bad luck. “linear progression” is not always a thing cancer does.
Spanky
@satby: Congratulations, youngster! You’re 50 weeks younger than me.
Please to also ask folks if they’ve got a spare room.
Professor Bigfoot
@Baud: The business story.
Idiots maundering on about the “trade deficit.”
They’re SO stupid, all of ‘em, with their own trade deficits to Walmart…
catclub
@MagdaInBlack: He got OUR data
Baud
@Professor Bigfoot:
I mean, reducing trade deficits isn’t problematic. The idea that Trump can achieve that without causing even worse problems is the problem. But that’s what you get with faith based politics.
sab
@satby: Echo and Solomon wish you a happy birthday.
Suzanne
@satby: Happy birthday! Glad you get to enjoy outside the country.
Ben Cisco
@satby: Happy Birthday!!
Suzanne
@Professor Bigfoot: Derek Guy (the menswear guy) had a great post about how we don’t want to become the country that manufactures cheap T-shirts. We can’t compete and we don’t want that role anyway. He talked about how we should become a powerhouse of making high-end clothing instead. But that would require investing in Americans’ skills, and that’s not a thing the GOP wants to do.
J.
@satby: Always wanted to visit Cork. Happy birthday!
Glory b
@Baud: Yep, they love Democrats pointing fingers at each other.
Someone said that Republicans seem to like each other and like being Republicans while Democrats hate each other and hate being Democrats.
Professor Bigfoot
True enough; but my point is that the “trade deficit” isn’t the bogeyman conservatives would have us believe.
The horror of the “trade deficit” is actually a lie.
Suzanne
@Glory b: This news about Joe yesterday made me so sad. (I had to take my mom to the pet cremation place, so I was already sad.)
He’s a private citizen now and deserves dignity and kindness.
Professor Bigfoot
@Suzanne: Mrs. B got some actually quite nice T-shirts online the other day; at a price I KNOW cannot be matched by “made in America.”
Americans don’t want to pay those prices anyway.
Professor Bigfoot
Tim Ryan, right there.
Though I believe it would be more accurate to say that “White Democrats hate being Democrats and would be much more at home in the GOP, except that the Republicans are pretty much all thieves, grifters, fools and cultists… so they try to take over the Democrats from the Black and Jewish and female leadership they have now.
EDITED FOR CLARITY.
Baud
@Glory b:
The leading influencers in Democratic Party are savvy well off people. They love to engage in self examination and think regular folks are interested in hearing about how much they’ve improved themselves after careful self reflection.
Baud
@Professor Bigfoot:
Agreed. Almost everything they fear is a lie. It’s their MO.
Glory b
@Suzanne: I am too. It would be nice if he was treated with dignity and respect.
Instead, the media plans on using him and his illness to divide the party even further.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: Marcotte isn’t wrong about how the media will approach it, but here’s where she goes off the rails, IMO:
My opinion is that accepting Trumpist framing about the alleged cognitive decline coverup is weak and wrong and unnecessary. But I can accept that people of good will can have different opinions on that.
In the quoted post, Marcotte seems to be buying into a coverup of the cancer diagnosis. I think that’s fucking NUTS.
Suzanne
@Professor Bigfoot: Yeah. A couple of years ago, I splurged on a birthday gift to myself and got an American Giant hoodie. All cotton, made in the USA. It’s fantastic. It was also $140. Zipper got damaged in the wash, so I took a picture and they sent me a brand-new one. Fantastic company.
Anyone who wants to support American garment manufacturing can do so and could have been doing so.
satby
@Baud: I’ll happily take that post. People laugh uproariously when I lead off “I didn’t vote for the ass”.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
Nuts and weak. Our values and ideas are great, but our too many people associated with us lack strength of conviction, and that stains the rest of us.
MagdaInBlack
@Betty Cracker: I’ve been reading her for years. I am a bit surprised at her this time.
satby
@Professor Bigfoot: Thank you!
@MagdaInBlack: Thank you and belated Happy Birthday to you!
Suzanne
@Betty Cracker: There is zero evidence that there was any cancer coverup and it is insane to draw that conclusion from the evidence we have.
I have never cared for Marcotte, even though I broadly agree with her politics.
Now I’m going to shut up about her, because I don’t like being inside-baseball-y about reporters and professional opinion-havers. Their job is to offer their thoughts and observations, and we should expect to align at some times and not at others.
satby
@🐾BillinGlendaleCA: thanks Bill. Hope you’re doing well.
@Spanky: thanks! And I know. I’m telling my friend who works for the government they need to extend ancestor citizenship back to great-grandparents.
sab
@Suzanne:Thank you. My spouse has a birthday next month. Great idea for gift.
satby
@sab: Thanks, and didn’t you also have one recently?
Baud
@Suzanne:
Baseless accusations of lying are well outside the range of a difference of opinion.
ETA: that’s MAGA behavior.
satby
@Suzanne: @Ben Cisco: thanks!
Suzanne
@sab: Their hoodies are fantastic. Quality material and it really holds up in the wash!
They Call Me Noni
@satby: Happy 70th Birthday! Keep doing your good work there on the Emerald Isle. I bet it is beautiful and the people are quirky.
satby
@J.: It’s beautiful, but then all of Ireland is. And now a more multicultural country with all the energy new immigrants bring. It makes me happy to see.
Subsole
@satby: Congratulations!
Suzanne
@Baud: Agree, that’s why I broke my personal rule about not complaining about her. Unless she has receipts, which she is free to share, she is making shit up right now.
Subsole
@Professor Bigfoot:
The commenters or the journos?
lowtechcyclist
@satby:
Happy birthday, and welcome to the septuagenarians’ club!
satby
@They Call Me Noni: 😉they are. And are heartened to hear the news, not well reported here, that EOs are not laws, Trump in losing the majority of court cases brought, and his popularity is sinking.
I’m a ray of fucking sunshine 🌄
sab
@satby: No I didn’t. That was a rikyrah joke because I was getting multiple birthday greetings because our managing partner had a birthday and I am on the list to receive text messages. So I got birthday greetings for him all day. We all did
ETA:My birthday is deep in the heart of tax season, so I haven’t celebrated it in 50 years, and that is fine by me.
prostratedragon
Benjamin Wittes:
“The Situation: I’m Done Cooperating”
lowtechcyclist
@MagdaInBlack:
Sounds like a perfect birthday to me, glad you had a relaxing weekend!
Kosh III
News flying under the radar since it’s not DC LA or NY.
Former Republican House Speaker convicted of corruption.
https://tennesseelookout.com/2025/05/16/former-tennessee-house-speaker-glen-casada-ex-aide-guilty-in-federal-corruption-case/?emci=bbe24e44-4634-f011-a5f1-6045bda9d96b&emdi=52fa7d9b-a434-f011-a5f1-6045bda9d96b&ceid=364466
Subsole
@Betty Cracker:
I take the smallest possible comfort in the fact that Ms. Marcotte was getting her wig dragged up and down the streets of Bluesky, last I checked.
Baud
@Kosh III:
Under the radar because he’s a Republican.
Baud
@Subsole:
Good. I was heartened that all the Biden posts I saw on Reddit yesterday were gracious.
Chief Oshkosh
@Baud: Lacking strength of conviction is SOP for politicians in general. The GOP has a much higher percentage of truly weak-willed elected and even more so for its electorate.
lowtechcyclist
@Spanky:
[To satby:]
Sounds like you’re three months younger than me, then.
zhena gogolia
@satby: Happy birthday!
sentient ai from the future
@Betty Cracker: she is using her ignorance of cancer care to make accusations instead of leaving that between the biden’s and their doctors. Disgraceful.
Subsole
@Baud: Oh yeah. The fact that the Current Guy’s brain is leaking out his nose in public kind of puts this all in perspective.
mapanghimagsik
@Baud:
They produce a lot of books that do exactly that. I feel that way about a lot of TED talks. Demagoguery definitely has a market.
Glory b
@Professor Bigfoot: Exactly.
sab
@Subsole: I am sorry but your comment did make me laugh out loud.
Spanky
@satby:
Now that’s just crazy talk.
Trivia Man
@sentient ai from the future: I thought PSA was the standard now. Haven’t had a DRE fir several years but that would seem less effective unless, maybe, it is only done by a specialist. Seems like a very subtle difference to find.
Baud
@Chief Oshkosh:
The GOP at least has conviction about their entitlement to promote themselves. That’s one more than we’ve got.
Betty Cracker
@Glory b:
There are seething resentments within the GOP coalition that can be exploited, but I think it’s true that Dems despise factions within their own coalition more than they loathe Republicans. That’s a weakness.
They Call Me Noni
@Baud: What every Dem should be saying about Joe Biden, if asked, is:
I did not have the privilege of speaking to President Biden regularly and was not advised about the state of his health. But what I do know is that he has spent his life in service to this country. He surrounded himself with capable people and his political instincts were sound. By every measure his Presidency was a success and his administration did an outstanding job of pulling this country out of a dire situation. Now let us compare THAT to what President Trump and his ilk have done in only four months.
Trivia Man
@catclub: Yoink! Finders, keepers! It WAS our data now it’s OUR data. You can access it under his T&C* for a very low monthly subscription fee.
*T&C subject to change whenever i see a way to make them more lucrative to me
Baud
@They Call Me Noni:
That’s perfect.
sab
@Professor Bigfoot: My spouse is now your biggest fan. A week ago he hadn’t even heard of you.
Librettist
@sentient ai from the future:
She is bargaining with drunk, authoritarian daddy for keys to the car. Fuck that noise. Wait till the old rummy passes out, swipe the keys, and the car.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
Dem factions see Republicans as a positive good that they can use as leverage against other factions.
Spanky
@lowtechcyclist: Hey, I saw your comment the other day about not finding wood thrushes. I was surprised to hear one while standing in the parking lot at Ward Farm Park! So they’re out there, certainly in range if you hike the trails.
jowriter
@Baud: Nuts and weak and at this point, collaborative with those who would have us ignore the crisis right in front of us. I’ve read her for a long time, but this is an ugly distraction.
Spanky
@Trivia Man: The PSA is the standard now. If things start to look suspicious they move on up to a biopsy and/or mri. You don’t want a prostate biopsy, and don’t ask me how I know.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@satby: Happy birthday!
A friend of mine is a librarian in Cork.
suzanne
@Betty Cracker:
It’s the narcissism of small differences, and it is constantly on display.
sab
@sab: My seasonal job has an office manager who loves birthdays, so every month with an employee who has a birthday we have an office birthday party.
The other office birthday girl my month hates it as much as I do. We started the thing of waving out the birthday candles with our birthday cards instead of blowing them out. That was during Covid. Why infect the whole office? was our thinking.
Ben Cisco
@Subsole: YES
Dorothy A. Winsor
Cripes. Democracy is being sold off piecemeal and many in the media and both political parties can’t stop talking about Biden. Why?
