Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

“Loving your country does not mean lying about its history.”

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

The unpunished coup was a training exercise.

Let the trolls come, and then ignore them. that’s the worst thing you can do to a troll.

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

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

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

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

Giving up is unforgivable.

This year has been the longest three days of putin’s life.

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

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

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

Today’s gop: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

Tick tock motherfuckers!

There are a lot more evil idiots than evil geniuses.

Oh FFS you might as well trust a 6-year-old with a flamethrower.

The “burn-it-down” people are good with that until they become part of the kindling.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

Republicans: slavery is when you own me. freedom is when I own you.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

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Two Questions

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Two quick questions:

1.) One of my big projects for this upcoming year is to digitize the family picture albums. Does anyone have a suggestion for a good scanner as well as good software that will allow you to add commentary to pictures for just this sort of project?

2.) I’m moving in a couple of months (we can talk about that later), and I think I would like to add a saltwater fish tank to the new house. Not one of those massive ones built into the wall that would make me look my place look like a Miami coke dealer’s, but just a decent sized tank to place. I’m not really much of a fan of domestic fish tanks, and the saltwater ones always seem to have much better looking fish and look cleaner. Approximately what kind of money are we looking at, and more importantly, what kind of man hours to keep a tank clean and appealing and healthy for the fish?

Also- Kennedy Center awards. I’m a big fan of Dave Brubeck- DougJ can not stand him. We both agree on Miles, though.

When Brubeck’s sons were introduced to play a medley of his songs, he gave a bewildered smile and said “Son of a bitch” and then grinned ear to ear. It was really nice.

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Early Morning Open Thread

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Cranky is endemic. I suspect this is one reason:

funny pictures of cats with captions
see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Perspective, my people. Here in the Northern Hemisphere, the days are growing longer… which will allow us precious extra minutes to contemplate the black ice that needs to be removed from the sidewalks & driveways. And then we come back in, huddle around the fire, and tell each other scary stories to beguile the hours of darkness.

— Signed, Flight Captain Emopants, W.S.S. Thwartships

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This Was Brilliant

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Spencer Ackerman:

Umar Farouk “When There’s Nothing Left To Burn, You Must Set Your Crotch On Fire” Abdulmutallab is currently detained in a federal prison in Michigan. For now! In a few days he’ll use his Muslim heat vision to escape and run amok in Ann Arbor, shortly after America is brought to its knees by the force of his oratory in open federal court.

Why haven’t the usual suspects wet their pants at the notion of a terrorist mastermind unleashed on the population… from his jail cell?

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Sorry, Ladies

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This will upset some of the female commentariat here:

Rahm Emanuel once said of Peter R. Orszag, the bespectacled economist who is President Obama budget director, “He’s made nerdy sexy.” So perhaps the White House chief of staff won’t be surprised to learn that Mr. Orszag got engaged over lunch today to the ABC News correspondent he began dating six months ago, Bianna Golodryga.

Looks like “the Calculator” got himself engaged.

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Early Morning Open Thread: Don’t Fear the Reaper Undie-Bomber

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Nate Silver puts the numbers in perspective for the Pantswetting Brigades:

Over the past decade, there have been, by my count, six attempted terrorist incidents on board a commercial airliner than landed in or departed from the United States: the four planes that were hijacked on 9/11, the shoe bomber incident in December 2001, and the NWA flight 253 incident on Christmas…

Over the past decade, according to BTS [the Bureau of Transportation Statistics], there have been 99,320,309 commercial airline departures that either originated or landed within the United States. Dividing by six, we get one terrorist incident per 16,553,385 departures.

These departures flew a collective 69,415,786,000 miles. That means there has been one terrorist incident per 11,569,297,667 mles flown. This distance is equivalent to 1,459,664 trips around the diameter of the Earth, 24,218 round trips to the Moon, or two round trips to Neptune…

There were a total of 674 passengers, not counting crew or the terrorists themselves, on the flights on which these incidents occurred. By contrast, there have been 7,015,630,000 passenger enplanements over the past decade. Therefore, the odds of being on given departure which is the subject of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade. By contrast, the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 500,000. This means that you could board 20 flights per year and still be less likely to be the subject of an attempted terrorist attack than to be struck by lightning.

(h/t Balloon Juice commentor BR)

When will Bill Kristol and/or Jonah Goldberg demand that President Obama declare a War on Weather?

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