Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

Petty moves from a petty man.

Hi god, it’s us. Thanks a heap, you’re having a great week and it’s only Thursday!

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

Trumpflation is an intolerable hardship for every American, and it’s Trump’s fault.

The desire to stay informed is directly at odds with the need to not be constantly enraged.

This chaos was totally avoidable.

If you’re gonna whine, it’s time to resign!

Balloon Juice, where there is always someone who will say you’re doing it wrong.

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

It is not hopeless, and we are not helpless.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

You’re just a puppy masquerading as an old coot.

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

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

The unpunished coup was a training exercise.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Stay strong, because they are weak.

Republicans choose power over democracy, every day.

I’m starting to think Jesus may have made a mistake saving people with no questions asked.

Stop using mental illness to avoid talking about armed white supremacy.

The media handbook says “controversial” is the most negative description that can be used for a Republican.

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Open Thread

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Some random thoughts:

Finally bought a big container of stevia. It tastes terrible. Back to splenda and turbinado for me.

The dogs are now actively conspiring against me. I open the door, and Rosie shoots out. I get Rosie back to the door, open it, and Lily shoots out- while yelling at Lily, Rosie squirts through my legs and they meet at the end of the sidewalk and run off to chase birds and rabbits.

Also, the romance is officially over. I now have to physically move Rosie and Lily to have room on my bed if they go to bed before me. On the upside, they get along so well that they are now sleeping together in a pile of dog and comforter.

There has to be a way to harness the power of the smell of three day old crab in garbage. Can’t that be used as a non-lethal chemical weapon?

Conservatives think the WaPo should have a cheerleader covering conservatives. They will probably get their way. Who will end up taking Weigel’s beat- Goldfarb? Matt Continetti? Jonah Goldberg?

Last night as the sun was setting and it was getting cooler and the humidity was becoming bearable, I sat on the back porch and had the sweetest, juiciest piece of watermelon ever. I felt like I was ten again as the juices rolled down my chin.

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Early Morning Open Thread: Spy vs. Spy

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I am such an unpatriotic American, when I first heard about the Illegals Eleven arrests, I’ll admit I was dubious of the timing. In our Total Information Awareness Era, nothing says “Eff you, Obama, and your Russkie-hugging DFH ways” like scheduling the disclosure of a ten-year multi-agency survelliance operation to coincide with a media-friendly state visit by the Russian President. Especially when the the announced charges against the ten defendents and one fugitive amount to “conspiracy to act as an agent of a foreign government without notifying the U.S. attorney general” (maximum penalty: five years) and “conspiracy to commit money laundering” (max charge: 20 years, under post-9/11 ‘anti-terrorist’ codes intended to guarantee that any individual suspect could be brought into custody quickly and conveniently without a lot of loose talk about their so-called Constitutional rights). Of course, this is just reflexive tin-foil-hattery; both William J. Casey and J. Edgar Hoover have been dead for many years, and there’s only so much one man, even a man like Dick Cheney, could have done to reinstate the ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan days of OSS hijinks during a mere eight years.

The Washington Post reports:

… Federal law enforcement officials portrayed their operation as a spectacular counterintelligence success that uncovered a group of spies capable of doing great damage to U.S. national security. “I can’t remember a case where we’ve been able to arrest 10 intelligence officers from a foreign country in one fell swoop,” one official said. “This network in the United States has now been completely compromised.”
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But other officials said the Russian network appears to have accomplished little, if any, of its espionage aims, even though some of the suspects had lived in this country for up to two decades. “These are people trying to get inside the tent that you would expect to see more charges on if they had succeeded in doing so,” said one U.S. official familiar with the investigation, who added, “It certainly is a wake-up call” for those on the alert for Russian spying.

I’m sure that as this narrative unfolds, we will all have reason to be grateful for the FBI’s viligiant and unwavering devotion to duty. News stories about the current details, however, share a certain Graham-Greene-ish aura. The BBC titled an article “Cold War meets 21st century meets ‘burger summit'”
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… Some of what they were said to be after, like information about nuclear “bunker-buster” warheads, seems rather serious. The Department of Justice has, however, made clear that none of the information at stake was classified. In fact it is a bit unclear what the suspects actually managed to get their hands on…

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Open Thread

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Didn’t get half as much done as I needed today- apparently this is the busiest time of the year for the DMV (at least in WV), because lots of tags become due on 1 July.

On the the upside, I did go get some tags for Rosie for her collar (or, as my friend Jill says, I picked up some “bling”), so I guess she is official now. She goes to the vet for shots and a chip next Tuesday.

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Early Morning Open Thread: The Kids Are All Right

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From Max Read’s Gawker post, “High-School Students Plan Hypothetical NASA Mission, Discover It’s Real”:

… In 2009, science teacher Ron Dantowitz gave three of his students a project, asking them to plan a mission to record the disintegration of a spacecraft. It was presented as a hypothetical situation to the kids—James Breitmeyer, Brigitte Berman, and Yiannis Karavas, all from Brookline, Massachusetts—but Dantowitz, an expert in “optical observations, tracking, and spectroscopy,” had actually been asked by NASA to participate in the real deal: The Hayabusa Re-entry Airborne Observing Campaign, which was to record video of the Japanese spacecraft, which had been out gathering material from an asteroid, as it re-entered the atmosphere.

After six months of work, Dantowitz let them in on the secret—and in June, the three high schoolers took off in a DC-8 and recorded the video themselves.

This is pretty damned cool, and I’m so old I don’t even have to feel like a failure in comparison. Yay, kid scienterrists!

Also, I think it’s a good counterpoint to the antics of Sam Besserman, America’s next Marjoe Gortner.

(Local chauvinism PS: You know who else went to school in Brookline? Michael Dukakis! Who, according to the American Thinker’s readers, is probably even worse than… )

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Voodoo Child

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I don’t get the whole “conservative kid” thing:

The only male teacher I had might as well have been castrated. His voice was soft, his gestures were feminine, he didn’t know how to run a class and he had to rely on female assistant teachers to control the children. And, of course, the female teachers treated the girls ten times better than the boys and constantly reminded us of our alleged inferiority. One of the assistant teachers even put down our rhyme, “Boys go to college to get more knowledge, girls go to Jupiter to get more stupider,” by reminding us that more girls than boys go to college because girls are smarter. And this only encouraged the girls to hijack our rhyme and switch the sexes around.

[…..]

It wasn’t until the Democratic primaries ended in 2008 that things started getting really bad. Liberals everywhere — but especially at school — seemed empowered by the prospect of a black man becoming president, if for no other reason than the color of his skin. One day, during a game of dodgeball, the old, assistant P.E. teacher yelled to the other students to “Get the Republican, Get the Republican!” meaning me.

This is not an isolated phenomenon of course. Matt Yglesias asked:

What’s the message it’s supposed to send? That the conservative message is childish? That the right’s talking points can be easily mastered by a 14 year-old?

Seriously, what is up with this?

Update. And, yes, as Lolis put it, OMG with the comment section.

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