I’m sad for him and his family. I wish them well. And now I will leave them in peace.
prostratedragon
News you might have forgotten you needed:
It’s as if Adam’s bunny was drawn first for him.
Baud
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
There’s a club. We’re not in it.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: I wouldn’t go that far, but in many cases, it seems like factions focus on the foibles of putative allies more than the existential threat posed by opponents. Wish I could figure out how to change that. I try to start with myself but don’t always succeed.
sab
@prostratedragon: I don’t believe in an afterlife, but if there is one he will be toasty today and for all eternity.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
You don’t have to go that far. I’ll do it for you.
ETA: ;-)
Jeffro
YES Tim Kaine! Exactly! Why are we talking about Biden (other than to offer him sympathy and best wishes)?
Baud
@jowriter:
She’ll probably start getting invited to all the mainstream media shows and won’t look back.
Jeffro
“Hey DOGE, where’s our data?” – highly relevant issue that will unfortunately fall flat with 99% of voters.
Harping on DOGE-generated layoffs in high-impact areas like tornado tracking and air traffic control? THAT should land, if done well and often.
lowtechcyclist
@Spanky:
Thanks for the tip! I need to find a moment to go over there and play some Frisbee golf. They’ve got a nice course, and it’s almost all in the woods. The trails and the course do a bit of crisscrossing, IIRC.
This time last year, I didn’t even know Ward Farm Park existed. There’s really no reason one would go down Ward Road unless your destination was on Ward Road, or on one of its side streets. Only found out about it when a former co-worker mentioned it. (Lots of Census and former Census people in Calvert County.)
Soprano2
@satby: Happy birthday! Sounds like you’re going to have a fun one in Ireland, lucky you.
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
But can we hit people over the head with it?
/groucho
JML
@Betty Cracker: What’s increasingly complicated is the only thing holding the GOP coalition together is an embrace of resentment and hatred towards the other. There’s almost no policy throughline in the GOP any longer (it helps that the GOP has almost no policies) so there’s no opportunity really to fracture them along any kind of policy lines. Their rural voters should be strongly against the Medicaid cuts, but have managed to convince themselves that the money propping up their hospitals is really all being diverted to urban centers (with “urban” being code for “things for black/brown people”).
At what point will people stop voting against their interests? Only when there’s no one else left to blame for their misery?
Geminid
@Betty Cracker: I take the 213 Democrats in our House caucus as most representative of our larger party base. They’re not caught up in faction fighting, despite all the pundits and clout-chasers who would like them to be.
Cheryl from Maryland
@sentient ai from the future: it’s true for so many screening tests. Insurance will now only pay for my Pap test every three years and breast exams every two years, so I pay put of pocket to get annual checkups for both.
RileysEnabler
@satby: happy happy birthday! Hope you’re having a marvelous trip.
Trivia Man
@Spanky: thanks, good to know
sab
@Geminid: That is a good observation.
Manyakitty
@satby: woohoo! Happy birthday to you!
lowtechcyclist
@Jeffro:
This. People here have argued that talking about Trump Horror A is a distraction from talking about Trump Horror B, but what can you say? Are you going to ignore this horror on account of that horror?
But talking about Biden, four months into Trump’s presidency? Fuck yeah, that’s a distraction.
prostratedragon
@sab: You remember! I think I shouted, “Hallelujah.”
sab
@Manyakitty: My husband did not want to go to the meetup but he didn’t trust my driving (mine is better than his but whatever.)
He now is a major fan of two jackals, you and Prof Bigfoot. I did not see that coming.
Bupalos
@Professor Bigfoot: It’s not a horror, but in opposing Trump’s intentionally destructive tariffs we maybe go a little far with the “deficits don’t matter” bit. At least my Turkish economics professor buddy says so. It is worse for our government and economy when entities we can’t tax and which create a lower economic multiplier effect hold our debt than when U.S. entities do. He specifically criticized the “trade deficit with Walmart” line.
None of which means tariffs are good or that Trump even has good misguided intentions.
Cheryl from Maryland
@Suzanne: This has always been one of my hobbyhorses regarding American manufacturing – why is the US not competitive with ITALY and Japan for high end fabrics? Both countries are the go to places for wool, silk, fine cotton, and even denim. The only reason we aren’t, I guess, is that Americans and US businesses are cheap and don’t value craftsmanship.
lowtechcyclist
@prostratedragon:
Michael Ledeen is dead. Good.
Soprano2
@Glory b: This was always going to happen. Don’t blame her for saying this, because it’s the truth.
Soprano2
@sentient ai from the future: That’s not how I read it, not at all. She says she wishes it would go away, and she’s certainly not in a position to keep it from happening. You’re shooting the messenger.
NotMax
@satby
Sláinte!
Have a happy.
sentient ai from the future
@Trivia Man: it is the standard. It’s also not very good diagnostically.
Soprano2
@Suzanne: That requires skills, something the MAGA dudebros don’t want to cultivate. They want a job paying them $50/hr when they graduate high school just because they’re a white dude, and they think bringing manufacturing back is going to get that for them. They’ve been sold a bill of goods that makes no sense if you examine it for even a couple of minutes.
Librettist
@lowtechcyclist:
It’s all Joey from Scranton’s fault that the corporate media has to beat you with a Trump rerun. Because they went all in on him… again.
sentient ai from the future
@Soprano2: bullshit. She could have refrained from asserting there was a coverup if that was the case. That’s the tell.
Soprano2
@Professor Bigfoot: A clothing company did an experiment with this. They had two identical T-shirts, one made overseas and one made in America. The one made in America was a few bucks more, and they advertised it as Made in America. After a few months they quietly dropped the Made in America one, because they sold very few of them. Turns out most people really don’t want to pay higher prices for clothes! I think the company was American Apparel, so certainly not a company selling T-shirts for $5.
Glory b
@Betty Cracker: They keep theirs under wraps and will deny them if asked.
We have lots of folks who can’t wait to proclaim their disgust with other members, loudly declare that unless they get exactly what they will stay home and have the temerity to call themselves “the base.”
Hogg saying that Clyburn needs to get over himself and move out of the way is on point too.
satby
Absolutely this! The thing you hear over and over from low info voters is how Republicans fight for what they believe, even if it’s unpopular, so they’re respected for that. Democrats fold like wet tissue. I like Amanda Marcotte, but she’s dead wrong about Biden. We need to shut down any Biden talk and pivot to Republican enablers every single time it comes up. That’s what Republicans do, and they’ve succeeded with it for 20+ years.
Soprano2
@Baud: The way I would put it is “they lie about what they actually fear”. Their biggest fear is non-white people and women being in charge of things, but many of them aren’t yet willing to say that out loud, so they say it’s things like DEI or prejudice against white men. I think this is one reason a lot of our political discourse makes no sense, because Republicans are lying about the things they’re actually upset about.
Subsole
@sab: Glad to hear it.
They Call Me Noni
@satby: I’m a ray of fucking sunshine 🌄
Yes, yes you are.
Baud
@Soprano2:
I agree.
Subsole
@Betty Cracker:
The GOP also doesn’t have the entire media ecosystem hammering away at their wedge issues 24/7. Worth bearing that in mind, I think.
sab
@They Call Me Noni: I agree.
Jeffro
Right??
And what’s their point? That if Biden had run for re-election and won and then this happened…we’d have President Kamala Harris. Which is what most of us were trying to make happen anyway.
In addition to being a completely unnecessary distraction, it sounds like the world’s lamest after-the-fact justification for not supporting Harris with more ardor (or at all). They still want Super Sparkle Magic Pony Land, where Biden stood down the day after the 2022 midterms, the party rallied behind some Ultra Dem (but not Kamala, of course), and we all lived happily ever after.
Just dumb and wrong on multiple levels.
Subsole
@Ben Cisco: <sigh> How did I know that would be the answer??
Soprano2
@Suzanne: I don’t think there was a cover-up either, but you know R’s are going to run with that so all the Democrats are going to be asked about it. The truth is things can change fast, especially when you’re 82 years old! I feel for him, because that hormone treatment they’re talking about isn’t a pleasant thing to go through. My husband had a boss who did that, and he said it made his boss act like a 14-year-old girl (those are his words, not mine). It’s totally not their fault, it’s the effect of the hormones, but what a choice to have to make.
Jeffro
@Soprano2: Americans in general are conditioned not to pay much attention to quality, and not just when it comes to clothes.
Just low, low prices! (eye roll)
Suzanne
@Cheryl from Maryland:
Derek Guy notes that the federal government used to put a lot of emphasis on making sure that sewing was a skill that people had access to, via home ec classes, 4H, etc. That has largely gone away, and it’s a thing mostly passed down from mothers to daughters. And I can assure you, that is bigtime on the wane.
Plus, fashion design is an actual entire art form with its own formal education. Another thing we don’t really take seriously as a culture (because women and gay men do it).
Subsole
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Frankly? What else are they gonna do? If they stand up and start grilling Trump now, after letting him slide for a decade, that opens up the possibility (remote as it may be) that they will start catching some very, very hard questions about why it took them so long to notice that Spray-tan Saloth Sar was sundowning.
People may start asking if there even really is a Librul Media.
Nah. They can’t risk that. They’re better off going with the program.
Gretchen
@Suzanne: There’s a lot of making shit up among the press lately. We have a president who is tweeting about whether Taylor Swift is hot and falling asleep in meetings, and the press wants to both-sides it by claiming that the sane, competent president they drove out of office is the real problem. The people who should be driven out of office are the press and the current administration.
Ksmiami06
@TS: yep- as Josh Marshall said, we took one for the team (the whole world)
Baud
Soprano2
There seems to be a lot of “if only we didn’t have to accommodate group ‘x’ it would be a lot easier to win.” Seems to be said mostly by white male Democrats about abortion, gay rights, trans rights, actually human rights in general. It’s the Bernie impulse to only talk about economic issues and throw everyone else under the bus to pursue the elusive white male vote. James Carville was honest about it with his statement that the Democratic Party is too “feminine”. I think he’s saying something a lot of male Democrats believe but don’t want to say. They think that’s why we lose.
Baud
@Ksmiami06:
Has the world even once said thank you?
Betty Cracker
@JML: The MAGAs are a lost cause, so screw them. It’s the low-info swing voters who decide elections we have to work on. There are several factions in the Trump admin who are pushing competing agendas under the aegis of the ceremonial retiree POTUS. None of their policies are popular. That’s where we need to focus, imo.
@Geminid: I agree people amplify differences within the coalition, egged on by the click-bait-driven political press. But IMO, the factions and priority differences within the elected coalition are real. As pros, they’re more adept at papering over differences in the face of a common enemy than we in the peanut gallery are, but the struggle is real, imo.
Subsole
@JML:
Sadly, no. If these people can’t blame Satan, they’ll pawn it off on Jesus.
