I’m working late, so I can’t watch it live. But maybe y’all can see it.
Live-Stream: President Obama’s Town Hall on RacePost + Comments (61)
Florida woman, still rocking a punk rock ethos in the 2020s, which is kind of sad. Betty Cracker has been a Balloon Juice writer since 2012.
This post is in: Open Threads
I’m working late, so I can’t watch it live. But maybe y’all can see it.
Live-Stream: President Obama’s Town Hall on RacePost + Comments (61)
by Betty Cracker| 104 Comments
This post is in: Politics, Assholes, General Stupidity
Looks like Brother Cornel is still butt-hurt about President Obama inviting a lowly baggage handler to the inauguration instead of his extra special snowflake self and wants to make sure the racist, sexist, xenophobic demagogue Trump has a chance to piss all over PBO’s legacy:
So honored to have Dr. Cornel West's support! https://t.co/clZDsZuRQx pic.twitter.com/48PZTJ8Xm9
— Dr. Jill Stein (@DrJillStein) July 14, 2016
No worries — if Trump wins (he won’t), Brother Cornel will be fine. The people he pretends to care about for fame and profit, not so much. I guess it’s too late to crowbar out whatever policy planks the rat-bastard nailed into the party platform last week, but the good news is, most people who actually know who Cornel West is realize he was driven off the rails ages ago by jealousy and spite. Good riddance to bad rubbish!
by Betty Cracker| 156 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads, Politics, Assholes, General Stupidity, Our Failed Media Experiment
This morning, I was reading an article about seagulls at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s “All About Birds” site. Many people dislike seagulls, and it’s true that they can come off as obnoxious beach pigeons.
But if you can look past their propensity to snatch a Dorito out of your hand and shit all over your car and instead focus on their social behavior, seagulls display some admirable traits, including the ability to learn to ignore the hysterical morons within their colonies:
[Nobel Prize-winning animal behavior researcher Nikolaas] Tinbergen observed that Herring Gulls also learn which individuals are worth paying attention to. He noted that they ignore alarm calls from individuals they know to be skittish, but freak out when trusted neighbors utter a sound.
So even among seagulls, there are Chicken Littles, and the wiser gulls learn to pay them no mind. There’s a lesson here for us flightless creatures, who will be exposed to a constant barrage of “SKREE! SKREE! SKREE!” for the next few months. We all get to choose what kind of gull we want to be.
Open thread!
Donald Trump lies a lot — so much that the individual falsehoods combine like lie-droplets to form a raging river of mendacity. Calling out every lie Trump tells would be a full-time job, and even people whose job it actually is — the Beltway press — aren’t up to the task.
In the morning thread comments, we briefly discussed a lie Trump told a couple of times yesterday: He claimed that BLM protests included a moment of silence for the cop killer. I’ll admit when I read that, it didn’t strike me as particularly ominous — Trump lies all the time, right? But I think Josh Marshall is right when he calls this a particularly pernicious lie. An excerpt:
Trump claimed that people – “somebody” – called for a moment of silence for mass killer Micah Johnson, the now deceased mass shooter who killed five police officers in Dallas on Thursday night. There is no evidence this ever happened. Searches of the web and social media showed no evidence. Even Trump’s campaign co-chair said today that he can’t come up with any evidence that it happened. As in the case of the celebrations over the fall of the twin towers, even to say there’s ‘no evidence’ understates the matter. This didn’t happen. Trump made it up.
The language is important: “When somebody called for a moment of silence to this maniac that shot the five police, you just see what’s going on. It’s a very, very sad situation.”
Then later at the Indiana rally: “The other night you had 11 cities potentially in a blow-up stage. Marches all over the United States—and tough marches. Anger. Hatred. Hatred! Started by a maniac! And some people ask for a moment of silence for him. For the killer!”
