Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

All hail the time of the bunny!

I might just take the rest of the day off and do even more nothing than usual.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Museums are not America’s attic for its racist shit.

The rest of the comments were smacking Boebert like she was a piñata.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

One lie, alone, tears the fabric of reality.

How any woman could possibly vote for this smug smarmy piece of misogynistic crap is beyond understanding.

If you thought you’d already seen people saying the stupidest things possible on the internet, prepare yourselves.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

Democracy cannot function without a free press.

This is dead girl, live boy, a goat, two wetsuits and a dildo territory.  oh, and pink furry handcuffs.

These are not very smart people, and things got out of hand.

Prediction: the gop will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

He really is that stupid.

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

American history and black history cannot be separated.

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This Year’s “Geniuses”

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None of the more-qualified front pagers here seem to have mentioned the 2010 MacArthur Fellows, the list of whom was released earlier this week. I am not ashamed to admit that I can’t begin to understand an “Optical Physicist working at the intersection of fundamental photonics and nanofabrication engineering to design silicon-based photonic circuits that are paving the way for practical optical computing devices” (Michal Lipson), or to judge whether a “Quantum Astrophysicist linking optics, condensed matter, and quantum mechanics in research that enhances our ability to detect and quantify gravitational radiation” (Nergis Mavalvala) is worthy of an being part of this august fellowship. (Although the short videos on each Fellow’s biographical webpage are mostly informative.)

But, hey, David Simon! — of Homicide: Life on the Street, and The Wire, and now Treme. And Annette Gordon-Reed is writing a sequel to The Hemingses of Monticello, which I can’t wait to read…

Anybody care to speculate as to the merits and potentials of this year’s honorees?

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Early Morning Open Thread: Good Night, Good Dog

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From commentor Folkbum:

Margaret Jane — Maggie — was our snow dog, our solid-white Great Pyrenees, whom we rescued from the Great Pyrenees rescue of Greater Chicago. (http://www.gpcgc.org/rescue.htm) She was a stray, found with another Pyr and a Pyr-golden mix that summer running loose in southern Illinois. She was skinny and shy and sweet as could be; when we sat with her at the rescue kennel, she just plopped her head in our laps and hunkered down. She came to live with us in September of 2003.
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She quickly got her coat and her weight back — 75 lbs but she looked much bigger with her puffy white fur. And it also didn’t take long to realize she’d be a handful. That fall, we found that Maggie wanted to go with us whenever we left the house. At first it was kind of cute. But then she started clawing and chewing at the doors and windows. In February of 2004, she jumped through a window trying to follow my wife to work. Luckily, she couldn’t get out of the fenced back yard.
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She was finally diagnosed with a pretty severe case of separation anxiety. She was an absolute sweetheart otherwise–calm, friendly, willing to sit and be petted for hours by anyone at all with the time. Until we tried to leave her alone in the house. We knew that we couldn’t send her back to the rescue, because she was unadoptable in that condition. We persevered, because she was young and vibrant and had a lot of life yet to live.
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Years of behavioral and drug therapy finally led us to a reasonable, but difficult, routine. Anti-depression meds twice a day, plus a dose of tranquilizer every time she needed to be crated when we left the house, made her life and ours mostly bearable.
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And Maggie was still a sweetheart. The neighbor girls begged us to let them take her on walks. She was the darling of the farmer’s market for being so white, so big, so calm. The vet was always grateful to have a dog who didn’t complain about any of the prodding, poking, pushing, and pinching required at her annual checkups. The workers at the kennel where we boarded her loved her, loved playing with her, petting her, having her around.
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Open Thread: DeMinted

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I’m going to argue that it’s not quite Friday yet on the other side of the Mississippi, because I can’t honor my own “Green Balloon Juice No (Overt) Politics Fridays” pledge until I’ve urged everyone to go read Charlie Pierce’s excellent Esquire takedown of The Guy from SC:

Just this week, Senator Jim DeMint settled the basic historical issue once and for all: the Civil War was a massive waste of time, money, and human life — at least as it pertains to the great state of South Carolina.
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OK, so we’d have missed out on some good songs, and that Ending Slavery thing was a good deal, and Ken Burns wouldn’t be as rich and famous, and a lot of grizzled men who like to play soldier-man dress-up would have to go back to the Star Trek conventions where they belong. I will grant you all that. But, at the very least, we would have been spared to piteous spectacle this week of the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body — and, through that the World’s Greatest Republic — being seized entirely by a slick, Leviticus-mumbling grifter. DeMint is what Jesus would have been had He gone into real estate, hustling swamp properties outside Capernaum to various Galilean suckers.
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This week, DeMint announced that he would employ his senatorial privileges to put a hold on virtually all legislation until after the midterm elections. After which, he anticipates giddily, the clown car will stop at the steps of the Capitol and disgorge its contents, all of whom will have the propellers on their beanies spinning in the same direction as his. This is what democratic self-government has come down to in the 21st Century — a coup DeMint.
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He doesn’t really have a grip on the etiquette, though. Usually, when you seize control of the government, the first thing you do is grab the radio station, so you can explain why you did it, and then you blockade the airports to make sure you have an audience. Of course, Jim DeMint hasn’t had to bother with all that. He has the Senate Rules, and he has the will to use them, and he is, after all, from South Carolina, which has always considered its membership in the United States of America to be largely honorary. […]

Yes, there’s more. By all means, go read the whole indictment!

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Open Thread: Thursday Night Menu

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From our faithful correspondent TaMara:

It’s been in the 90’s all week, but nights are cool enough for me to start thinking of fall menus. I’ve promised to fulfill some squash soups requests, which I’ll post over the next few weeks, but to get you started, there are a couple of Sweet Potato Soups here. If you have other fall menu requests, let me know. I’m happy to look for something new to try. One O/T note: Homer is now officially a member of the JeffW household. Yeah, I know, we’re all surprised by that now, aren’t we? Tonight’s menu is a diverse group of flavors with no discernible theme that I can see. Lots of light fall fruit notes, though, so it has that going for it.
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On the board tonight:
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1) Roasted Salmon in Orange-Ginger Soy Sauce
2) Fresh Spinach Salad
3) Herbed Potatoes
4) Blueberry Crisp

As ever, recipes and shopping list at the link.

(In her email, Tamara added: “BJ people are so predictable – Homer has gotten a couple thousand hits since he became our mascot.” Lots more where that came from, over at her blog.)

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War is over if you want it

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An interesting story from yesterday’s comments:

The First World War will officially end on Sunday, 92 years after the guns fell silent, when Germany pays off the last chunk of reparations imposed on it by the Allies.

The final payment of £59.5 million, writes off the crippling debt that was the price for one world war and laid the foundations for another.

Germany was forced to pay the reparations at the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 as compensation to the war-ravaged nations of Belgium and France and to pay the Allies some of the costs of waging what was then the bloodiest conflict in history, leaving nearly ten million soldiers dead.

The initial sum agreed upon for war damages in 1919 was 226 billion Reichsmarks, a sum later reduced to 132 billion, £22 billion at the time.

This goes to show how dangerous debt is, and justifies a lot of the Villager fear about the size of our debt.

Consider this an open thread.

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Terrorist plot

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I don’t know why this story isn’t getting more press, given how much attention other planned terrorist attacks have gotten:

Intelligence officials and people familiar with an unfolding terrorist plot to target Europe tell NPR that Osama bin Laden is involved.

Several months ago, source say, bin Laden used couriers to send a message to al-Qaida’s affiliates and partners: He told them that he would like to see a Mumbai-style attack on at least three strategic targets — the United Kingdom, Germany and France.

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