Why does it feel like it is Friday?
At any rate, my sinuses are starting to clear up a little bit after being waterboarded by tree pollen over the weekend, and the Tempe weather states that pollen levels are dropping to moderate. Plus Joelle made a medium spicy beef/pepper stir fry sort of thing, so I am beginning to be able to smell. Unfortunately, I am also beginning to plan my trip back to WV next month, which sucks. But there are things to do. tomatoes to plant, backyards to clean up, etc. I also have to be back because I need to have the water turned back on so that the plumber can install a new line from the street to the house. We have been (the plumber and I) to do this for two years now, but last year he got swamped with major contract work and the winter got him so far behind because of all the breaking pipes in the area. I called and talked to him today and we decided the end of April would be best, and he gave me a quote so I can start sending him some payments up front so it will not be as much of a shock.
Also working out the mowing schedule with Gerald for the summer. At my urging he has fixed the second rider and got a bunch of new contracts so we might be in a position where both of us are mowing for solid 40 hour weeks, which is awesome. Gerald also informed me the front porch finally needs to be fixed, but the roof on it is fine, so we are going to have to lift that and re-do all the nonsense. It just never ends, but I have to do it to keep the house structurally sound and safe and I don’t want to be saddled with a ton of repairs to do when I eventually sell.
In other news, we need to talk about the problems in the white family? Where are the role models?
This white crime wave has gotta stop. We need to shut it down until we can find out what the hell is going on
— Oliver Willis (@owillis.bsky.social) March 5, 2025 at 4:43 PM
I wonder if they will just drop the charges just because.
I have no idea how much of any ofthis is true but the cynic in me is that this is just an attempt to cripple Democratic fundraising in the midterms:
Democrats have for years credited ActBlue with giving them an edge over Republicans by creating a universal and trusted platform for donating. ActBlue, which is based in Somerville, Mass., says it has raised more than $16 billion for Democratic candidates and causes since its founding in 2004.
In recent weeks, congressional Republicans have demanded answers from ActBlue about its security and fraud-prevention measures, as well as how the group prevents certain foreign donors from illegally contributing to candidates. The letter from the ActBlue unions warned that the group was “under increasing scrutiny” and “the target of bad-faith political attacks at the hands of ill-intentioned operators.”
On Feb. 6, ActBlue responded to Republican congressional inquiries with a three-page letter, sent from the law firm Covington & Burling, to “provide an update regarding ActBlue’s security, fraud prevention measures and related procedures.”
If Democrats had just 1/100th of the killer instinct Republicans have. I will follow along though and if there is any real issue with their fundraising, we will adjust accordingly.
Did we come to any consensus on what kind of book and author we would like to try to get for the future? Right now I am re-reading Howard Zinn’s People’s History, but that is obviously not someone we could have for the book club. Anything else?
I’m going to watch some Trump-Free tv and not think about politics. Might watch an episode of 1923, since the new season is underwayBy the way- I forget if I mentioned this, but I have no problem with any of the Democratic behavior last night. Do it all. Hold up signs, get kicked out and wag your cane at those pricks. Heckle. Color-coordinate. Wear messages on t-shirts. Give feisty interviews. Hold town halls. Have instagram chats afterwards. Flood the fucking zone. Do everything until something works. Good on ya.
War for Ukraine Day 1,105: Putin Takes Advantage of Trump Stabbing Ukraine in the Front
toine
The British got tired of the Puritans and shipped them off to America. They emptied their prisons and sent all their criminals to Australia. Who would have guessed that 400 years later the Puritans would have caused more havoc?!? Australia definitely got the better of those deals…
TKH
Was the POS-COS drunk on power or just on ethylcarbinol like a “regular Joe”?
Leto
Always projection.
SiubhanDuinne
If either of them is gettable, I would love to have a book club zoomer with either Ruth Ben-Ghiat (an expert on fascism in Italy and author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present) or another renowned expert on authoritarianism, Timothy Snyder (author of On Tyranny and On Freedom.)
They’re both good speakers and from what I’ve seen of them on various MSNBC programs, they both seem very accessible and conversational. But I have no idea, obviously, if they’d be open to something like the BJBC.
frosty
@toine:
The Puritans aren’t causing the havoc, they settled New England and moved on to the upper midwest. The havoc is from the Cavaliers who settled the southeast and became slaveowners. We’re still fighting the English Civil War from the 1600s.
The Scots-Irish are lending a hand in the havoc as well, from their home base in the Appalachians, then points west.
Steve LaBonne
@frosty: And the lineal descendants of the Puritans were Congregationalists (now part of the United Church of Christ) and Unitarians (now Unitarian Universalists). Two of the most liberal religious denominations that exist.