A would-be strong man, an authoritarian personality, isn’t just against disorder and violence. They need disorder and violence. That is their raison d’etre, it is the problem that they are purportedly there to solve. The point bears repeating: authoritarian figures require violence and disorder. Look at the language. “11 cities potentially in a blow up stage” .. “Anger. Hatred. Hatred! Started by a maniac!” … “And some people ask for a moment of silence for him. For the killer…”
We’re used to so much nonsense and so many combustible tirades from Trump that we become partly inured to them. We also don’t slow down and look at precisely what he’s saying. What he’s saying here is that millions of African-Americans are on the streets inspired by and protesting on behalf of a mass murderer of white cops… This is not simply false. It is the kind of wild racist incitement that puts whole societies in danger…
Trump’s entire campaign is built on the premise that the country is in the toilet and needs rescuing by…Trump. We certainly have problems, not least of which is a structurally racist justice system.
But crime rates are at historic lows. So what does a “law and order” candidate do if there’s not a real law and order problem — or at least not one of the type that he is proposing to address? Like a private sector firefighter who drums up business via arson, he lies to foment division, distrust and fear.
In the early days after the Dallas shooting, I wondered if someone had muzzled Trump. He didn’t immediately resort to fear-mongering and bigotry as he did after the Orlando shooting. He even acknowledged the pain of the families of Mr. Castile and Mr. Sterling. Looks like the muzzle is off.
by Betty Cracker| 229 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
NASA says there’s this big black hole creeping over the sun, but not to worry about it:
Do not be alarmed, but a NASA spacecraft just spotted an enormous black ‘hole’ creeping over the surface of the sun.
But although it looks like the sun is either about to fizzle out, or explode, there’s nothing to worry about in the image captured on July 11, the scientists promise.
Coronal holes look terrifying in the images captured by NASA’s sun-observing Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) satellite – but they’re perfectly safe, and normal.
Well, of course they would say that, wouldn’t they?
Open thread!
by Betty Cracker| 149 Comments
This post is in: Election 2016, Hillary Clinton 2016, Open Threads, Politics
Or at least, none featuring Senator Warren as VP:
In an apparent sign that Sen. Elizabeth Warren will not be named Hillary Clinton’s running mate, Warren was invited by Clinton’s campaign Tuesday to deliver a prime-time address on the first night of the Democratic convention this month — a marquee speaking slot but one that is earlier than vice-presidential picks typically appear.
Oh well. Probably for the best since we have to retake the Senate, and the wider the margin, the better.
Open thread!
[H/T: Valued commenter the Conster, la Citoyenne]by Betty Cracker| 220 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Last week, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg revealed the startling intelligence that she’d rather not see a racist, sexist, xenophobic, self-aggrandizing demagogue appoint a successor for her or a fellow justice. The sturdy oak legs upholding Beltway fainting couches were groaning under the weight of their owners’ insensate carcasses within seconds. Justice Ginsburg doesn’t give a shit about that. Yesterday, she amplified her remarks for CNN:
“He is a faker,” she said of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, going point by point, as if presenting a legal brief. “He has no consistency about him. He says whatever comes into his head at the moment. He really has an ego… How has he gotten away with not turning over his tax returns? The press seems to be very gentle with him on that…”
“I think he has gotten so much free publicity,” she added, drawing a contrast between what she believes is tougher media treatment of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and returning to an overriding complaint: “Every other presidential candidate has turned over tax returns.”
Looks like No-fucks-left-to-give-itis has spread from the White House to the Supreme Court.
PS: The belief that RBG should have retired early in PBO’s first or second term is a perfectly legitimate point of view. I don’t happen to share it, but, fine, wevs. However, here’s a pre-emptive “GFYS” and a bonus “you’re not fit to trim her bunions” for the commenters who invariably show up in threads that mention RBG to call her names like “selfish asshole” because she didn’t retire on their timetable.
Oh, and open thread.
Notorious RBG Tweaks Press on Gentle Treatment of TrumpPost + Comments (220)