Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

There are no moderate republicans – only extremists and cowards.

Republicans firmly believe having an abortion is a very personal, very private decision between a woman and J.D. Vance.

The “burn-it-down” people are good with that until they become part of the kindling.

Humiliatingly small and eclipsed by the derision of millions.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

This chaos was totally avoidable.

Bark louder, little dog.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

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

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

“Facilitate” is an active verb, not a weasel word.

When we show up, we win.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

Wait, what?

You know it’s bad when the Project 2025 people have to create training videos on “How To Be Normal”.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Consistently wrong since 2002

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

“When somebody takes the time to draw up a playbook, they’re gonna use it.”

“Can i answer the question? No you can not!”

They are not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

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56Comments

  7. 7.

    eclare

    @lamh36: I thought I read that Kushner was in favor of firing Comey, pretty much the only person in the White House that was.

  8. 8.

    ArchTeryx

    In a lot of ways lions and housecats really aren’t very different, psychologically. In fact, from what I’ve read, lions are easier to socialize to humans than housecats are. The trouble, of course, is that when a lion lovenibbles you a little too hard, you lose half your face. ^.^

    These two show every bit of body language of being ecstatic to see her, so she must have really pampered the daylights out of them before they were removed to the zoo. (And based on how healthy and sleek-looking they were, the zoo wasn’t exactly mistreating them either).

    Lions are such fun cats, so long as you aren’t on the menu!

  9. 9.

    efgoldman

    @lamh36:

    Bannon wants Priebus to testify to Mueller that Kushner was involved in Trump’s decision to fire Comey

    Lord of the Flies Nazi WH division.
    Everybody’s looking to give testimony that will save his/her own ass.
    And this is just the beginning. We haven’t heard from Flynn or Manafort’s papers yet.

  10. 10.

    Yarrow

    I love this video. It’s amazing they knew her.

    @lamh36: Bannon’s going to war with Javanka. They are the Democrats in the White House, after all. We’re all going to need a lot more popcorn.

  13. 13.

    ArchTeryx

    @MomSense: You had some reason to be. Lions can be pretty friendly cats if they’re well socialized to people (and these two obviously were), but they also can forget their own strength. That humans don’t have thick fur and heavy pelts to defect a playful cuff or a lovenibble.

  14. 14.

    Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)

    R.I.P 2017…
    John Hurt
    Al Jarreau
    David Axelrod
    Chaz Pazienza
    Jonathan Demme
    Bill Paxton
    Powers Boothe
    Chuck Berry
    Chris Cornell
    Roger Moore
    Charlie Murphy
    Albert “Prodigy” Johnson
    Don Rickles
    Chester Bennington
    Adam West
    June Foray
    George Romero
    Martin Landau
    Gregg Allman
    Bruce Forsyth
    Glen Campbell
    Dick Gregory
    Jerry Lewis

    Join us next time when Trump, Ryan, and McConnell die and the entire surviving cast of the Star Trek franchise is immediately devoured by rogue bull elephants.

  18. 18.

    Chitown Kev

    A friend of mine once dog-sat for a grown female rottweiler that took a liking to me. I remember one afternoon at an outdoor coffeehouse, the dog greeted me exactly like this… now really, she was a big sweetie of a dog but still…

  21. 21.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Mom Says I*m Handsome: I’ve fixed your link. For anyone that doesn’t want to click across, here is what is posted at the link:

    personal news
    Posted on August 20, 2017 by Freddie
    Shortly I will be headed to the Richmond University Medical Center to pursue intensive treatment for my mental illness. My day-to-day existence has become entirely unmanageable, and I fear for my health and safety. I do not have much of a plan at this point other than to get checked in. When I am back out I will try to decide if this project can continue. If not I will immediately suspend the Patreon, but feel free to stop your payments yourselves too. It is clear that I can never return to my old ways of engaging online, and I must leave semipublic life permanently, among many other changes. All I want is to build a quiet and simple existence where I can live and work privately without hurting myself or others. At present I have a hard time contemplating the future. I just know that my life is fundamentally broken and drastic measures are necessary to fix it.

    My immediate priority is to get healthy, and to try and save my job and the health insurance that is necessary for my immediate survival. I need to try preserve whatever I have left.

    I would give everything I own to be anyone other than who I am. Goodbye and thank you for everything.

  27. 27.

    Mookie

    @Omnes Omnibus

    I will leave it there.

    I won’t. Just hours before deleting his twitter for the umpteenth time, he accused Malcolm Harris of being a rapist and sexual harasser, and a number of useful idjits, including Greenwald and Fang, blithely enabled this and are now whinging that Harris is shaming [BONERS] for his mental illness because he, Harris, would like an apology.

  29. 29.