The whole project is underpinned by a refusal to reflect.
Trivia Man
@Subsole: Exactly this. “Traction” is whatever the media says it is. And it is well documented that there is a heavy bias to sane wash republicans. Even the so-called liberal media participates. FTFNYT, NPR, WaPo (even before a billionaire bought it specifically for lobbying)…. All join the dog pile just “to be fair…”
Soprano2
@They Call Me Noni: You should e-mail that to every elected Democrat. Joe Biden is not required to share information about his health with anyone except his doctor and his family. I’m sure if he had been diagnosed with this at this time last year he would have announced it and dropped out of the race.
ETA – IMHO elected Democrat’s best response to these questions is to go on offense, and if it gets too probing ask the interviewer how much they know about their boss’ health, and how many questions are they willing to ask about it, and how much information about their health they think their boss is obligated to share with everyone. Make them uncomfortable to even be asking the question. Too many of them are too defensive about this whole issue when the true answer is that most of them weren’t in a position to know anything about this anyway. They aren’t obligated to repeat unsourced rumors to the press.
WTFGhost
@Baud: Oh, friend – the end is not COBOL, the end is *design*. Good design won over the glorified script kiddies.
@Glory b: Marcotte is, in fact, openly mourning that it is “just how it goes” and seems more to be complaining.
It’s worth noting that there was no conspiracy to hide anything about Biden’s health. Like with every President, the presidential doc sees the President first thing in the morning and last thing at night, and would have reported on any medical concerns. Remember, everyone in the WH is fully aware that the President will give orders on a nuclear strike, and, if 9/11 didn’t remind people something bad could happen, well, there’s no helping them. No one was hiding Biden’s problem.
Super-aggressive prostate cancer is rare. People Biden’s age often don’t have prostate cancer treated at all, because something – heart attack, stroke, a really bad cold or the flu – is so much more likely to kill you first, that the treatments aren’t worth the risks, in many cases. In his case, it’s too late to treat, as in, at all. If it was there, his doc would have found it on the digital rectal exam; if his doc didn’t spot it, it probably wasn’t big enough to be detected otherwise.
Metastatic prostate cancer that’s spread to the bones has probably had zero, zilch, none, not a bit, of an effect on his cognition. More likely than not, he got cranky, yelled at a subordinate or two, came back a few minutes later, apologized, and finished the meeting or briefing. He felt *badly* at times, most likely, and it affected him, just like a broken bone that ached during storms, but his brain? There should have been little noticeable effect, until it was noticeable, and *bam*, they’d have spotted the cancer, and put Harris in charge as President. She, with full control of the federal government, would have had a much better chance at trouncing Trump.
But that’s not what happened. That’s what happened in ANOTHER UNIVERSE where Biden was actually impaired by disease or disorder while in the WH.
sab
@Suzanne: It is a huge industry, but the Wall Street Journal thought covering it was contemptible and beneath their dignity. WTF. It’s a business, and a very very big one.
zhena gogolia
@Baud: She looks so sad. He looks strong, as he always does.
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
100% Joe is thankful it’s him and not her that has the cancer.
NotMax
@Jeffro
You betcha.
;)
Suzanne
@Soprano2:
The updated version of this is complaining about how Democrats are “too professional”. It’s amazing how having college-educated professionals — who, on average, are not really making much more than tradespeople — only became a problem when most of those professionals were women, when most of those getting that college education were women.
It just always seems to come back to boys not wanting girls in the clubhouse.
They Call Me Noni
@Baud: I do so hope that his cancer can be managed and he and Jill can enjoy their family for many years to come. In peace.
schrodingers_cat
@Dorothy A. Winsor: He treated non-white people like human beings not as an object of hate or fear or as tokens whose job it is clap their hands for their progressive betters. We can’t have another person like that in the WH.
A man who appoints a black woman with immigrant heritage as his VP, a native American as the interior secretary, a black woman to the SCOTUS and so on. Many white Ds don’t want that either as their actions with respect to Joe Biden speak volumes.
And refusing to acknowledge non-white people as equals with their intellect and opinions is not a “small” difference
We want to be accepted for who we are, not merely tolerated as a cheerleading squad for our progressive betters.
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone 😊 😊 😊
Trivia Man
@Cheryl from Maryland: I am a little surprised they dont refuse coverage anyway. “You had one last year, we only cover it if it has been 3 years – regardless of who pays.”
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
UncleEbeneezer
@Glory b: It’s so wild that so many otherwise smart people (as I generally consider Marcotte to be) completely lost their minds with their irrational loathing of Joe Biden. This was always one of the big dangers of playing around with “Genocide” smears. It causes people to lose all sense of humanity and grace. And my guess is that it played a major role in the way Biden was treated last Summer (and still is) by people who should know better and claim not to be ageist/ableist.
tobie
@sentient ai from the future: My father developed aggressive prostate cancer at 90. It killed him. My mom now has breast cancer at 96, stage 3, grade 3 (fast growing). The lump developed in 6 months. These things happen…even when you have the best medical care.
Gretchen
@Betty Cracker: Even if he knew about the cancer diagnosis in January, so what? He left office 5 months ago and has been a private citizen since then. It was none of our business until he wanted to share it.
Suzanne
@sab: Fashion is a huge, huge industry. The vast majority of which is outside the U.S. Fast fashion has been one of the biggest lifestyle changes of the last few decades and it gets much less attention than tech.
Jackie
@Kosh III:
Looks like the kind of federal charges FFOTUS loves to pardon. 😡
UncleEbeneezer
Absolute truth, on Twitter:
Bupalos
@Betty Cracker: It’s not and isn’t 100% clear. I can see a line where she’s producing that lack of clarity by way of not recognizing the difference between reality and political reality. I agree it’s fairly nuts to think Biden hid aggressive prostate cancer, that simply would be too hard to hide- impossible to hide while getting treatments and insane not to immediately get treatments.
I also think that the political reality is that politically determinative chunks of the electorate will believe in such a conspiracy, and well now have numbers approaching supermajority that Biden wasn’t truthful or realistic about his health. In a polity that is overrun by us/them politics and existential dread, this is overdetermined. So I think Marcotte is just inhabiting “political reality is the only one that matters” a bit too deeply. Also seeming not even to consider the potential you’re pointing to about giving Republican framing more legitimacy. I mostly disagree with censoring or shaping our internal debate as if that’s very significant, but there are times when at least it needs some consideration and disclaimer.
Spanky
@Jeffro: I think you’re overthinking this. Talking about Biden means not talking about Trump. That simple.
Soprano2
@sentient ai from the future: Did you read somewhere else that she asserted there was a coverup? I can see how you could get that from the first comment in that series, but I don’t actually see where she says that. Someone should ask her about it directly so it’s clear what she actually thinks. I do believe she thinks they were covering for other things, maybe that’s what you mean.
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: Amanda Marcotte bought into the John Edwards campaign big-time and probably still feels burned by the experience of advocating a candidate dogged by personal scandal.
Suzanne
@Gretchen: If I were Biden, I probably wouldn’t have shared the diagnosis at all. He’s a private citizen and he owes us nothing.
Everyone who runs for president signs up for a certain degree of invasion of their personal life. Maybe not fair, but it is what it is. But the public right to know ended on January 20.
Another Scott
@Jeffro: Why? Because an “insider” book is out. The political reporters get to ask about it and talk about it without any risk that their precious Rolodex sources will clam up.
“I’m not accusing you of anything; this book is doing the accusing. I’m a Serious Journalist, doing my Job! What do you think about it?”
It’s pernicious and lazy and cowardly.
It’ll die down for a while, then there will be another tell-all book or another Democrat who answers a question with a brief statement in the course of an hour-plus interview or …
Grr…
Tote wood, carry water, etc.
Best wishes,
Scott.
WTFGhost
@They Call Me Noni: If I may rant….
My instinctive response to a rational explanation is “Fuck that shit. If you don’t attack them, calling them sick motherfuckers, attacking an old man, without bothering to do a single bit of research on him or his disease first, you’re not punching back hard enough.”
The reason I think one should punch back hard, is, they are sick motherfuckers, attacking an old man, without bothering to do a single bit of research on him or his disease first.
Soprano2
@Suzanne: The couple who run the place I get my alterations done told me they’re having a harder and harder time hiring people because so many people don’t learn to sew anymore. She said she hires mostly immigrants. It won’t surprise me at all if they close in a year or two. I told her she should talk to the Mennonite women, and she said they won’t come to town to work. They could piece it out to them to work on in their homes. I mean, desperate times call for innovative thinking. I think this is how most alterations work used to be done.
sab
@rikyrah: Good morning to you too.
zhena gogolia
@UncleEbeneezer: Amen.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin: I’m sure.
Honestly, the history of personal scandals and frailties is why I try not to get ride-or-die about any of our candidates. Keeping seats in Dem hands is more important than the specific Dem. I of course have my preferences, and I figure that’s what primaries are for, but my reaction whenever my preferred candidate loses a primary is always, “Whelp, bummer, okay, guess I’m voting for [insert winning Dem here]”.
Glory b
@UncleEbeneezer: On bluesky there are LOTS of lefties who speak just as derisively about Biden and his supporters as any of the MAGA.
Chief Oshkosh
@Baud: And semi-sentient prune Andrea Mitchell (no link, because fuck her) has hobbled onto the cancer-coverup bandwagon, so we know that the worse than worthless MSM are going to spin this baby for all it’s worth.
In the meantime, Trump has another utterly insane meltdown overnight about celebrities being mean to him. I mean, completely off the rails for ANY adult, much less POTUS. Added value? The screed is about celebs who supported Harris in last year’s campaign. Trump obviously is crumbling mentally – even further than from yesterday, or the day before, or the day before that, or the…
MSM? Crickets.
Soprano2
They want them as long as they don’t insist on having any actual important roles. I wish someone would drill down with Carville about exactly what he means when he says that. All the guys just nod sagely in agreement and go on without much remarking on it.
Belafon
@Baud: Time to develop hard to read languages that aren’t Perl, because, just no on Perl.
jowriter
@Suzanne: President Biden is damned if he does reveal his condition and certainly would be damned if he did not reveal it and it was somehow discovered. I am still incandescent with rage when I see how the mainstream press has made him the victim of their misplaced criticism. We have a demented psychopath with an administration fulfilling all the sick and twisted dreams in his filthy imagination, and the media choose to continue to beat up and berate a good man who actually worked for all Americans. My heart breaks for Joe Biden and his family.
Spanky
@Belafon: I’ve got my FORTRAN IV with Watfiv book around here somewhere…
Soprano2
@Suzanne: I totally agree, it’s one reason for so much more clothing consumption. I remember when they got different clothes 4 or 6 times a year – now, it’s something new every month!
