Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

ha ha ha! Nice try weird people.

Republicans would impeach Biden if he bit into a whole Kit Kat rather than breaking the sections apart.

So many bastards, so little time.

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

Bogus polls are all they’ve got left. Let’s bury these fuckers at the polls a year from now.

If you’re pissed about Biden’s speech, he was talking about you.

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

Never forget that he train is barreling down on Trump, even as he dances on the tracks.

We need to vote them all out and restore sane Democratic government.

Speaker Mike Johnson is a vile traitor to the House and the Constitution.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

You can’t love your country only when you win.

T R E 4 5 O N

Republicans don’t lie to be believed, they lie to be repeated.

Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true.

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

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

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

Democrats are back in array!

Happy indictment week to all who celebrate!

SCOTUS: It’s not “bribery” unless it comes from the Bribery region of France. Otherwise, it’s merely “sparkling malfeasance”.

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Republican Stupidity

Open Thread: Con Man’s Gonna Con

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I have no comment…except the rubes will lap this up along with their spray-painted gold sneakers, trump bibles and flags.  From CNBC:

 

Key Points
  • Former president Donald Trump on Thursday promoted a soon-to-launch, Trump Organization crypto platform, “The DeFiant Ones” to his 7.5 million followers on Truth Social.
  • “For too long, the average American has been squeezed by the big banks and financial elites,” Trump wrote. “It’s time we take a stand — together.”
  • The post marks the first time the Republican nominee for president has used his personal platform to promote the as yet unactivated digital bank.

Former president Donald Trump on Thursday promoted a soon-to-launch, Trump Organization crypto platform, “The DeFiant Ones” to his 7.5 million followers on Truth Social.

“For too long, the average American has been squeezed by the big banks and financial elites,” Trump wrote. “It’s time we take a stand — together.”

The post marks the first time the Republican nominee for president has used his personal platform to promote the as yet unactivated digital bank. Within minutes, his son Donald Trump Jr., shared the post with his 12 million X followers.

Trump’s post includes a link to a Telegram channel called “The DeFiant Ones,” which had approximately 29,000 followers as of Thursday morning, and climbing.

Feel free to point and mock

Open thread

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NOT breaking news: Terry Gene Bollea is an asshole (open thread)

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The washed-up 71-year-old former WWE performer who calls himself “Hulk Hogan” got drunk and made a fool of himself Monday (PennLive):

In a video obtained by TMZ, the retired wrestler at one point asked a cheering crowd, “Do you want me to body slam Kamala Harris?”

“Want me to drop the leg on Kamala?” he added, referring to one of his iconic wrestling moves.

The dramatically mustachioed quarter-wit also made dumb and offensive comments about Harris’s heritage, invoking ignorant stereotypes about Native Americans because he’s more clueless than Columbus. Later, he blamed beer:

Hogan later walked back his comments and suggested that the remarks he made was not a true representation of himself. He also blamed the comments on the alcoholic drinks he drank at the bar.

“I am going to get heat for that one, brother. That was not me. That was the beers talking,” he added before the video stopped.

No, Bollea — that was your racist, misogynist, drunk ass talking. We see you.

Bollea and his idiot, criminal kids and related hangers-on live in my media market. They all go by Hogan for some reason and are frequently covered by the local news when they maim people in car crashes, etc. Just garbage people who should fuck off into the sun.

Open thread.

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Late Night Open Thread: That Lingering Smell of Burnt Toast

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Remember when your middle-school history textbook tried to get you interested in the ‘colorful’ figures of the original Gilded Age bust-out, cartoon characters like John D Rockefeller and Nominally President Harding? Someday historians — assuming there are still historians — will treat Musk and TFG’s “interview” the same way…

Best example of Trump’s slurring I’ve heard: “Sthrikehh”, at the 9second mark:

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Foreign Affairs Open Thread: Tim Walz Went to China… Many Times!

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In case y’all didn’t have a high enough opinion of Coach Walz already… “Tim Walz’s Long Relationship With China Defies Easy Stereotypes”: [gift link]

In the summer of 1989, Tim Walz faced a difficult choice.

A newly minted college graduate from small-town Nebraska, he had just turned down a stable, 9-to-5 job offer and moved across the world to teach at a local high school in China. He had made it as far as Hong Kong, just across the Chinese border, when People’s Liberation Army tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square to crush pro-democracy protests.