    Adam L Silverman

    @lamh36: There’s also this:
    axios.com/sheldon-adelson-privately-supports-anti-mcmaster-campaign-2474802744.html?utm_source=twitt…

    Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson has privately told one of his allies that he supports a campaign that depicts H.R. McMaster as anti-Israel and seeks to remove him from his post as national security adviser.
    In an email to Mort Klein, the president of the Zionist Organization of America, Adelson writes: “Now that I have talked to somebody with personal experience with McMaster, I support your efforts.”
    Why this matters: Adelson is arguably the most influential donor in Republican politics, spending tens of millions of dollars each election season. He also funds the ZOA, which has been relentlessly attacking McMaster and leading an outside campaign to remove him from his post.
    Adelson’s spokesman Andy Abboud told Axios recently that Adelson had nothing to do with ZOA’s campaign against McMaster and was “perfectly comfortable” with the job McMaster was doing.

    Abboud was correct about Adelson being unaware of the campaign, though Adelson makes clear in his email to Klein that he was never “comfortable” with McMaster because he knew nothing about him.
    What changed: Adelson tells Klein he spoke with Safra Catz, the Israeli-born CEO of Oracle. Adelson says Catz told him about a dinner she had recently with McMaster and “it certainly enlightened me quite a bit.”
    But Adelson also makes clear in his email that he doesn’t want to be publicly associated with the campaign against McMaster. (Klein never claimed Adelson was supporting it, and while he accepts funding from Adelson he is known as an independent Israel hawk who cannot be corralled, even by his major donor.)
    The pushback: A White House source points out that the Israel team at the White House, including noted right winger Ambassador Friedman, “feel McMaster is remarkably pro-Israel and he just had a meeting with senior Israeli officials where he won plaudits from them for understanding their unique security needs.”

  31. 31.

    Mom Says I*m Handsome

    @Mookie: I don’t know anything about his recent activities, and his writing at BJ never did anything for me. But I’ve been watching some people close to me go through the torment of mental illness (including my ex-wife & mother of my kids, who’s doubly blessed with bipolar & BPD), and I will relate to Freddie with compassion and some allowance that his actions weren’t entirely fully volitional.

  35. 35.

    Shalimar

    @Adam L Silverman: Breitbart has already been at war with McMaster for weeks, as I’m sure you are aware. For their new war to begin under their returned general, they at least need to expand to a new target. Like Jared.

  36. 36.

    Mnemosyne

    @Mom Says I*m Handsome:

    Accidentally or inadvertently injuring someone still requires an apology, whether it’s something as simple as stepping on someone else’s foot without meaning to or as complicated as making false accusations when you’re not in your right mind.

    At a minimum, a public apology should be made for a public allegation that was false and damaged the other person’s reputation.

  37. 37.

    Shalimar

    @Adam L Silverman: Didn’t Freddie get a job last year at a New York university? I forget the details, bit it sounded lIke he actually found work in the administrative field he had been studying.. Did he lose that, or is he just disengaging from blogging? That post sounds like someone who has lost everything.

  39. 39.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Shalimar: I don’t know. He well predated me here. When he wrote here and I just read stuff here while writing at my previous locale I didn’t read his pieces. So I have no idea what he does, where he is, etc. All I know is he apparently pisses off a lot of people.

  40. 40.

    Shalimar

    @Mnemosyne: Very true, but it is possible he has checked himself in somewhere where he no longer has internet access to be able to applogize.

    He was always melodramatic and a bit self-absorbed, but I hadn’t thought it was to the degree of mental ilness. Hopefully his time away will help him.

  41. 41.

    Shalimar

    @Adam L Silverman: That is a war worth watching. I hope we will get lots of tales of Jared’s incompetence on various issues. Just making him the scapegoat for Russian collusion would be so boring, and also such bullshit. Trump knew every detail. I want to know about all the things Trump didn’t care about and delegated to Jared even though Jared didn’t know jack about them either.

  42. 42.

    Mnemosyne

    @Shalimar:

    It’s certainly possible that he’s already closed his accounts, but then you get the word out another way. Sending a mass email to the other bloggers who picked up the accusation, or emailing an apology to the person you publicly accused of rape along with your permission to publish it would probably work.

    It just seems shitty to make a very public accusation like that and then leave it hanging without a clarification that what you said was not true.

  43. 43.

    Shalimar

    @Adam L Silverman: Freddie wasn’t here long. There weren’t many posts by him, but his shtick is being a true leftist no matter how rightwing his idea, whereas you are a sellout because you do not agree with him.

    I didn’t read many of his posts here. Regulars drove him off before I cared enough to try his writing. But I do seem to remember that one of the big complaints was that he would attack someone in a post, and then not stick around for the comments.

    He is more well-known for various LGM takedowns of his leftier-than-thou hot takes, and a rather infamous destruction by Sadie Doyle. That is where the “Boner” nickname comes from.

  45. 45.

    Shalimar

    @Mnemosyne: It is shitty, but then, this is Freddie. His whole online persona was back and forth name-calling with a huge number of people.

    When he was here, I thought commenters were very harsh to him, but I didn’t read all the threads in detail and later realized he provoked the hatred with the arrogance and condescension of his writing style.