WTFGhost
@Betty Cracker: It probably is. Prostate cancer is only screened for annually, and the only test is the finger up the rear, to feel for lumps or swelling. There’s a prostate specific antigen, and if it’s low, that’s good, but high doesn’t mean you have it.
And prostate cancer is often very slow acting. In 80 year olds, it’s often left go, because it’s not expected to kill you for years – and I don’t mean 1-2, I mean, more like, 5-10, and by the time you’re in your 80s, your odds of surviving 5-10 more years aren’t *bad*, but… face it, they’re not *great* either.
An aggressive cancer, spread to the bones, was extremely unlikely to have been affecting him, without it having been noticed. Prostate cancer is something old men know about, and they know it affects how you pee, so, it’s not like there was some big secret to him, once the cancer was discovered.
Kristine
@satby: Happy birthday!
Subsole
@Glory b: Yeah. It all ties back into the idea that you can buy these people off. You can bribe people out of their arrogance and the selfishness it breeds. If we just give them a factory job, or a state-issued sex partner, or let them spit racial slurs on teevee as a treat, surely they’ll vote for us.
It will not work. Their priority is spite, not prosperity.
I think we need to get something very, very clear: people don’t vote Conservative to make money. They vote Conservative to keep the people they look down on from making money.
Jackie
@Gretchen: Speaking of which… FFOTUS is now screaming illegal campaign contributions…
Not linking – you can find it on his social media.
RevRick
@Professor Bigfoot: MSNBC had a segment with Justin Wolper called The Professor Is In in which he offered the following great analogy about the difference between trade agreements, trade deals , and trade talks . A trade agreement is like a marriage , a legally binding arrangement, not easily unraveled, which offers the knowledge of stability allowing for planning to buy a house or have kids. A trade deal is like dating, where the partners agree to continue this arrangement until they decide they either want to move to marriage or break it off. It’s friendly, but offers no guarantees of stability. Trade talks, on the other hand, are like texting or swiping right on Tinder. They express interest, which is a necessary first step, but don’t promise any future beyond that.
Chief Oshkosh
@Geminid: I agree. There are a TON of idiots online whose discourse probably amplifies our differences. Probably I are one. But I don’t see a lot of outright faction fighting in the House or Senate. There may be a few weirdos (that big guy from Penna. is standing on my last nerve), but I think our electeds are holding together OK.
Suzanne
@Soprano2: They want women to vote for Democrats without being visible. They want to return to the days of blue-collar breadwinner men voting for Democrats and bringing their wives along, rather than aiming at women directly to vote for Democrats. Just patriarchy, all the way down.
They Call Me Noni
@Soprano2: I will endeavor to do this. Thank you.
The Pale Scot
@satby:
I’ve been hearing rumors of some sort of enhance demonstration happening on Boom Boom Yea USA is Awesome day. Should we make popcorn?
Suzanne
@Subsole:
This is hereby nominated for a rotating tag.
Subsole
@WTFGhost:
My sole beef there is that Ms. Marcotte knows full well that “that’s the way it goes” solely because of decisions her industry makes with its eyes wide open. Decisions it could easily make differently.
She seems to be treating her profession’s editorial choices as immutable tidal forces when they absolutely are not.
@rikyrah: Good Morning!
Belafon
@Betty Cracker: Her pole star seems to be that Biden should have dropped out early, and all evidence will be made to prove that, which lets the electorate off the hook. Considering what we all knew was coming, Walter Mondale’s corpse should have been able to win the presidency.
Chief Oshkosh
@Baud: GREAT message from the Bidens. And that cat looks like It.Does.Not.Play. Maybe they should let that cat loose on the DC press corpse.
They Call Me Noni
@UncleEbeneezer: Well the country did vote for Hillary in 2016. I will until the end of my days shout from the fucking rooftop
CAN WE PLEASE GET RID OF THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE!!
Subsole
@UncleEbeneezer: TRuth. I really don’t know how we are supposed to uplift a country full of people who very clearly do not wish to be valued, respected, or uplifted.
It’s the mother of all dysfunctional relationships.
schrodingers_cat
@satby: Happy Birthday!!
They Call Me Noni
@WTFGhost: Your rant is 100% on point.
sab
We are getting our house painted this week. Twenty years ago I could have painted it myself over a weekend, but now I am too old for ladders,
We are changing the color completely. Our neighbor will have a conniption.
She threatened to sue us when we moved in and installed a generator beside our house. She said it was on her property. We hired a guy to mark out the property line and she lost eighteen inches and a fence. LOL. We lost $900 fee but it was worth every penny.
RevRick
@Soprano2:
@Suzanne:
When was the last time anybody mended socks?
My wife used to sew her own dresses. She sewed her own wedding gown! Plus two of her bridesmaids’ dresses! We still have the dinosaur of a sewing machine she got for her 16th birthday.
Last summer, when our granddaughter spent a week with us, my wife taught her to sew. We both agree that the kid has an artistic flair and might be headed for a career in fashion. But such skills are no longer routinely taught.
sab
@RevRick: I had to take home ec in 7th and 8th grade public school. My older sister went to a fancy boarding school and she cannot cook or sew. For many years I made my own clothes, and I am planning to go back to that this summer.
I cannot imagine being unable to cook. That is one of my most favorite creative outlets.
mali muso
@RevRick: My 8 year old is interested in fashion and design, and is taking lessons in which she is learning on a sewing machine with a local woman. Even if she doesn’t end up pursuing it beyond just knowing some basics, I think it’s a great life skill and well worth the $ I am shelling out for the private lessons.
sab
@Jackie: As we all know, with them every accusation is a confession.
UncleEbeneezer
@Glory b: And they did the same to Hillary and Obama and now sometimes Kamala. It’s what I’d call a “tell” and always makes me immediately place them in my LoyalDemsBut™ category: people who claim to be liberal/progressive (and probably are) and vote Dem (and probably do), but never miss an opportunity to jump in on every anti-Dem smear campaign and spend all their time spreading Putin/GOP-approved propaganda to sow voter apathy on our side, right before every major election.
UncleEbeneezer
@satby: Happy Birthday! 70 is the new 50. ope you’re having a great time :)
Jeffro
every accusation a confession, part 7,596
montanareddog
@Spanky:
Every Democratic official that is asked about Biden’s cognition or physical health should reply “I’ll be happy to talk about the former President once the current, actual President does one of his famous cognitive tests, and has himself weighed on an independently-verified pair of scales, on live TV”.
Belafon
@RevRick: If she has significant support to get started on her own, she could probably turn that into a specialty skill and turn it into a career. There are people who will pay for bespoke clothing.
Jeffro
that’s glorious!
I’d be tempted to frame the bill from the property-marking guy and hang it in my rec room
sab
@mali muso: In middle school home ec I learned to sew on a treadle machine, that ran on foot power instead of electricity. Two girls to that machine instead of four or five girls sharing the electric ones.
I loved that machine.
Soprano2
@Suzanne: They’re jonesing for the days when it wasn’t hard for them to get the votes of white men (the only voters the press and many other white men believe actually count) by campaigning on economic issues without having to mention icky civil rights or abortion. I think a lot of these white men don’t “feel” these issues because they don’t directly affect them that much, which is why they think candidates should ignore them because they’re “too divisive”.
Kirk
@RevRick:
Me. Ten minutes ago. But I’m an old man taught by both parents to be self-sufficient. At least I passed most of those skills to my child.
Bupalos
@Soprano2: I think it’s pretty much the height of unfairness to propose that the secret thoughts of Bernie and all the male Democrats are being related by Carville. These are two people who could hardly be different. Would you accuse AOC of selling out human rights? She has roughly the same approach as Bernie. Whether you agree with the idea of conducting coalition politics the way Bernie and AOC do, I think it should be taken seriously and sincerely. This thing where we find the secret motivations is just not going to result in effective politics.
For my money what Carville likely means when he says that the Dems are too feminine is a version of what the majority of this board tends to say – that we need to “fight” and be more simply certain, stop seeing nuance, be louder and more clear about us versus them, hurt our enemies, shame the press… basically just be more of an asshole party that shouts a lot while covering our ears.
If I was on that panel I think I would have replied “but there are more women, they vote more reliably, they win elections at a higher rate, and they seem biochemically more predisposed to the kind of cooperation that good governance is based on. So isn’t being the more feminine party maybe an advantage?”
RevRick
@Belafon: Walter Mondale’s corpse should have won that election? Really?
In my view that takes wishful thinking to stratospheric levels.
For one thing, it denies the sick appeal Trump has for a huge chunk of the electorate (overwhelmingly white male, btw). We kid ourselves when we think he ought to be a pushover.
Second, it glosses over how uninformed and ill-informed many Americans are. And Trump wins among that group. And there’s considerable evidence that that group continues to prop up what little popularity he has.
The fantasy that if more Democrats had turned out in the November election, we would have won is just self-delusion. There is no evidence that it would have changed the outcome.
Baud
Sewing gave the world pants and it’s been downhill ever since. No thank you.
Lyrebird
He’s pretty interesting, and I loved the strange story Sister Golden Bear linked about him vs some right-wing influencer creep. I also agree generally, but I had to laugh when I read your comment right after being encouraged by email to pay $150 for a pair of ethically sourced jeans that are called “gardener jeans” – do you use new $150 garments for gardening? – which make the lovely model look bowlegged.
Sigh.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: You should try a dhoti, no sewing involved. There are several versions you could choose from.
Bupalos
This just strikes me as an interesting sentence. What would it mean to keep the electorate on the hook here?
Step 1: establish that the fault lies with the electorate
Step 2: ????
Step 3: profit
I mean, I don’t disagree that the state of the electorate is at the proximal root of our election and governance problems, but what exactly flows from centering that?
PatD
Kaine has the right idea. Any time elected Dems spend helping the media distract from Trump’s incompetence and abuses of power is time wasted. There is nothing to gain from dwelling on the past.
Jackie
@sab:
@Jeffro:
Absolutely!
Maybe we can get Bondi to start an investigation regarding FFOTUS’s campaign briberies… remember him suggesting billionaires donate a couple of millions in return for a seat at his table of future opportunities?
LOL, as IF!
RevRick
@sab: Sex-segregated classes are a thing of the past. The days of girls in home ec and boys in print, woodworking and metal shop are long gone. My experience in the latter was living proof that I have no mechanical skills whatsoever. Many of those skills are thoroughly outdated.
Lyrebird
^^THIS!!! both NUTS and damaging to democracy. We’ve already got sick in the head RFK Jr doing enough willful misunderstanding that harms citizens…
Thank you Betty C. and everyone else. Oh man that excerpt really bothers me. In my family, two very strong, tough, smart people with regular medical care got 9 months or less between cancer diagnosis and decease. No one was fking hiding anything. In one case, we were the ones fighting to not get brushed off by docs. (Yo Betty, a dear friend is now more than 20 years past her massive abdominal procedure for her cancer, so you rock on!! I’m just mad along with you about the quote.)