Rumors were flying about a possible civil war in China. Many foreigners, including most American teachers, had fled the country. Should he go back home or continue his journey into China?

He decided to go in.

“It was my belief at that time that the diplomacy was going to happen on many levels, certainly people to people,” Mr. Walz recalled in 2014 during a congressional hearing marking the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown. “The opportunity to be in a Chinese high school at that critical time seemed to me to be really important.”

The one year that Mr. Walz spent teaching English in southern China was the start of what would become a decades-long relationship with the country. As high school teachers in Nebraska and Minnesota, Mr. Walz and his wife, Gwen, regularly led trips to China in the 1990s and early 2000s to introduce students to China’s history and culture. Mr. Walz has said that he has traveled to China some 30 times, including for his honeymoon.

That deep history of engagement with China reflects a lesser-known international dimension of the Democratic vice-presidential candidate. If elected vice president, Mr. Walz would bring to the White House unusually extensive personal experience in China — a history that supporters say could be an asset at a time of volatile relations between Washington and Beijing…

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Late Night Open Thread: JD Vance & the Rage Furby, Texting Buddies

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Some of you vintage blog readers may remember Chuck ‘Floorsh*tter’ Johnson, a/k/a ‘Not the Little Green Footballs Charles Johnson’, going back to the days when he was a favorite chewtoy at Tbogg’s joint. He bobs up like a turd in the right-wing septic tank every so often, but until I did a cursory search on earlier posts here, I’d completely forgotten he was another one of Peter Thiel’s ‘intellectual’ beneficiaries.

So *of course* when the Rage Furby reached out to a newbie Repub senator, he would not be shunted off for an intern to deal with… Per the Washington Post, “JD Vance in texts with far-right figure: Profane and off-the-cuff” [gift link]:

The day after JD Vance was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2022, he received a congratulatory text from Charles Johnson, a blogger and entrepreneur who has zealously promoted right-wing conspiracy theories.

Johnson assumed the posture of a wise mentor, cautioning the first-time officeholder to choose his staff carefully and repeatedly pressing him on his committee assignments. “Got to keep you out of trouble,” wrote Johnson, who now describes himself as a government informant seeking to protect the United States from foreign influence.

Their correspondence over the next 20 months — extending into the weeks before former president Donald Trump picked Vance as his running mate — offers a glimpse of the Republican vice-presidential nominee’s off-the-cuff musings, often matching his public expressions but voiced with much less polish and more profanity. Vance was just as casual in discussing America’s foreign alliances as he was in evaluating his own private alliances with the GOP’s moneyed class. With Johnson, he pondered responsibility for the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines and crudely described his aversion to the Ukrainian government and refusal to consider its pleas for U.S. assistance.

“Dude I won’t even take calls from Ukraine,” he told Johnson in October, about three weeks after House Republicans blocked additional aid to help Kyiv repel the Russian invasion. “Two very senior guys reached out to me. The head of their intel. The head of the Air Force. Bitching about F16s.”

In response to questions about his correspondence with Johnson, Vance spokesman William Martin said the two were never close and don’t share the same politics. “Chuck Johnson spam texted JD Vance,” Martin said. “JD usually ignored him, but occasionally responded to push back against things he said.”…

The mostly friendly conversation with Johnson reflects how Vance gravitates to people on the political fringe — a cohort emboldened by Trump’s insurgent campaign in 2016 and highly active online in the years since. After Trump picked Vance as his running mate on July 15, Johnson has been criticizing his onetime interlocutor and threatening to release their communications. He said he has grown disillusioned with Vance, especially over the senator’s favorable view of the Israeli prime minister, and now supports President Biden and Vice President Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee.

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Harris & Walz Fight for Red State Citizens

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In an homage to himself and the colossally unself-aware sloganeering featured in his flaming Hindenburg of a GOP primary campaign, shitty far-right Florida Governor Ron DeSantis recently wasted $60K in taxpayer funds to change state line welcome signs to read “Welcome to the free state of Florida.” (Source: Tampa Bay Times)

It probably won’t matter in the final Electoral College* tally, but as one of the taxpayers whose contributions have been wasted on the sour kumquat’s hard-right vanity projects, I’m grateful that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have both been attacking the DeSantis anti-freedom agenda for years and hope they keep it up throughout the next 90 days.