LeftCoastYankee
I have found myself muttering “f*king white people…” more than a few times in the last few years, despite the fact I’m as pasty as they come.
Oy.
Central Planning
I’m in NYC and saw in the subway there’s a new Daredevil season on Disney+. I might give that a go. The big decision is iPhone or laptop.
Steve LaBonne
@LeftCoastYankee: You’re very far from being alone.
NotMax
Song Petula Clark never sang: “Don’t Saw in the Subway.”
:)
mrmoshpotato
Mmmmmmmm slap me in the bones with that! 😋
ETA – I want some late night Chinese food now. Dammit, Cole!
NotMax
@mrmoshpotato
Which raises an unrelated question.
Anyone have an inkling what became of commenter dance around in your bones?
mrmoshpotato
@toine:
Australia aren’t idiots – they have universal healthcare. And you can freely call people c***s.
mrmoshpotato
@NotMax: That person was before I found this site, but I did tell WaterGirl that I loved the name from some of the 20th anniversary celebration reposts.
Leto
@SiubhanDuinne: great suggestions.
mrmoshpotato
@LeftCoastYankee: Same here!
NotMax
@mrmoshpotato
Your ETA raises different question.
Does Chicago still refer to Chinese restaurants as chop suey restaurants? Used to be a slanguage thing (AFAIK) unique to the Windy City.
eclare
@mrmoshpotato:
Same here! But I live in Memphis, not NYC, late night deliveries do not exist.
mrmoshpotato
@NotMax: I’ve actually never heard that used.
Growing up, there was a local place that had “chop suey” in its restaurant name, but I’ve never heard Chinese food restaurants referred to as “chop suey restaurants.”
mrmoshpotato
@eclare: Let us shake our fists at Cole!
Pretty sure the Chinese place up the street is closed already.
NotMax
@eclare
Everybody Chun King tonight.
:)
eclare
@mrmoshpotato:
Curses!
comrade scotts agenda of rage
Doubt Cole will see this…
You can’t get Zinn but maybe you can get an author of one of the books in the ‘People’s History’ series, Ray Raphael. He wrote the outstanding “People’s History of the American Revolution’. He’s also written a ton of books from the period but other interesting stuff:
rayraphael.com/booklist.htm
He’s 81 so no time like the present.
rikyrah
Finished watching Prime Target on AppleTV.
Liked the series.
Gloria DryGarden
@NotMax: when we lived in Chicago, we never called it that.. just Chinese food.
Gloria DryGarden
@mrmoshpotato: do you know how to make it?
mrmoshpotato
@eclare: I searched, and it’s open for another hour. I think dinner tomorrow will be some beef dish. Mmmmmmmmmm
Old Dan and Little Ann
@NotMax: YIkes. I had a terrible teaching partner many years ago with a Hong Kong Phooey figurine. Push button and it would play “Everybody was Kung Fu fighting.” Made my skin crawll.
mrmoshpotato
@Gloria DryGarden: I could figure it out – even though Cole didn’t include details!
NotMax
@Gloria DryGarden
First learned that factoid more than 60 years ago, so it may have fallen out of fashion in the interim.
JCJ
@NotMax: I thought Dance Around in Your Bones had a terminal illness, but I certainly might not be remembering correctly
mrmoshpotato
@Old Dan and Little Ann: From Wikipedia:
“Kung Fu Fighting” is a disco song by Jamaican vocalist Carl Douglas, written by Douglas and produced by British-Indian musician Biddu.[3] It was released in 1974 as the first single from his debut album, Kung Fu Fighting and Other Great Love Songs (1974)
Ummmmm other great love songs?
NotMax
@mrmoshpotato
Push Push in the Bush?
“Oh, listen darling. They’re playing our song!”
//
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@mrmoshpotato:
Another little known fact, Carl Douglas’s manager at the time was Eric Woolfson who went on to co-found the Alan Parsons Project along with Alan Parsons.
danielx
Heard this earlier while trying to improve my mood. Can’t say I was a huge Slash fan but anybody who covers Howlin’ Wolf in this day and age days is okay by me.
Killing Floor
NotMax
@comrade scotts agenda of rage
Somewhat different meaning can be interpreted today from one of their hits.
Thor Heyerdahl
@danielx: thank you. That was a great rendition of a classic!
Spanky
Today in What the Fuck:
NotMax
Give Randy Rainbow an A for effort but, sadly, only a gentleman’s C for the final product on his latest.
