This is fucking beautiful:
Jimmy’s thoughts on quarterback Karen Rodgers… pic.twitter.com/mRh5VRUycz
— Jimmy Kimmel Live (@JimmyKimmelLive) January 9, 2024
Every idiot should be treated like this.
This post is in: Asshole
This is fucking beautiful:
Jimmy’s thoughts on quarterback Karen Rodgers… pic.twitter.com/mRh5VRUycz
— Jimmy Kimmel Live (@JimmyKimmelLive) January 9, 2024
Every idiot should be treated like this.
by David Anderson| 54 Comments
This post is in: Asshole, Balloon Juice, Open Threads
As Twitter is an ever increasing dumpster fire, people have migrated to multiple life boats. I’m over at Blue Sky as dmaanderson.bsky.social along with a good cluster of Jackals.
I have four invites if anyone needs them
E-mail me at firstname-lastname AT this website’s address and I’ll send them to you.
by John Cole| 55 Comments
This post is in: Asshole
This is obscene:
The nation’s largest pharmacy chains have handed over Americans’ prescription records to police and government investigators without a warrant, a congressional investigation found, raising concerns about threats to medical privacy.
Though some of the chains require their lawyers to review law enforcement requests, three of the largest — CVS Health, Kroger and Rite Aid, with a combined 60,000 locations nationwide — said they allow pharmacy staff members to hand over customers’ medical records in the store.
I find this to be absolutely flabbergasting. There is literally no fucking upside for them to release these records without a warrant and they may have violated who knows how many codes and laws. I need to know which pharmacy chain, if there is one, who will fight this shit.
by TaMara| 73 Comments
This post is in: Asshole, Media, Our Failed Political Establishment, Politics, Republican Crime Syndicate
In case you missed it, this is chilling:
Eric Meyer, publisher of the Marion County Record, answers questions in his newspaper office Friday after police seized computers, servers, cellphones and other items. He says he doesn’t know how they will get the newspaper out on Tuesday, but, “We will publish something.” (Sam Bailey/Kansas Reflector)
Eric Meyer, owner and publisher of the newspaper, said police were motivated by a confidential source who leaked sensitive documents to the newspaper, and the message was clear: “Mind your own business or we’re going to step on you.”
The city’s entire five-officer police force and two sheriff’s deputies took “everything we have,” Meyer said, and it wasn’t clear how the newspaper staff would take the weekly publication to press Tuesday night.
The raid followed news stories about a restaurant owner who kicked reporters out of a meeting last week with U.S. Rep. Jake LaTurner, and revelations about the restaurant owner’s lack of a driver’s license and conviction for drunken driving.
Meyer said he had never heard of police raiding a newspaper office during his 20 years at the Milwaukee Journal or 26 years teaching journalism at the University of Illinois.
“It’s going to have a chilling effect on us even tackling issues,” Meyer said, as well as “a chilling effect on people giving us information.”
The search warrant, signed by Marion County District Court Magistrate Judge Laura Viar, appears to violate federal law that provides protections against searching and seizing materials from journalists. The law requires law enforcement to subpoena materials instead. Viar didn’t respond to a request to comment for this story or explain why she would authorize a potentially illegal raid. Read more here
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It is not hyperbole to say that this attack on the people’s right to know appears to have killed the Marion County Record’s Joan Meyer. From Melinda Henneberger: https://t.co/EqU8bElgLo
— The Kansas City Star (@KCStar) August 13, 2023
Here’s a paywall-free version of my column about the police raid on the Marion County Record newspaper. #ksleg https://t.co/gIBGF1ezTs
— Joel Mathis (@joelmmathis) August 12, 2023
Back in the 1990s, on my very first day at my very first newspaper job, my boss — a sometimes-crusty, often-jolly Battle of the Bulge veteran by the name of Bill Meyer — told me to call up a local businessman who was, rumor had it, about to open a new branch of a popular chain restaurant in our small central Kansas town.
“Ask him when it’s going to open,” Bill told me. “And ask him if he’s going to serve beer.”
It wasn’t an idle question. The businessman owned another restaurant from the same franchise the next town over, in a small Mennonite community, and certainly no beer was served there.
So I did what I was told. I called the businessman. I asked him about his new restaurant. And, finally — not thinking much of it — asked him the final question: Would the new establishment serve beer?
There was a long silence on the phone.
“What kind of reporter are you anyway?” he sputtered. “What do you think you’re doing asking questions like that?” If memory serves, he then hung up on me. It was an unexpectedly fractious start to my journalism career.
The paper where I had just started? The Marion County Record.