@Glory b: I was at first just going to ask, whether Marcotte had included anything about how harping on his health just keeps dissing our former MVP? AKA the person he’d selected with voter approval to be ready to step in whenever the need arose?
Bupalos
@Soprano2: I think there could be a point that folks who don’t see themselves as part of a minority might have less sensitivity to the political potential of minority solidarity. The problem with this right now is that in electoral terms minority solidarity is in fact falling apart.
Geminid
@Jeffro: I’d be tempted to paper the neighborhood telephone poles with that bill. I probably wouldn’t though, since I’d have to live with that land-grabbing neighbor.
RevRick
@Baud: None of us cares if you wear
skirtsBupalos
I think this cuts both ways since the context of the decision was whether Joe was, for various reasons, indispensable or Kamala could do a better job.
sab
@RevRick: We tried to get us girls into woodshop but they said we needed to get 40 girls for our own class. Apparently if there were girls in the boys’ class the boys might accidentaly saw off their own hands. And yet they let them use power tools.
ETA There were boys in home ec cooking, because chefs were an accepted male job. And girls could be trusted around stovetops even when distracted by males.
Captain C
@Glory b:
Most of that may be true but I think Republicans hate each other; they just hate most other people more.
Bupalos
@RevRick: Well, this isn’t necessarily true across the board. Our local vocational HS is pretty damn segregated by the existing gender inflection of the various programs. 0 females in electricians, masonry, carpentry and auto repair, 0 males in beauty and early childhood.
The veterinary and architecture are mixed. They get to self-segregate though, and I just have a really hard time seeing a kid buck the social reality at that age.
YY_Sima Qian
Among the least surprising developments:
Professor Bigfoot
@Subsole: The commenters; but the credulousness of the journos in going along with the entire “trade deficit booga-booga!” has a lot to do with it.
ETA: Sorry for the late reply; had cardiac rehab class this morning… and gods help me, but it’s working, and I can feel it!
Soprano2
Then he should say that instead of characterizing the party as “too feminine”. The reason I grouped that and Bernie is because Bernie is always saying we should talk about class as the main issue and not race or gender.
I think we should advocate for what we believe is right. That’s what R’s do, even when the stuff they want is extremely unpopular. I agree that we need to be on offense more than defense; that’s not inherently masculine.
WTFGhost
@RevRick: So, if you read the word “should” in the sense of “it would have been a far better, in the sense of ‘justice being well served, and the law being followed, result” does that change your criticism any, or are you stuck in “should have won” = “had a strong, competitive, in fact, winning, advantage”?
@Kirk: It does make more sense to mend good socks – I haven’t seen many I’d mend, recently.
@Subsole: People do want to be respected; it’s just, they’ll suspend their disbelief over being respected far too easily. Trump tells them other countries pay for tariffs, and that he respects them; they should reject both premises, but they’re told by Fox News that both statements are true, so they get confused as to what respect looks like.
(I’m not entirely kidding.)
RevRick
@Bupalos: That’s unfortunate, because in the real world those professions aren’t sex segregated.
sab
@YY_Sima Qian: Let us fire them and then torment them in their unemployment. Make America Great Again because we are such a good country already.
sab
@RevRick: Bupalos is in Ohio, and Ohio is Ohio.
ETA I love the state, but not so much many of its inhabitants.
Omnes Omnibus
@Bupalos:
How universal is that? I am not going to extrapolate a big problem from one school in Ohio.
Professor Bigfoot
@Spanky: Had one. Truth is, the procedure wasn’t all that onerous; but the aftermath… ewwwww.
Just had a PSA last week (a little high but lower than last time) and am seeing the urologist tomorrow… fingers crossed.
Professor Bigfoot
@suzanne: I would like to see the demographic breakdown of these factions.
I have my own theory about who wants to tear down the Democratic Party and why…
Geminid
@Soprano2: I don’t think “fighting more” is what Carville meant. But I’m not looking up the the context of the statement– which is probably easy to do– because I don’t believe Jame Carville is especially insightful, or very relevant today. People talk like he is, but I think it’s mainly to advance their own particular narratives.
YY_Sima Qian
DC is jumping the shark on PRC related policy (gift link to NYT article):
The quote from Krishnamoorthi is pretty emblematic. There has not even been insinuations that Alibaba (or Tencent, ByteDance, Baidu, etc.) is somehow involved in the so called “civil-military fusion” effort in the PRC, certainly nothing like the DOD contracts that OpenAI & Microsoft hold, let alone bona fide members of the new techno-MIC such as Anduril & Palantir.
Alibaba does not even have the best models in the PRC, those belongs to DeepSeek, Tencent & ByteDance. If Apple fails to incorporate a Chinese AI LLM into the iPhones for the PRC market, it will simply lose more market share to the Chinese brands such as Huawei, Xiaomi, oppo and vivo. Alibaba (& Tencent, ByteDance, Baidu, etc.) will simply get data from Chinese users off their Chinese brand devices. DC politicians & policymakers are still living in the fantasy world where the Chinese users are dependent on Apple to access the most advanced, whose market share has fallen from 19% to 12% in the PRC over the past year & half. The same applies to passenger vehicle brands incorporating AI models into the “infotainment” systems.
They seem to think that Apple selling iPhones to Chinese consumers is somehow the US doing the PRC a massive favor…
Belafon
@RevRick: My reasoning on not letting the electorate off the hook is this: Trump was a known quantity, and Project 2025 was not a secret. These farmers complaining about Trump taking away the funding promised under Biden? We knew it was going to happen, but they didn’t want to believe it. These shop owners getting destroyed by tariffs? This isn’t the first time Trump has done the tariff thing.
The only thing that we couldn’t predict was Musk getting to run around and break things. But even the way a lot of departments are being treated was written into Project 2025.
At the end of it all, it’s the voters that decide, the fact that they chose the psychotic old man rather than the old man with a cough or the black man is the final story.
Bupalos
Trump received the vote of 6 in 10 white males, and that didn’t make up a majority of his total vote let alone an overwhelming one. Republicans have traditionally pulled right about that margin. There is a growing gender gap that is disproportionately powered by Hispanic, Black, and Asian voters.
We really need to keep the demographics of this in perspective to understand the part of the phenomena we’re looking at that is new. George W. Bush got a higher percentage of the white vote and white male vote versus John Kerry than Trump managed against Kamala Harris.
Manyakitty
@Betty Cracker: yeah, there’s no way. He gets excellent medical care. I think I read they found the nodule on his prostate during a colonoscopy. That’s not the behavior of someone who’s cutting corners.
Belafon
@Bupalos: I’m not here to profit. I’m just here to hold the electorate ultimately responsible in this case. Democrats can try to figure out how to get their message out better, but, based on the people I work with and live near (I’m in Texas), too many are going to have to lose a lot to make better choices.
Nelle
A parachute in on an open thread. A summary of my just now call to my congressman’s office: I’m old, I’m tired, I shop at Walmart. But I’m also persistent, as you’ll know if you look at my call record (I call about three times a week). And I have a good network of people that I can do my best to influence their votes. I’m grateful to the Congressman for what he did in visiting Ukraine and in sponsoring the bill to support them with funding. But if he votes for this bill to strip health funding from the poor in order to funnel more money to the wealthy, I will dedicate my efforts to make sure that he does not return to Congress.
I had some New Zealanders ask me if the US really lets people die if they are too poor to afford health care. I said yes. They said, “How can they call themselves a Christian country? That is sheer barbarism.” And that is what those who would vote for this bill are. Barbarians. Defending billionaires against their constituents. Barbarians.
So, yes, I told the staffer that this vote will make my congressman a barbarian, despite his lip service to his Christian beliefs.
I was more than a bit steamed, but I managed not to say a fucking barbarian. I was so proper.
Belafon
@Belafon: Black woman. Hate it when I overdelete, because I wrote woman first.
RevRick
@WTFGhost: Of course if we are talking about moral shoulds, in my Christian moral framework, the answer is a resounding yes. There’s lots of those shoulds and shouldn’ts that I would just love to bless our world with. Starting with Republicans in Congress shouldn’t gut Medicaid or the climate change legislation and they should fully fund USAID. Alas, my moral desires are falling on deaf ears.
The reality is that we live in the ideological realm of empire, which has remarkable shape-shifting capacity. As always it’s based on domination, control and violence and divides us by hierarchies of race, class and gender. And easily gets us to fight about such things.
Why were the 60s a time of so much social ferment?
Perhaps one factor might have been kids went to mainline, liberal churches and heard liberal preachers deliver the liberal Gospel message and doing liberal things. And they got ideas in their heads. Good trouble ideas.
Bupalos
@Omnes Omnibus: I’m not saying it’s universal, I’m saying it isn’t universal either way. This is an exurban school near Ravenna Ohio, the liberal “part of the state” but the exurbs are the exurbs whether you’re in New York or Illinois or Michigan or Ohio or basically anywhere.
One of the reason it strikes me is because I’ve worked a bit in sustainable construction and indeed the trades themselves comprised of people that left HS 10-20 years earlier seemed (very slightly) less segregated than the vocational school. The extent surprised me.
prostratedragon
@RevRick: Are there even good sewing machines on the market for homevuse anymore? We never found one as good as my mother’s old one from the 1940s — not a Singer, but equivalent — even though the newer ones claimed to do everything but knit Fair Isle. I sewed my high school senior year dresses for the prom, luncheon, and so on.
Manyakitty
@sab: YAY!!! He clearly has excellent taste 😁. I have to agree about the high quality of participants in our meetup. What a great group! I look forward to the next one.
Professor Bigfoot
This is why I want to see the demographic makeup of these “factions” that hate other factions in the Democratic Party, because the only faction I see that has that hate and that willingness to shiv other Democrats is straight white Christian men.
chemiclord
Sen. Kaine: Americans aren’t talking about Biden anymore…
Media: But we really, really, really want them to!
sab
@Nelle: You are an inspiration to me. I am lucky, because although both my senators suck my congresswoman is excellent.
jonas
@Professor Bigfoot: Also, anytime any retailer has tried to offer premium Made in USA products alongside imported ones, nobody will touch them. They go for the cheaper import. Always. Which is why after a while they gave up and just started relying on imports. Consumers spoke loud and clear with their shopping dollars.
People tell pollsters they’d be willing to pay more for a comparable US-made product, but they lie like filthy rugs.
Eunicecycle
@mali muso: tthat’s a really good skill to have. I, like sab, took home ec in high school and also my mother sewed, so I learned. Now my daughters don’t know how to hem or even fix a seam. Entirely my fault. I’ve even tried to show them but they’re happy to let me do it for them!
Captain C
@Another Scott:
I think you suck at your job…oh, you mean the book.
Belafon
@prostratedragon: Some of the best sewing machines are made by Brother, the printer company.