SiubhanDuinne
@NotMax:
Didn’t know the usage was unique to Chicago. At the Chinese restaurant in my suburb, Oak Park, chop suey was pretty much the only thing on the menu, at least in the early 1950s.
“Chop Suey” was also a musical number in Flower Drum Song, set in San Francisco.
Martin
So my generally apolitical community subreddit is struggling to keep up with the number of comments calling for assassinations of elected Republicans. That’s new.
Martin
@SiubhanDuinne: Banger of a System of a Down song.
RevRick
@toine: Puritan here, and the assholes are based in Dixie, a region based on the “do anything for a profit” ethos, hence slavery. The Puritans were the progressives of their time, founding Harvard and Yale, among others, and ordaining the first Black American, Lemuel Haynes in 1785, the first woman, Antoinette Brown in 1853, and the first openly gay man, Bill Johnson, in 1980. We supported a woman’s right to choose in 1971, two years before Roe, and equality in marriage regardless of gender in 2005.
We Puritans have made our share of mistakes, but adopting retrograde politics is not one of them.
SiubhanDuinne
@Martin:
I’m sure you’re correct, but I honestly have no idea what that sentence means. Sorry.
mrmoshpotato
@Spanky: Is John ok? – seriously.
RevRick
@Spanky: Paul Campos, over at LGM, gives a variation of this observation, saying that strong Democrats are pissed that their members of Congress didn’t do more, and what he calls the Ariana Grande voters, who have little clue, are put off by what they did do. And the latter group far outnumbers the former.
Every healthy party tolerates – and needs – the politician who sticks an index finger up in the air and goes where the wind blows. For example, Joe Biden. Every healthy party tolerates – and needs – the gadfly who pesters everybody else to be more. For example, Bernie Sanders.
MobiusKlein
It’s been a week of Tuesdays so far. And yes, Tuesday is the worst day of the week, objectively.
RaflW
Earlier this evening, i thought “Well, at least I won’t have to look at the DJI or S&P 500 for a couple days.” And then realized its Wednesday night. Zoiks.
Kelly
Twelve years ago I replaced Mom’s waterline, meter to the house. Seemed like a straightforward task. I call Locate and the various utilities came out and painted the yard to mark their lines. I rented a trencher for $80 to dig about 100 feet of 24″ deep ditch to bury the new line. Powerful tool. I’d never run one and got it stuck in the wet grass several times before I figured out how to coordinate the drive speed and the digger speed. That thing was heavy. The other problem was at about 18″ down I hit river rock cobbles it couldn’t dig out. So after working the trencher for an hour or two I took the trencher back and called it a day. The ground never freezes past 4″ around here but code calls for water lines to be buried 24″. Codes are not pulled out of thin air and I didn’t want the new pipe laying on the uneven layer of cobbles I spent 2 mornings laying on my belly the grass wresting cobbles out of the ditch with a crowbar until I had room to lay a couple inches of sand and still be 24″ deep. I’m not crazy I stopped digging when it was hot. Another day to glue the pipe, connect both ends, lay a detect wire and cover it up. So as usual for my homeowners projects it took me 4 times longer than I expected.
prostratedragon
Wikipedia article on chop suey, whivh apparently means something like “leftovers,” shows pictures of chop suey signs from LA and SF. There’s also that rather mysterious 1929 painting Chop Suey by Hopper.
Gretchen
@SiubhanDuinne: These are both good suggestions. I also thought Dying of Whiteness had a lot of explanatory power, and the author gives interviews sometimes
https://www.dyingofwhiteness.com
Gretchen
@Spanky: Fetterman is lecturing us on dignity and decorum now? I’ve seen everything.
Redshift
@RevRick:
Based on what? There doesn’t seem to be any way he could possibly have an actual data on that less than 24 hours later, which makes me suspect it’s an observation of the type “this event somehow proves the thing I already believed to be true.”
Even if it is true, it’s reasonable to think the larger group who are less politically involved are also much less likely to have any long-term change in their behavior by being “put off” by this event.
prostratedragon
Projected onto the side of the Harbor Building in Los Angeles this evening.
sentient ai from the future
john fetterman is the susan collins of james carvilles
sentient ai from the future
@Redshift: well it helps if you know ahead of time that paul campos is usually completely full of shit
hitchhiker
I like 1923 a lot; it’s just a big gooey soap with great scenery, Harrison Ford, and Helen Mirren. Plus it’s part of a very long arc of story, basically from the Civil War to last year, as lived in one crazy family. It’s addictive.