You’ve probably heard of the newspaper by now. It was raided Friday by the Marion police, many of its computers and all the other stuff its staff uses to, well, put out the newspaper, were hauled away with no guarantee of their quick or safe return.
“We’re going to have to reinvent the wheel to put out this week’s paper,” Eric Meyer, Bill’s son, told me on Friday after news of the raid became public and very quickly went viral nationally.
We’re not entirely sure of the reasons behind the raid. Marion’s police chief wasn’t taking questions, at least initially. But the apparent cause — unsurprisingly to me, given my own first-day memories of the paper — had something to do with the paper’s unpublished investigation of a liquor license for a catering business.
The mixture of alcohol, business and journalism in Marion has always been touchy, apparently.
Since we don’t know the full details behind the raid, though, I’m not going to get into all the nitty-gritty. Bill, who died in 2006, wouldn’t want me to write without having a firm command of all the facts.
But it’s scary when police raid a newspaper. It looks and smells like a threat to the First Amendment. Investigators had better have a damned good — even extraordinary — justification for the search warrant. God help them otherwise.
I do want you to know about the Marion County Record, though.
It’s one of those small town newspapers that serves as both the backbone of its community, and of the journalism profession at large. I wasn’t the only young reporter to get my start there: Bill — a member of the Kansas Newspaper Hall of Fame and a KU alum who had the Jayhawk fight song played at his funeral — regularly hosted summer interns from the university, sending them back out into the world after a few months of doing everything: Taking pictures, writing features, covering city council meetings, you name it. It was an immersive education.
Sometimes, the paper threw elbows. Bill once told me about coming into work to find a bullet hole in his office window.
Small town journalism is a delicate balance, though. Everybody knows everybody. You can’t hide from the people you write about. When the paper ran a rather prominent correction about an error I’d made, I was razzed on the streets of Marion for a solid week.
A few years before he passed, Bill called me to talk about maybe coming back to town. It’s a nice community, he told me, a place where you can serve that community and make a comfortable living.
He loved the town. And he loved the newspaper. Rural Kansas and community journalism both face brisk headwinds these days. The two situations are probably related. Whatever the outcome of this ugly mess, Marion and its newspaper will still need each other to survive.
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I think the best thing we can do to help this small paper get through this is to subscribe (here).
Personally, I think Police Chief Gideon Cody, Magistrate Judge Laura Viar, and drunk driver Kari Newell are about to go through some things.
(note: the dying bird is randomly NOT supplying the full tweet, so you may have to click through to see images. Apologies).
Let’s Talk About The Marion County RecordPost + Comments (73)
This post is in: Asshole, Civil Rights, Open Threads, Our Failed Media Experiment
I can’t top this https://t.co/HQ7kw2bgDl
— New York Times Pitchbot (@DougJBalloon) August 3, 2023
Po-faced both-siderist zombie pundits never die. They don’t even lose their precious top-grade media slots, dammit!
yes, so weird how "somehow" that always happens pic.twitter.com/GCuyc1QwfF
— Karl Bode (@KarlBode) August 3, 2023
… Like all elites, we use language and mores as tools to recognize one another and exclude others. Using words like “problematic,” “cisgender,” “Latinx” and “intersectional” is a sure sign that you’ve got cultural capital coming out of your ears. Meanwhile, members of the less-educated classes have to walk on eggshells because they never know when we’ve changed the usage rules so that something that was sayable five years ago now gets you fired.
We also change the moral norms in ways that suit ourselves, never mind the cost to others. For example, there used to be a norm that discouraged people from having children outside marriage, but that got washed away during our period of cultural dominance, as we eroded norms that seemed judgmental or that might inhibit individual freedom…
Life was just fine for David Brooks under The Traditional Morality: It didn’t stop him from nestling down in a snug top-tier media job, writing best-selling books to explain why kids these days are WRONG and RISIBLE, or dumping the wife that helped make his career for a much younger ‘research assistant’ fresh out of Wellesley. Brooks can’t understand why the rest of us peons keep raising such a stink about personal freedom — no wonder the rubes are resentful!
This, in particular, goes in the "You're so close to getting it" hall of fame. Yes, a Trump voter is EXACTLY someone who hears Barack Obama use the word "smart" and immediately thinks "He's calling me stupid." I wonder why that is. pic.twitter.com/lClSiB69mG
— Mark Harris (@MarkHarrisNYC) August 3, 2023
British expat, now living in DC:
ironically picking up his shitty book about 'bourgeois bohemians,' full of lavish praise from supposedly serious outlets on the back, was a major step in my general cynicism toward the US elite. people who would praise something this dumb and full of lies couldn't be trusted
— James Palmer (@BeijingPalmer) August 3, 2023
I live in one of the wealthiest counties in the nation and have a large number of similar MAGA neighbors. There *is* an explanation that applies to many of them. ??
