Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

You are so fucked. Still, I wish you the best of luck.

Also, are you sure you want people to rate your comments?

Republicans in disarray!

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

Beware of advice from anyone for whom Democrats are “they” and not “we.”

Optimism opens the door to great things.

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

American history and black history cannot be separated.

“Alexa, change the president.”

The current Supreme Court is a dangerous, rogue court.

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

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

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

I am pretty sure these ‘journalists’ were not always such a bootlicking sycophants.

When you’re a Republican, they let you do it.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires.

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

Fight them, without becoming them!

Radicalized white males who support Trump are pitching a tent in the abyss.

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

It’s pointless to bring up problems that can only be solved with a time machine.

Sometimes the world just tells you your cat is here.

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

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Another Rant

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I know by now you are sick and tired of hearing this, but today was another shitty day and I can not tell you how sick and damned tired I am of having my shoulder aching constantly and having to wear this stupid damned brace. I can’t sleep well, because I either have to sleep in a damned chair or sleep in the bed and roll over and wake myself up in pain every 45 minutes. I haven’t had a solid night of sleep in a month.

I can’t do basic things, like tie my shoes or button my pants. To get dressed, I have to put my belt in before I put my pants on, button them, pull them up buttoned while sucking in my gut and perform a gymnastic feat to do my belt with one hand, then spend ten minutes trying to rearrange the boxers so I am not a gelding by the end of the day. I can’t mop or sweep or clean, and even emptying the dishwasher is a total PITA. Not that that is a big deal, because I can’t cook, and even if I could, I can’t use a damned fork with my left hand unless I A.) place a plastic sheet over my torseo B.) cook enough that 50% spillage will still leave enough food. Shaving is another whole load of joy.

Even using a computer is an ordeal. I can’t do any video or sound editing because I suck with a mouse with my left hand, and I can not do keyboard shortcuts with one hand. The only way I can blog and email is by using a laptop placed strategically on a board placed across my lap while sitting in a lazyboy- that allows me to have my right hand on the keyboard in the sling while contorting myself so my left hand can play too.

I can’t exercise, because walking hurts my shoulder after just a little bit, and even then, who can walk in this ice and snow. I move like an 80 year old with a hip replacement because I am so terrified of falling again. Additionally, you would be shocked how many times you are accidentally bumped into in public places by people- you just don’t realize it until you have something broken. Also, the $500.00 towel rack (the exercise bike) has been forbidden by the doctors, but I doubt I could probably mount the damned thing anyway.

And now to the chipper sadists at rehab who claim this is for my own good but who main remarkably cheerful while watching people in agony all day. Apparently I have moved on to a new stage in my rehab protocol, something that involves “table exercises.” If that sounds a lot like waterboarding, that should be no coincidence, because it is just as painful. After rehab, I’m basically shot for the day.

I know it is supposed to get better with time, but this just sucks and I have no idea how elderly people recover from this sort of thing without a huge support system. I’m so fed up with the lack of independence and the pain that I’m going crazy. And about the pain- it is no longer the excruciating after-surgery pain, it is now a constant aching, with occasional sharp pierces of pain and always the fear that you have done something wrong. Sure, you can take pills for it, but that just leaves you dain-bramaged and unable to think.

And I don’t want a 100 people saying “I hope you feel better.” I just wanted to bitch, and some of you stated complaining was therapeutic. If that is the case, I should be better by tomorrow after this baby.

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Damned to Mediocrity

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I’ll let this Ezra Klein deconstruction of Evan Bayh speak for itself:

So: Evan Bayh’s not a major deficit hypocrite. He’s a minor deficit hypocrite. But a deficit hypocrite all the same. In his exit speech, he describes himself as “a lonely voice for balancing the budget and restraining spending.” Of course, there’s no such thing in Washington as a “lonely voice” for a balanced budget. There is a cacophony of such voices, and a dearth of such votes. But votes are the only things able to do the job. If voices balanced the budget, treasury bonds would never rise.

Accusing a politician of deficit hypocrisy isn’t a particularly serious slur. Pretty much every politician is guilty of it. It’s a bit like trumpeting the fact that some politician or another wears a suit. But if Bayh’s sins are ordinary, so too was his career. Which is why I was surprised to see my colleague Jonathan Capehart term this a “brain drain.” I’ve talked to Bayh before, and like Jonathan Chait, found him special only in his ability to formulate platitudes on the fly. The guy missed out on a terrific career as a fortune cookie author (“Your country will be assured of greatness! Your lucky deficit number is zero!”), but the sciences will not weep for their loss.

It is kind of refreshing to hear someone in Washington speak about politicians that way- it basically reads like a cleaned up entry in the Buffalo Beast’s 50 worst people in America. In an era when the country’s greatest villains and biggest failures, after years of screwing the American people are guaranteed a reach-around on the op-ed pages of the WaPo and in the national media as they ride off into the sunset to their new lobbying jobs or wingnut welfare sinecures, having someone clearly and accurately define what a mediocrity someone was and is strikes me as a nice change.

And most devastating of all for Evan Bayh is that every word of it is true.

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Early Morning Open Thread: White Lady Redefined

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As a Person of Size (size 3X, in t-shirts), I always take an interest in Jezebel’s food posts, but I just have to share Anna North‘s latest LOL:
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I wish organic food were affordable for everyone, and that our food system relied less on insecticides and antibiotics and other substances of questionable safety. But I also wish we could have this discussion without alarmism, and without treating people who enjoy a doughnut now and then like self-destructive crackheads…
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Comments about how healthfully one’s own family eats are a staple of Internet food threads — a significant sector of the online population seems to believe that simply sharing their own righteousness will eradicate diabetes.

There will be those who declare that I am incapable of having a correct opinion on this topic, because as a walking example of America’s Obesity Crisis, I am helplessly enthralled by Our New Worst Enemy, a substance “ten times more addictive than heroin” that “wreaks havoc on the immune system”. (They would be wrong, because it’s fat-laden potato chips, not sweets, that are my greatest weakness.) But I do think that the tendency to “demonize” particular foods or food groups springs from some of the same roots as the tendency to reject any information that conflicts with one’s personal political beliefs. People want to have a Unifying Narrative to help them understand what can seem like a cold and hostile universe. Whether that means believing that Big Agro has deliberately addicted us to Demon Sugar, that Big Gubmint has deliberately addicted us to Welfare Dependency, or that Big Oil deliberately brought down the WTC towers with the connivance of its puppets in the Cheney Regency — or some combination of all these theories — is less important than Knowing the Truth. Who was it said “The truth will set you free, but first it will make you crazy”?
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On the other hand… nobody doesn’t love puppies! John O “still hasn’t decided” how much he wants to “share” of his pet-rescue story, but here is a new picture of Dweezil:
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Early Morning Open Thread: White Lady RedefinedPost + Comments (132)