I keep thinking about how television used to be, with shows that somehow went for an entire season, Sept thru May, with a new episode every week. Now you get 8 or 10 shows and then wait a year for the next set, which may or may not arrive. I really want a 2025 version of something like the West Wing — not about politics, or at least not about American politics. I mean, a show with great dialogue spoken by good actors set in challenging situations with real stakes. Every damn week, reliably, for the whole school year.
Why can’t we have that?
1923 and Paradise and Slow Horses and The Diplomat are great, but they’re a different thing.
dc
@RevRick:
The “Ariana Grande” voters do not even know there was a speech of any kind Tuesday night.
Origuy
The Republicans have a counter to ActBlue called WinRed. It’s been accused of deceptive practices like taking recurring donations without the donors’ knowledge.
They need to remember Matthew 7:3-5:
3 And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
4 Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?
5 Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.
DMcK
@hitchhiker:
@hitchhiker:
Ever wonder why so many streaming shows get the axe after three “seasons”? The story goes that back when, the unions in Hollywood negotiated a rule that mandated a pay raise for everybody after the wrap of a typical 20-something episode season. So nowadays you get three six- or eight-episode bursts and then poof, no raises, it’s over. Greed, basically.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@mrmoshpotato: My understanding is that the British shipped (transported, it was called, IIRC) a lot of prisoners to the American colonies but after the American Revolution, they had to find another place to dump “criminals”, which is how lots of British convicts ended up in Australia.
Martin
@SiubhanDuinne: System of a Down (band), Chop Suey (song)
Unlikely your cup of tea, but pretty well known early aughts song.
NotMax
@hitchhiker
Yup. Working my way through revisiting the three seasons when it was called The Alfred Hitchcock Hour on Prime (previous seasons were all titled Alfred Hitchcock Presents).
32, 32 and 29 episodes, respectively.
eclare
@dc:
I really wish people would stop picking on Ariana Grande and her fans. I know, it’s about people who have no idea who she is, it is still insulting.
There are plenty of insults left that do not reference her.
DMcK
@hitchhiker: The story goes that back when, Hollywood unions negotiated a mandate that after a typical 20-something episode season, the cast & crew were entitled to a pay hike for the next one. So now you get three six- or eight-episode “seasons” and then poof, the show is concluded or cancelled outright. Greed and exploitation of labor, basically.
dc
@eclare:
I used her name as term because that’s what Campos uses and I’m referencing a reference to his post on LGM. I don’t think Campos uses it as an insult, rather to people who don’t pay attention to politics at all and don’t want to. At any rate, my response makes no sense without a reference to what I’m responding to.
Jay
Saw an Oregon registered Tesla, vandalized in the parking lot today,
Usual stuff and then some.
Glass, body.
Skritched the glass,
Epoxy paint,
So, all glass needs replacement, walnut sandblasting to the body, then a repaint.
In the meantime, has to be towed.
Never seen this level of anger.
leeleeFL
@LeftCoastYankee: Been doing that for years! Cannot remember how many times I have said, “God, I am so ashamed of being white!”
hitchhiker
@DMcK: Interesting.
I just looked, and the West Wing, Hill Street Blues, and LA Law all made about 22 episodes per season, usually late Sept thru mid-May.
I can recite a lot of the WW, and saw some HSB — but LA Law was on the tube at a time in my life when I didn’t even own a television. I’m going to start watching it. Looks like Hulu has the whole catalogue.
Matt McIrvin
It seems to me that the point of protesting isn’t to turn people against Trump, it’s to establish that you were opposed to him when the disasters caused by what he does start to hurt people.
If you grant him respect, you’re just going to look like part of the problem later on. This was what happened with the invasion of Iraq. By the time Hillary Clinton ran for President, the rhetoric practically described it as her war, not Bush’s.
Protesters can never expect to be loved in the moment except by people who are already with them. It’s a longer strategy. Does it work? Who knows, but what’s the alternative?
TBone
J.C. I like yer style, reminds me of my dad’s investment strategy: diversify out the wazoo! Load up the sawed off with bird shot and scatter blast!
sab
@Matt McIrvin: Good point.
Professor Bigfoot
@Matt McIrvin: An astute observation:
Dr. Martin Luther King was HATED in 1967. Were angry at the “outside agitators” and “freedom riders.”
.
AM in NC
Deleted because I misread the original comment
Betty
As an overseas donor to Act Blue, I can confirm I have to verify my US citizenship with a picture of my passport. That should address the foreign donor allegation. On the other hand, anyone here get any money from a Saudi prince recently?
Paul in KY
@mrmoshpotato: There were these little hole-in-the-wall places in NOLA back in late 70s called ‘Takee Outee’. Had yellow paint on front, about size of a mcmansion master bedroom closet. Everything was on a stick. Gone by mid 90s I think.