— Tom Tell (@ThomasTell) August 4, 2023
Resentful and well-to-do in their communities. “Support for Trump was strongest among the locally rich — that is, white voters with incomes that are high for their area.” https://t.co/QgnhLSiGwM
— Jennifer Baty (@JenBaty) August 3, 2023
Brooks and his ilk are busy creating, as Adam might say, a permission structure for the out’n’proud squirmy white racists…
NEW @RichardHanania is a right-wing star. A @UTAustin scholar, his fans include JD Vance, Thiel, Musk, Sacks, Rufo. @HarperCollins will publish his book "The Origins of Woke"
HuffPost found he used a pseudonym for yrs to write for white supremacist sites https://t.co/NOPSmIc0vH
— Christopher Mathias (@letsgomathias) August 4, 2023
Three of those fans are white guys who spent parts of their childhoods in apartheid-era South Africa. https://t.co/ubBxezwJhT
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) August 4, 2023
(And Vance and Rufo are the wholly-owned creations of the Apartheid Three.)
The secret writings of Richard Hanania, who is about to have his book published by Harper Collins after endorsements from Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie.
Remarkable scoop from @letsgomathias.https://t.co/rDNNaPqlmp pic.twitter.com/KAJAemuAo4
— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) August 4, 2023
(Nothing to stop y’all from moving your vast fortunes talents to Orania, boys. Well, maybe not Sacks…)
When you’re a very normal person with normal interests and not a racist dork pic.twitter.com/I7K80EQCKy
— Jane Coaston (@janecoaston) August 4, 2023
Yeah, Tommy Tuberville is racist. Richard Hanania is so deep in the weeds of genocidal fantasy that he should be barred from ever renting a Ryder truck. https://t.co/dTBXs1DbZF
— zeddy (@Zeddary) August 4, 2023
This post is in: Asshole
Remember when cheney would leak bullshit to your paper and then cite your paper as justification https://t.co/Ag6ZGogR3j
— Atrios (@Atrios) March 20, 2023
A lot of Iraq war retrospectives on the 20th Anniversary. Here is one that I think is one of the best piece of blogging ever done, Operation Desert Snipe from April of 2003:
The Snipe Hunt is an American folk tradition, a rite of passage for the novice outdoorsman … an elaborate practical joke which ends with the initiate crouching alone in the woods, in the dark, literally “holding the bag”, waiting for the nonexistent Snipe.
What if we sift through all the sand in Iraq without finding WMDs? (That means hundreds of tons, as advertised … not lab samples, training rounds or inventory strays.) We’re alone in the woods, in the dark, holding the bag. Paraphrasing NYT’s Tom Friedman, we will have gone to war on the wings of a snipe.
Too early to call it a night. It’s a big desert, our last candle hasn’t flickered out, and the mocking call of the snipe still echoes hauntingly in the distance, but … the original standard WMD thesis is strictly defunct.
Saddam Hussein had extensive, active, advanced, clandestine chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs. UN inspectors couldn’t find WMDs because they were inept, or corrupt, or because Saddam played the shell game so masterfully. US intelligence pinpointed dozens of high-value target sites, hundreds of intermediate-value sites and thousands of low-value sites. Chemical and perhaps biological weapons were deployed to commanders in the field, who had orders to use them against invading Coalition forces. Special Forces teams were dropping in to secure and neutralize high-value sites in advance of the ground assault, with high-tech analytic Mobile Exploitation Teams (MET’s) close on their heels.
Six weeks ago, it was beyond the pale to suggest otherwise. Today the man in the street doesn’t exactly care much about WMD’s … but he’s curious. The men in the hawk’s nest — and some of their media enablers — care a lot. Alternative explanations are being spun out so rapidly, they’re not even kept on the same page.
In public, Bush and Blair — as they must — still insist WMDs will turn up. Behind closed doors, staff are obliquely, deniably huffing into trial balloons, testing branches of the contingency that never earned a spot of Rumsfeld’s contingency sheet. What if there are no WMDs?
A Washington Post embed reports analysts here and in Washington are increasingly doubtful that they will find what they are looking for in the places described on a five-tiered target list … strategy is shifting from the rapid “exploitation” of known suspect sites to a vast survey that will rely on unexpected discoveries and leads.
Come what may later on, Blair’s dossiers, Powell’s “solid intelligence”, and Rumsfeld’s “bulletproof evidence” are dead letters. C’est la vie, c’est la guerre.