  47. 47.

    Mookie

    @Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD): Indeed
    @Mom Says I*m Handsome: I don’t dispute that people aren’t always responsible for their actions. Highlighting and condemning bad behavior is not condemning the man, it’s advocating on the behalf of his victims and ensuring that they are not erased in the rush to absolve him of his many errors and bad habits. Harris has asked for an apology and/or explanation and there was nothing and no one stopping deBoer from having given one or both in his letter of departure.
    @Omnes Omnibus: If it’s mean to acknowledge reality, I’m a mean one. I won’t be complicit in handwaving away his harassment (and he’s started and participated in many campaigns of harassment over the years). I’ll speak ill, provided it’s true, of the dead and the living, both. No one has earned the right to whitewash their history, when it’s as egregious as his, because of some present suffering and doing so is no favor to someone hoping to recover, one day, from that suffering.

  48. 48.

    Mookie

    @Omnes Omnibus: Also, just to be clear, my original comment wasn’t just critiquing his behavior, but others’s, as well.
    @Mom Says I*m Handsome: my apologies for not saying so in an earlier comment, but I’m sorry to read you’re grappling with a similar situation.

  49. 49.

    bystander

    @Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD): What? No mention of the loss of Barbara Cook? The original Marian the Librarian, Cunegonde and Amalia?

    IIRC de Boer was trying to post on my old favorite, CapitolGrilling. I think the rwns ran him off there.

    The best thing that ever happened on CG was when the mother/daughter duo who were both sleeping with John Fund brought their fight to CG. Breathtaking in its awfulness.

  50. 50.

    PJ

    @Shalimar: Self-righteousness combined with self-absorption, and an inability to consider any kind of criticism is a crippling delusion. Whether that rises to mental illness is a professional question. But then that might get Trump off the hook, too.

  51. 51.

    Mnemosyne

    @Mookie:

    And just to be clear, if he is having serious mental health issues, I’m not saying that the things he did were somehow deliberate. But if you very publically injure someone else, you are responsible for apologizing to them afterwards even if you did not purposefully injure them.

  52. 52.

    WaterGirl

    @Mnemosyne: It sounds to me like Freddie is fighting for his life here, and it seems to me that puts everything else on the back burner. If he doesn’t apologize after he has recovered, then by all means have at it. But someone who fears for his life and his health and who says he would give everything he has to be anyone other than himself, that person has much bigger fish to fry than apologizing for something – or a lot of things – that he did while unstable.

    He may still be an asshole when be comes out on the other side of this, but at least he will be an asshole who is responsible for his actions. If that happens, slag him for the lack of apologies then. My two cents.

  53. 53.

    Mom Says I*m Handsome

    @Mookie: Thanks. One of the features of my ex’s mental illness (the BPD, or borderline personality disorder) is the complete inability — and I do not use that phrase lightly — to understand how her actions have a negative consequence with me or with others. If you can’t see how what you’ve done is shitty, you don’t have to apologize; and apologizing, to her, is an admission of her underlying internal conversation that she’s bad, and she knows in her bones that she’ll be abandoned if she’s bad.

    I don’t know the particulars of Freddie’s condition. I’m just saying that the stuff we reasonably healthy-of-mind people take for granted — reasoning, balance, lack of distorted thinking — may be off for him, and when it is, all predictability is out the window.

    Let’s let the guy get the help he needs. He can atone afterwards. Or not; this shit is insidious.

  54. 54.

    Hob

    WaterGirl: Delurking here just to say thanks for that comment. “Back burner” is a good way to put it. And I say that as someone who has been harmed by people while they were in a crisis involving mental illness and/or substance abuse, and had no way of knowing at the time whether they would make amends in the foreseeable future.

  56. 56.

    Mookie

    @Mnemosyne: Agreed. And he has never been at a loss for words. He has always, however, demonstrated a willingness to wipe out his social media accounts when he feels he’s gone one step too far. And I think it’s fairly clear he overstepped, and knows he overstepped, when lashing out at Harris. The timing of the two (attacking Harris, withdrawing for self-care and mental health reasons) aren’t actually shown to be connected.
    @Mom Says I*m Handsome: What you say makes sense; I’ve no experience with BPD nor, as you say, ought we to speculate about what’s afflicting deBoer, but he’s allowed to be an unrepentant asshole, ill or otherwise, now or later, for any reason he chooses, and I imagine if he does offer up an apology at some point it’ll be accepted. Frankly, I’m more concerned at the moment about reactions like this, where disingenuous concern-trolling is used in the service of protecting people from merely discussing a known abuser (and that is what I regard deBoer as). He definitely has a right to, as he puts it, retire into a private life; what he has said and done publicly up until that retirements remains valid fodder for discussion and attempts to silence that discussion deserve scrutiny and criticism. That those silencing tactics explicitly partake in the language of victim-blaming is an interesting, but not particularly surprising, development.

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