Manyakitty
@sab: cooking and sewing are fun and useful skills. I took all the home ec classes, even “advanced” home ec senior year.
prostratedragon
@Lyrebird: Those look like the Navy bells I used to wear back in the early 70s. Comfy as all getout. Mine were wool melton, but if that denim’s as good as it looks, at least the jeans will last many a year.
jonas
@RevRick: It’s starting to be a thing again with the millennial crowd. My son has a side hustle altering clothes at college for his friends. Lots of kids have taken up knitting and other “old-timey” crafts. We got him a nice, heavy duty machine recently at a close-out sale at Jo-Ann.
You can still get decent sewing machines (all imports nowadays, of course) — the trick is finding service shops if you need something fixed. Outside major metro areas, there are none.
Suzanne
@Soprano2:
Agreed, but there’s been some change about the issues that affect women. Education and housing have been big issues that disproportionately women under 50, because women started going to college in significant quantity (and currently outnumber men by a lot), and people are delaying marriage and household formation, so we need more small housing in urban areas for one-person households.
Manyakitty
@Professor Bigfoot: fantastic! Keep it going!
jonas
@Belafon: Also Husqvarna, the Swedish company that also makes chainsaws and motorbikes, for some reason.
Suzanne
@Manyakitty: I took Home Ec, too, and I got an award. SuzMom loves to tease me about it to this day.
sab
@prostratedragon: I have an ancient Bernina. It stopped working a few years back and I took it in for repairs. The guy said it might need a new motherboard and that would cost me. Then he opened it up and laughed. It was so old it didn’t even have a motherboard. It just needed a new foot pedal. And that was about twenty dollars.
Amish women are all competing for the used treadle machines. Why don’t we make new ones?
Omnes Omnibus
@Manyakitty: Everyone had to take Home Ec as 7th graders and Shop in 8th at my middle school in CT. I was pretty terrible at both. My iron and brass candle holder was okay, but everything else I did sucked.
Bupalos
@suzanne: I think we’re looking at political realignment and increased polarization from one angle. In fact, former Republicans are fleeing that party in numbers that are very high compared to historical norms. Former Democrats are fleeing this party in slightly higher numbers.
The trend is that we’re becoming more white, older, more wealthy, and more female. They’re becoming less white, younger, less wealthy, and more male.
Suzanne
@Professor Bigfoot:
There’s a chunk of left-NIMBYs who hate YIMBYs. It’s weird to see people who say they’re on the left aligning with right-wingers who oppose housing construction because they don’t want PoC and poor people living near them, but the spectrum is a really a circle, I guess.
prostratedragon
@YY_Sima Qian:
Earth to DOGE: Know what all those laid off civil servants were doing? NOT WORKING FOR SOME OTHER GOVERNMENT, YOU DUMB SHIT!
Manyakitty
@Omnes Omnibus: I wanted to take wood shop but can’t remember now why it didn’t happen. I know there were a couple of boys in home ec because they thought it would be a good way to talk to girls.
Suzanne
@Bupalos: I agree with you on this. The realignment is happening and it isn’t going to break down the same way it has in the past. The social order is changing and issues are shifting in salience.
trollhattan
It all makes sense with an added coda: “Because that’s what I’d do.”
prostratedragon
@sab: Motherboard! Oh, how precious. I think a new pedal was the only major repair my mother’s machine needed down into the 70s.
Bupalos
@Professor Bigfoot: Erm… I think the analysis from the focus group lady Sara Whatshername at the Bulwark was that the single most effective political ad of the cycle was Trump’s anti-trans “she’s for they-them,” and the group it was most effective with was non-white men. In Ohio they blasted one on every baseball and basketball game I watched that was 3 black dudes in like a podcast studio talking about Harris wanting to pay for sex-change operations for prisoners.
RevRick
@sab: I have a cousin who lives in Ohio, born and raised there. Goes to the UCC church in Kent.
sab
@Manyakitty: That’s why the boys were in my home ec. They didn’t become chefs. They went to law school.
prostratedragon
@Belafon: Huh, I know their printers are ok. Not about to resume sewing at this point, but might look into them just out of curiosity.
Suzanne
@sab: Because sewing is now firmly in the niche hobby camp. It’s not a thing that people need to know how to do to make their households function.
If we wanted to make highly skilled garment design and production be a thing we do in this country, we’d need to invest significant resources of time, money, and training into teaching people how to do this stuff. In schools, not at home. We’d have to have additional training after high school, in trade schools and/or colleges. We’d have to pay for that. But we don’t pay for things in this country! We push costs onto students.
Omnes Omnibus
@sab:
So?
RevRick
@prostratedragon: MrsRev’s is a Brother and it weighs a ton.
PatD
@YY_Sima Qian: if the US was truly concerned about China, as in a future war scenario, then maybe this makes sense on some level as access to the Chinese market would no longer be all that important. However, this just seems to be a ham-fisted attempt to benefit US AI companies.
JML
@Belafon: hey, no shots at Walter Mondale, who was a good dude and a fine public servant.
(He came in to help push a poll monitoring recruiting drive I was doing in law school, and even well into his 80’s you should have seen that guy work these cynical law students and flip one after the other from someone just there for free pizza to a committed volunteers)
sab
@Omnes Omnibus: I am still chopping onions on the chopping block my brother made in shop and gave to my mother for Mothers’ Day back in the late 1960s. Mom used it for the rest of her long life.
sab
@Omnes Omnibus: What a waste of an education.
Professor Bigfoot
@sab: You just gotta love when karma is right on time, doncha? :^D
Geminid
@Suzanne: I generally avoid the YIMBY/NIMBY debates because I don’t have the time to study the real issues underlying these abstract slogans. And people tend to load every possible unrelated grievance onto them.
But Holy Cow, those debates sure are fierce!,They can make the Hatields and the McCoys look like Big Bird and Mr.Rogers.
sab
@Suzanne: Kent State has an acclaimed Fashion Design school. And a museum.
Manyakitty
@sab: smart kids
Omnes Omnibus
@sab: Redacted
prostratedragon
@sab:
Good question. How much of a market would there be beyond Amish? How many shops could serve it? Does anyone still own machinery to make them (classic textbook story on sunk costs)? Might there be a foreign market?
Suzanne
@Geminid: It’s incredibly hateful. And what kills me is that there’s probably a fair amount of room for alignment. But it gets so damn vicious.
I have said before, and I still believe….. how to sustainably urbanize, successfully manage the social and health impacts, and do so without killing one another, is our biggest economic and policy challenge of the next 100 years.
schrodingers_cat
@Bupalos: II did the math to test your claims.
This is what I found. 49% of Trump’s vote came just from white men. So your math is not mathing.
81% of his votes came from white people and only 19% came from other demographics. And only 2 percent of the vote came from Asians.
So yes white people comfortable with racism was one of the biggest factors why Trump won. The data doesn’t support your rewriting of history.
White people provided close to 63 million of his vote total of 77 million votes.
The biggest demographic group voting for Trump is white men
Second largest is white women. White women gave Trump more votes than all the other non-white Trump voting demographics put together
prostratedragon
@RevRick:
That sounds promising, i.e. able to withstand repeated forceful motion, which is where newer ones from years ago tended to be subpar.
Bupalos
@RevRick: That is a fantastic church and it was central to our efforts to fight fracking here. Kent is just a great community in a lot of ways.
YY_Sima Qian
@PatD: It’s not going to benefit the US AI companies, because the US LLMs are blocked in the PRC. Currently they are blocked by the US AI companies themselves, but otherwise they would be blocked by the CPC regime, because the output of the US LLMs are not censored, or rather not censored to the CPC regime’s liking.
Soprano2
@Geminid: I don’t think that’s what he meant, either – I think he meant what he said, there are too many women in the Democratic Party. The problem is that a lot of people in the press and other Democrats still listen to him.
Belafon
@trollhattan: The “What you did was illegal because it was mandated by law” crime.
Belafon
@JML: Not a shot at him. He was just the first dead Democrat I thought of.
Sure Lurkalot
@prostratedragon: I have a BabyLock sewing machine, second up from the bottom of the line and it’s quite nice. I paid $350 a couple of years ago. People also say good things about the Singer Heavy Duty machines which are in the $200-300 range.
Now that private equity shuttered JoAnn, I will probably sew a lot less. We have some nice fabric stores in Denver but they are way spendy for an amateur like myself.
sab
Painters arrived at 8:30 and the (stupid) pitbull has been barking non-stop ever since. I am so embarrassed for her.
Bupalos
I wouldn’t contest the first statement. I’m talking about CHANGES in the electorate, not what still persists and of course racism does persist. The white vote remains mostly unchanged overall, while it is now comprised for Republicans of younger and less wealthy and more male whites.
The non-white vote is changing and making the marginal difference in Republican success. A party that was dead in the water when Romney LOST to Obama with a maximal white margin had Trump just beat Kamala with a lower white margin. Because they’re adding voters we think of as welded to the party by minority solidarity, and that’s proving to not be true. It’s especially vulnerable to campaign manipulation in the digital age. The black vote in critical and media-bombed Wisconsin went from 8% Republican to 22% Republican. PA was similar and worse with Hispanics. The version of coalition politics we’re running is simply more vulnerable and shaky than we think.
The second statement doesn’t make sense to me. This isn’t “history,” I’m not “rewriting it.” You’ll also need to show your math, I’m going with Pew and Roper and letting them do the math. Though even your math in fact confirms that Trump did not get an “overwhelming” nor even “majority” of his support from white men.
prostratedragon
Derek Guy on qualigy t-shirts. Machinery is involved.
JML
@Belafon: fair enough. I’ve been lucky enough to meet Fritz many times, so I hate it when he’s trotted out as being the example of a loser Democrat (which is what my overreactive brain thought was going on, so I apologize), because he really was just a great guy and wonderful public servant.
schrodingers_cat
@Bupalos: You can do the math yourself. Not white men by their lonesome but white people who are comfortable with racism and all other kinds of bigotry made up over 80 percent of his total vote.
Here are my sources:
https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/how-groups-voted-2024
https://navigatorresearch.org/2024-post-election-survey-racial-analysis-of-2024-election-results/
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/elections/202
Percentages are a good short hand for analysis but raw numbers matter in an election
White people made up over 63 million of the 77 million plus votes Trump got. So yes they get the lion’s share of the blame for Trump’s second terms. That’s what the numbers say.
Belafon
@schrodingers_cat: Republicans are about to ramp up their attack on the CRA and VRA like they have done with trans rights (there’s a chart I cannot find right now that shows that the number of anti-trans bills more than doubled over the last three years, you know, when Democrats really had to start defending trans people), and Democrats will be accused of caring more about minorities than whites.