Operation Desert Snipe is a marvelous case study in one of CP’s pet themes — collective self-deception. The plot spoilers were there all the time. “Everybody” was so sure, and so wrong. Down the page, we’ll retrace the divergent arcs of evidence and attitude that brought us to this pass, and we’ll sample some of the surviving alternative theses … but first, a rundown of Truth or Consequences.
Second, my retrospective from 2008. Nothing has changed:
I see that Andrew Sullivan was asked to list what he got wrong about Iraq for the five year anniversary of the invasion, and since I was as big a war booster as anyone, I thought I would list what I got wrong:
Everything.
And I don’t say that to provide people with an easy way to beat up on me, but I do sort of have to face facts. I was wrong about everything.
I was wrong about the Doctrine of Pre-emptive warfare.
I was wrong about Iraq possessing WMD.
I was wrong about Scott Ritter and the inspections.
I was wrong about the UN involvement in weapons inspections.
I was wrong about the containment sanctions.
I was wrong about the broader impact of the war on the Middle East.
I was wrong about this making us more safe.
I was wrong about the number of troops needed to stabilize Iraq.
I was wrong when I stated this administration had a clear plan for the aftermath.
I was wrong about securing the ammunition dumps.
I was wrong about the ease of bringing democracy to the Middle East.
I was wrong about dissolving the Iraqi army.
I was wrong about the looting being unimportant.
I was wrong that Bush/Cheney were competent.
I was wrong that we would be greeted as liberators.
I was wrong to make fun of the anti-war protestors.
I was wrong not to trust the dirty smelly hippies
Although it should be noted Scott Ritter is a fucking scumbag piece of shit kid touching Putin apparatchik. But other than that, it holds up.
This post is in: Asshole, Civil Rights, Gay Rights Are human Rights, LGBTQ Rights
One of the weirder things I have witnessed over the past twenty years of blogging is how so many writers out there, particularly those with an ax to grind about an issue or issues approach things as if they, alone have the gospel truth, and that what they are writing, if followed, will change the trajectory of the world. It’s really bizarre, honestly.
The proximate cause of this discussion is earlier today I noticed Jesse Singal, a middling intellect and former writer for one of the NY rags, who has spent the last few years ranting about Trans issues. He’s one of Sully and Greenwald’s favorites, so that means he is kind of an edgelord douchebag with a dubious grasp of statistical analysis. Speaking of statistics, there is literally nothing that statistically ignorant writerslove more than a shoddy meta-analysis. It’s the dataset equivalent of of an asset backed security potentially jammed full of subprime loan tranches. At any rate, Singal was picking a fight with, of all people, Drew Magary:
Lol at picking a fight with Magary https://t.co/12cgYjqP5Y
— John Cole (@Johngcole) March 2, 2023
If Magary even bothers to respond, this is not going to end the way it played out in Singal’s head when he started this ruckus.
Back to the point. Singal and those like him always seem to write as if the very existence of our species and nation is at stake if these issues with the troublesome trans people are not dealt with, and dealt with in the way he sees fit at this very moment (because, as we know, that may change moment to moment). It’s really kind of crazy.
There are so many people out there who really do not realize they are not the main character in this story, and I don’t know if that has changed over the past few decades because we spent so many years boosting people’s self esteem instead of making sure people have accurate self esteem, if the internet has just given everyone a bigger megaphone, or who knows what else. But when these guys write, it feels like they think they are at the helm of Civ IV making big decisions about the shape of their empire, rather than just being some windbag blasting out noxious fumes into an already smelly public discourse.
The trans and other various antigay bigots are really special cases, though, in that they seem to think there is some concerted effort teh left or the other villain du jour to transition everyone to the ick. And it’s just so absurd. First off, so what. If 50% of the population decided overnight they were going to transition, I would give zero fucks because it is not going to change how I live my life in any way, shape, or form. I’m still going to have the same like and dislikes, and the same sexual attraction I have always had and still have my “type.”. In case any of you are wondering what my type is, at this age it’s “willing.”
At any rate, none of the anti-trans shit that Republicans and others are pushing is going to change the number of trans people out there, just like no amount of bigotry is going to change the number of gay people out there. They’re still going to be trans, they’re just going to be more miserable than they already are, which if you look at the numbers for kids, is fucking horrifying.
And, if you are an old like me, you don’t have to fucking understand it. It literally does not impact your life. All you need to do is call people what they want to be called, don’t be a fucking bigot, and mind your own fucking business.
On a side note thank you for all the roofing advice- I have a person coming on Monday to give me a bunch of estimates.
Also, I am driving to Rhode Island tomorrow to pick up the cat this weekend.