Baud
@Belafon:
Agree. That’s how it works.
rikyrah
Just a muthaphuckin’ GHOUL
GHOUL
GHOUL
Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) posted at 9:24 AM on Mon, May 19, 2025:
JD Vance’s reaction to Biden’s cancer diagnosis: “Whether the right time to have this conversation is now or some time in the future, we really do need to be honest about whether the former president was capable of doing the job.” https://t.co/VSUrPfaEg9
(https://x.com/atrupar/status/1924471160273580224?t=pHqtvrEGi_a1WFKkIIKnGw&s=03)
rikyrah
Matt McDermott (@mattmfm) posted at 7:03 AM on Mon, May 19, 2025:
On the topic of presidential mental acuity, the current president was awake at 1:30am rage tweeting about his former opponents’ crowd sizes and calling Beyoncé, Bono, and Bruce Springsteen ‘unpatriotic entertainers.’ Where is the news cycle about his fitness for office?
(https://x.com/mattmfm/status/1924435662276583868?t=Tj9e1bfvnL9o_fIDz4H32Q&s=03)
Bupalos
@schrodingers_cat: We’re using the same sources and I guess talking about different things? Again, I’m talking about how the electorate is changing to make Republican wins more likely. While contesting that “an overwhelming slice of Trump’s support comes from white men.” It’s not a majority of his total support overall, let alone an overwhelming part. He gets 60% of white men, 6 in 10. 4 in 10 supported Harris. If 1 in 10 walks to the other side of the line, it’s 50/50.
Granted, we haven’t seen 1 in 10 white males change their party preference in forever, that would be almost unprecedented. Which points up that the fact that we saw something on the order of 2 in 10 Hispanic females, 2 in 10 black males, and 3 in 10 Hispanic males walk over that line the wrong way over the last couple elections. This is where things are changing.
rikyrah
Greg Sargent (@GregTSargent) posted at 8:04 AM on Mon, May 19, 2025:
Remarkable description here from legal scholar Matt Seligman of the genuine authoritarianism that Stephen Miller and JD Vance crave, which is about the will of the “pure” people (the MAGA volk) being unconstrained by niggling obstacles like rule of law:
https://t.co/gtVUsUnbkA https://t.co/ojrYubQshm
(https://x.com/GregTSargent/status/1924451018965758198?t=tjuDDj3BAHBofHNxBTqfew&s=03)
Captain C
@trollhattan:
The investigators: “Donnie, after extensive and thorough investigation, using copious amounts of evidence, we have come to the conclusion that they all endorsed your opponent because you and your policies are utter dogshit.”
Baud
@Bupalos:
One election doesn’t establish a trend.
And SC has the right metric if the goal is to figure out which demos are primarily responsible for Trump. White people don’t get a pass on responsibility because they’ve consistently been bad for several decades.
Melancholy Jaques
@Betty Cracker:
Agreed & I would add that it doesn’t make anything better.
They Call Me Noni
@Professor Bigfoot: Good news! Glad you are on the mend.
satby
Late reply but many thanks to all for the birthday wishes! 🥳 ❤️
They Call Me Noni
@prostratedragon: I used to sew a lot. I could go to Hancock’s Fabric (long since shuttered) and buy enough scraps to make my (toddler) daughter a summers’ worth of outfits. Made some of my own clothes. Had a New Home machine that I sewed many a mile on. Loved that thing and I could make it sing and dance. Our house burned in 2014 and so when it came time to replace my beloved New Home I went to the Jenome’ (which is the new New Home) and bought a much, much more expensive but comparable machine. I hate the damn thing. Took me half an hour to thread it. It’s just a computer. Sewing shouldn’t be complicated but this thing is and I don’t have the patience for it. I’ve had it 10 years now and I bet I haven’t sewn 3 feet of fabric. It just sits in my sewing room on the cabinet with the cover over it.
Belafon
@Bupalos: Yes, you two are using the same data and arguing two different things. You’re arguing that a few percentage of blacks and Latinos have moved and are helping Republicans win, which is true of the 2024 election, but we’ll have to see if that’s true in the future. SC is arguing the bigger truth, which is that whites are overwhelmingly voting for the party that hates minorities, and they can’t escape being the people responsible for all of this no matter what a small percentage of others are doing.
To give you a similar context: Remember “Not all slave owners were white”?
brantl
@Suzanne: I can’t afford $140 hoodies, and I don’t know many who can. For $140 for a hoodie, the damn zipper shouldn’t break!
Professor Bigfoot
Y’know, I remember all the worries about the US becoming a “service economy.”
Well, that “service economy” was running like a well tuned flat-six, six months ago, and here we are.
If you can’t fix stupid and you can’t outvote it…
Melancholy Jaques
@Bupalos:
How much of that is people refusing to vote for a woman for president?
And I will repeat one of my hobby horses. Everyone on our side has to stop talking about Hispanic voters, Latino voters. There is far too much diversity among people whose surnames, parents, grandparents, & more distant ancestors came from countries where Spanish is the most common language.
Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Mexicans, Salvadorans, Filipinos do not see themselves as members of the same team.
Suzanne
@brantl: Like I said, it was a birthday treat to myself! I had been given a gift card, which took care of a portion of it. I wear it all the time. But agree….. it is a spendy item and not a thing I get to buy with any frequency. The opposite of fast fashion, since I bought it like four years ago.
The zipper breaking was actually more my fault. I didn’t zip it up before throwing it in the wash, and the strap of something else got caught in the zipper and got all twisted up in it.
Melancholy Jaques
@satby:
Welcome to Septuagenariosity!
I’ve been here since March. Still not used to the seven.
Suzanne
@Professor Bigfoot: The complaints about being a “service economy” turned into the comments about being “too professional”. It’s always about something (someone) else.
Gretchen
@RevRick: When my kids were in junior high boys and girls both took both sewing and shop
UncleEbeneezer
@rikyrah: So JD Vance is a BJ commenter from 2024? I kid, I kid…
Omnes Omnibus
@Belafon: I also want to see how this “shift” plays out when Trump is no longer in the equation. I don’t understand stand his personal appeal at all, but he does seem to have it. Is there a shift towards the GOP as Bupalos suggests or is Trump sui generis?
sab
@rikyrah: Isn’t Bono Irish, so he can be all kinds of patriotic to his own country and still not like us.
Belafon
@Melancholy Jaques: There’s a search for language to use that means the same thing but isn’t “brown skin”. It’s also a search for words that indicate that Republicans don’t care if you’ve been here for generations if they can see with their own eyes that you’re different. Americans were removed the last time the US did this type of purge, and it will happen again.
mrmoshpotato
@prostratedragon:
Joining Rummy, Powell, and Kissinger.
They Call Me Noni
@rikyrah: Yeah, but let’s not have the conversation about whether the current president is capable of doing the job. What a creepy asshole.
trollhattan
Revvin’ up on a Monday.
The junior high nicknames will never get old. What a guy.
They Call Me Noni
@Melancholy Jaques: How much of that is people refusing to vote for a woman for president?
Woman of color. All of it. Every damn bit of it.
lowtechcyclist
@Professor Bigfoot:
Well yay!!!
brantl
@Subsole: rich people buy Republican politicians to make money.
They Call Me Noni
@trollhattan: The junior high nicknames never get old because he hasn’t learned any new words since then.
Suzanne
@Omnes Omnibus:
I am really interested in this question. There are some shifts that pre-date FFOTUS….. educational divide is growing, gender gap is growing. But I wonder if it’s transferable to another Republican. In a totally fucked-up way, I think FFOTUS is a generational political talent.
ETA: “Working-class” has been shifting toward the GOP since before Trump, as well.
No One You Know
@Trivia Man: And yet they seem to have never heard of the difference The Fairness Doctrine made, or how it was destroyed.
mrmoshpotato
@trollhattan: ABC does need to get their shit together and renew Doctor Hotboat (h/t John Oliver) for a second season though!
trollhattan
@They Call Me Noni:
Rolling tape, I see our larger issues are voter suppression and people staying home on election day.
Trump ’16: 62,984,828; ’20: 74,223,975; ’24: 77,302,580
Clinton ’16: 65,853,514; Biden ’20: 81,283,501; Harris ’24: 75,017,613
Despite drawing 9 million more votes than Hillary, Kamala shed 6 million Biden voters among whom roughly 3 million simply vanished. Why?
lowtechcyclist
@Suzanne:
My older sister got an award in Home Ec too, and she got her bachelor’s in engineering, and spent most of her adult life in the Corps of Engineers.
trollhattan
It’s a trap!
They Call Me Noni
@trollhattan: Perhaps they stayed home because they didn’t want to vote for a felon or a woman of color.
lowtechcyclist
@Professor Bigfoot:
Straight white men, sure, but I think the haters who identify as Christian went over to the GOP a long time ago. The Democratic Party isn’t a party where Christianity is that big a deal. The shivvers are just as likely to be agnostics.
Almost Retired
@Omnes Omnibus: I built a birdhouse in 7th Grade wood shop. The neighbor birds preferred to remain homeless.
trollhattan
@They Call Me Noni: The felon increased each of the three elections, even as his criminal record became longer, so that seems not to be disqualifying.
Old School
@mrmoshpotato: Pretty sure the non-renewal status of Doctor Odyssey is a “Ryan Murphy is busy on other shows” issue rather than an ABC issue.
mrmoshpotato
@Old School: Then Ryan Murphy needs to get his shit together. More Sexy ER On A Boat is needed.
StringOnAStick
@prostratedragon: There are good sewing machines available, and a lot of cheap crap that insures that someone curious decides it’s just not worth it. The Swiss made machines are excellent, but expensive. I sew everything and have for my whole life, but I recognize that I am a rare, rare bird these days. I use a 1980’s Bernina and I’ve sewed literally miles with it, and it’s still a great machine. I’m not interested in all the fancy stuff the new ones do, useless expense and also much moire touchy and in need of tune ups than a simple 7 stitch machine.
sab
@Almost Retired: That made me laugh, just proving I am not a nice person.
They Call Me Noni
@trollhattan: Very true. Maybe a lot of people figure that if they don’t live in a swing state what’s the use? Would be interesting to see the state statistics comparing the past two elections. Might look into that later this evening. Have to take Mr. Noni to a doctor appointment here in a few.
sab
@Professor Bigfoot: My white male spouse agrees with you 100%. He is suspicious of all white men, even his family and friends. He assumes the worst until they can prove otherwise.
You are his new hero.
lowtechcyclist
@rikyrah:
I would be delighted to punch that guy in the face. I would derive great satisfaction from it.
And then I would remind him that he can’t bring his sin into Heaven with him, so he might want to start working on leaving it behind now if he doesn’t want to end up in Hell.
sab
@lowtechcyclist: There are lots of Christians on our side. The sorts of Christians that actually read the Gospels, not the prosperity gospel.
Melancholy Jaques
@Professor Bigfoot:
Solidarity! I finished my cardiac rehab (post triple bypass) in February & it worked for me. Cannot praise the staff at UCLA enough. I joined a gym so I can continue to do the same things. Glad to hear you’re getting stronger.
trollhattan
@lowtechcyclist:
Can I get in line behind you?
Pretty please? I’ll even hold your jacket.
sab
@lowtechcyclist: Toasting away for all eternity works for me, because I am not a nice person.
mrmoshpotato
@lowtechcyclist:
Was capable? WTF?
When JD Vance croaks, I’ll ask if Vance was an asshole, and the answer will be “Yes! Fuck that couchfucker!”
mrmoshpotato
@lowtechcyclist:
Jesus does not approve of you fucking your couch, JD!
Professor Bigfoot
@sab: I almost don’t even know what to say except thanks to Mr. SAB, he is clearly a righteous cat.
as were everyone!
the flipside is that when you do run across one of those white dudes who is a “righteous cat“ y’all hold onto with all your might!
sab
@StringOnAStick: I wish I was a billionaire so that I could start a company making treadle sewing machines. They don’t do anything fancy. They just sew forwards and backwords. Thread tension is not complicated. They just work.
lowtechcyclist
@No One You Know:
If it were still in existence, it certainly wouldn’t have nearly the reach it once did, since it only applied to broadcast TV and radio to begin with.
Captain C
@lowtechcyclist:
We really do need to be honest about whether, regardless of what his biography may say, JV Vance is a habitual couchfucker who’s definitely going to hell for a number of reasons.
sab
@Professor Bigfoot: I intend to, as do his children.
Manyakitty
@StringOnAStick: I use my 25+ year-old Husqvarna (when they were still made in Sweden) at least several times per year and it’s been great. Took it in to the local quilting/sewing machine shop for a tube up and the guy said he hasn’t seen one like it in a long time. It says it’s electronic but all the controls are manual so I dunno.
rikyrah
scary lawyerguy (@scarylawyerguy) posted at 8:16 AM on Mon, May 19, 2025:
His entire presidency is programmed like a reality TV show. Today’s storyline is a call w/Putin, which I suspect will be followed by some selected leaks to favored reporters and perhaps a press availability so the rest can launder his spin. This is exactly what the press wanted!
(https://x.com/scarylawyerguy/status/1924454127909609901?s=03)
trollhattan
Just shoot me. Wait, let me rephrase.
Manyakitty
@rikyrah: so lazy. They can just sit back and collect their stories, no need to actually chase down facts.
Pathetic
PJ
@Baud:
A huge part of the political press is delighted to be part of the problem, and not just because it puts them at the center of any discussion. I am convinced that most of the press who took up the “Biden old” campaign from the Russians did so not because they were afraid Biden would lose to Trump, but because they were afraid he would win.
Some of that is because many of them are at heart Republicans (or who hate Democrats, which amounts to the same thing), some of it is because Trump was better for their careers and Biden was boring, some of it is down to aesthetics and class (so many of them seem to be pissed off that someone who didn’t go to an Ivy League school was President). And some of it is probably down to racism and sexism, because if anything happened to Biden, then a black woman would be President.
Geminid
@trollhattan: I suspect a lot of the 6 million voters Harris shed were Independents who voted Biden in 2020 and then Trump in 2024.
There were probably two smaller groups as well: one that voted Trump in 2020 and voted Harris last time, and another that sat out the last election. I can only guess the numbers, but I expect they were substantial.
Belafon
@rikyrah: Same with the stock market. He says “We’re getting a deal done” and the market goes up, without looking at the fact that what he meant was “We’re getting a deal to agree on meetings to get a deal done.” They don’t want to have to do their jobs either.
Gretchen
@Suzanne: I got the Betty Crocker Future Homemaker’s of America award in high school. I took the test because it got me out of physics class one day.
Melancholy Jaques
I agree with Josh Marshall on this:
There is never a shortage of people who want to argue about things that don’t matter anymore. The thing that matters now is how do we win the midterm elections.
JML
@Melancholy Jaques: seriously. especially since all except for the committed and unpersuadable have forgotten most of what happened in the last presidential race by the time the next one rolls around. And they’re not even wrong to do so! 4 years later, it doesn’t really matter what went on in the campaign to the voter…only to the people running the races.
No one is going to vote in 2028 going, “well, I was going to vote Democratic, but the Democratic leadership didn’t give me a mea culpa over Joe Biden being old, so now I’m voting for the couch fucker.”
sab
@Gretchen: Your comment just made the whole human faction of my household laugh.
The cats were not amused, but tney never are.
The dog was busy barking.
Lyrebird
@prostratedragon: Thanks, fellow Jackal!
I bet those were well constructed pants you had. We have a wool Army blanket from a relative who was in the service about 60 years ago… Still super warm and super tough!
zhena gogolia
I was away for a while and see we’re working on a TBogg.
trollhattan
Leopards, faces, construction, deploy!
Belafon
@trollhattan: They have a fix for that: The powers that be want to wreck the economy enough that you’ll want to take that accounting degree and put it to use reroofing houses, not as the owner, or the accountant, but as part of the crew.
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
I hate when BJ is slow when I’m trying to procrastinate.
Glory b
@RevRick: For me? Saturday.
Thankfully, my daughter is interested in sewing.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@trollhattan:
There’s been quite a bit of stuff written on construction and the immigration crapola:
https://www.realtor.com/advice/home-improvement/housing-market-hispanic-workforce/?cid=soc_shares_article_X
dnfree
@Spanky: I started on Fortran II, where if you wanted to incorporate text you had to count the number of characters and call it Hollerith, as in 9HTEXT HERE. Yes, all caps, why would you ask?
dnfree
@RevRick: I remember learning to darn socks in Girl Scouts for my sewing badge in the 1950s. It is a skill I have never used. But I have reattached buttons and fixed simple seam or hem problems by hand. I doubt that any of my grandchildren even know how to tie a knot in the thread.
StringOnAStick
@sab: My first job out of high school was sewing in an industrial factory for what went on to become a fancy outdoor equipment brand; it taught me two important lessons, the first being that I needed to go to college STAT or else, and how to sew at a demon’s speed. It took me two years before I could stand using a home machine again because they were so painfully slow compared to an industrial machine.
A neighbor asked me to help her thread a fancy used serger she’d bought; the damned thing was so complicated because it had an automatic threader that wasn’t working, and there was no way to bypass it and actually thread it. She then tried to give it to me; I told her to take it as a trade in and get something simple. Something without all this complicating stuff just so people can avoid following a diagram to thread something a bit more complex. This thing had a blower in it to push the thread through, just about guaranteed to be fiddly and not work without constant maintenance.
zhena gogolia
@Baud: Me too. Just finished grading my papers.
prostratedragon
@lowtechcyclist: [Whew, that was a nice nap!]
I know a chef who had a science degree. Suspect there’s a bunch of science majors among the America’s Test Kitchen presenters; one has admitted to chemistry in an aside. Home ec should be a very useful bit of back ground gor an engineer.
dnfree
@sab: I wanted to take drafting in my public high school in the early 1960s, but it was only for boys. My dad even went to the school board. And there were no power tools in that class as far as I know. (Just in the administration.)
StringOnAStick
@Manyakitty: If your Husquvarna weighs a ton and the head portion (where the needle comes out) isn’t huge, it’s more machine than motherboard. The new stuff just seems obsessed about having all these fancy stitches and doing machine embroidery, and seriously, how much need is there for that? The heads are huge so they get into your visual field and all that fancy electronics means they are more expensive to repair and need tune ups more often. My old Bernina 801 might be a heavy warhorse but it is about as reliable as it can be. I almost bought the industrial version back when they made it, but I didn’t want to deal with the extra space it took up. I just sew as a hobby but I repair tons of things for friends and do projects like making microphone stand bags for members of our music group.
prostratedragon
@trollhattan:
Nothing like a solemn inaugural mass for a Pope to make a guy get all smoochie.
Another Scott
@RevRick: +1
But I’d go even further.
“Deal” is 47’s framing, going back to his book. It has a mountain of baggage with it. The press really should avoid the term, because that’s not how nation states act, and it’s not how important consensus is created.
Life, and government, isn’t a real estate transaction.
Grr…
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
dnfree
@Gretchen: Physics was a life-changing class for me in high school and I never had a single home economics class. When I got married the only thing I knew how to cook was my mother’s meat loaf.
Omnes Omnibus
@PJ: The same bunch was pissed at Clinton who had Georgetown, Oxford, and Yale on his resume. Ronald Reagan had a BA from Eureka College and they were fine with him. I swear it’s comfort around Black people that sets them off.
WTFGhost
I saw that CNN had all the information we needed to know about Biden’s cancer, and how it didn’t affect his presidency.
As is normal with prostate cancer, the cancer was found when he had problems peeing. This means it happened since the last time he had a physical, at which time he’d have gotten his prostate checked for lumps and hardness by the doctor. Before that time, no cancer. But, even if you swear up and down that there must have been, because otherwise journalists are going to be so sad, it would have affected peeing, sex, and bone, not brain.
Another Scott
@prostratedragon:
$349 at Amazon.
;-)
My J has a Husqvarna sewing machine. Non treadle. Loves it. I’ve got a bunch of battery operated Husqvarna lawn tools – they work very well.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Pappenheimer
@schrodingers_cat: it’s sarong it could be right
cain
@Glory b:
That’s what our blogfather said after switching :D
prostratedragon
@Lyrebird: They were, extremely well made. I had two pairs, and found an Ike-style jacket from the British civil defense, of the same melton cloth and similarly well fashioned. Set me up for a few winters in chilly but not arctic NYC.
prostratedragon
@Another Scott:
I see there are several. For that full retro look there’s the Yamata Bee Butterfly. Also some treadle machine user manuals available.
LAC
@Jeffro: amen! It never stops, and yet let’s play nice and hold their hands while we step back because Super Hetero Man is on his (not her) way to save the day!
Kayla Rudbek
@Suzanne: because it’s women’s work, of course nobody pays attention to it
Kayla Rudbek
@Belafon:
@RevRick: or she could be the one giving lessons someday like here: https://stitchsewshop.com my local sewing store
Kayla Rudbek
@RevRick: yeah, everyone regardless of gender should have exposure to shop and home economics classes (it would make a lot more sense than gym classes that don’t teach lifetime sports)
Kayla Rudbek
@Professor Bigfoot: I would say that straight white Christian women are also good at backstabbing as well
Kayla Rudbek
@sab: good question about the treadle sewing machines, advertise them as green/low carbon/low emission/off the grid ready (and slap “tactical” onto them as well)
Paul in KY
@satby: Happy Birthday! Also thank you for spreading the truth! Have a Guinness for me!
Paul in KY
@TS: His coattails are so long and bigly!! NOT!!!
Paul in KY
@Baud: To me, a true Democrat doesn’t need to explain anything. It’s just self evident.