Last year, when the DeSantis admin dumbed down the public school black history curriculum to protect the extra-dainty feelings of white snowflakes, Harris came to Jacksonville to call the change what it is: distorting history with far-right propaganda and lies. (Source: NPR) This year, she visited the state after the 6-week abortion ban became law and said “the government should never come between [a woman] and her doctor.”

Meanwhile, from his perch as a fellow governor, Walz has steadily slagged his odious Florida counterpart: (Source: TBT)

On social media, Walz has posted articles about books being removed from Florida school shelves, saying that “while we’re focused on banishing hunger with free breakfast and lunch, they’re focused on banning books, bullying LGBTQ+ students, and attacking teachers.”

In response to Florida effectively banning AP Psychology last year because the curriculum acknowledged the existence of people who are LGBTQ, Walz said, “My message stays the same: If you want to live in the year 2023, come to Minnesota. We’re protecting freedoms here – not taking them away.”

DeSantis talks often about all of the people who have moved to Florida since he became governor to flee liberal states. Walz, in an interview with NBC News last year, said Minnesota’s track record could appeal to people wanting to leave Florida and find another home.

“Like no time in my lifetime, the choice in states you could pick could not be greater,” he said in the NBC interview. “Folks don’t really care about the woke corporation fights, they care about the roads and water treatment plants.”

If I wouldn’t literally freeze to death in Minnesota, I might consider it, Governor Walz.

DeSantis takes credit for the sun, spinning the in-migration as a response to his crackpot far-right policies rather than the continuation of a trend that has seen the state’s population nearly triple in my lifetime. (It’s the sunshine and lack of a state tax, stupid!)

Anyhoo, “more of this, please,” etc. It’s meaningful to Democrats in red states when our national leaders push back on the fascist GOP culture war bullshit that takes away our freedoms, makes it harder for us to access healthcare and complicates raising our families.

Open thread.

*After we cross “crush fascism” off the to-do list, we should really make a more sustained effort to abolish the anti-democratic vestige of deference to slave states known as the Electoral College. The appeal could be fairly simple: In a democracy, all of our voices matter, so let’s stop making the citizens of a handful of swing states super-voters whose ballots outweigh everyone else’s. Maybe framing it as a fairness issue could work. 

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Odds & Ends (Open Thread)

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Is it Friday already? Days of the week are meaningless here in Happy Funville. That said, the news has been a lot more fun since the, uh, vibe shift in the 2024 election.

Exhibit A, did you know Trump is now too fucking old to be president? Even Republicans acknowledge that: (Newsweek)

In a fresh polling blow for Donald Trump, a majority of Republican voters have said they would prefer a president who is younger than the 78-year-old former commander-in-chief.

In a YouGov poll conducted between July 25-29, 59 percent of Republicans surveyed said they would prefer a president under the age of 75. Trump celebrated his 78th birthday in June. Forty percent said they had no preference, and just two percent said they would prefer a president over the age of 75.

After reveling in the media’s “Biden is old” chorus for years, even as their own candidate decayed before our eyes, now Trump and his shitty campaign say age is just a number:

“It’s not about age, it’s about competence…a Trump campaign spokesperson told Newsweek…

This latest poll could suggest the tables are turning on Trump, who regularly attacked his former rival, President Joe Biden, over his age. Biden is 81.

Trump seemed to row back on this sentiment at recent remarks at a rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

“81 is not old,” Trump said, and now Biden has withdrawn from the race, Trump is faced with a substantially younger competitor in Vice President Kamala Harris, who will turn 60 just weeks before Election Day.

Good luck to the self-masticated lump of vintage Naugahyde and the henchmen who are trying to sell that!

Continuing with the general twin Trump campaign themes of pathetic and weak, Trump surrogates are trying to steal the limelight from Joe Biden by claiming credit for the prisoner swap. The sofa-shagger weighs in: (The Hill)

“But we have to ask ourselves: Why are they coming home? And I think it’s because bad guys all over the world recognize Donald Trump’s about to be back in office, so they’re cleaning house,” he said. “That’s a good thing, and I think it’s a testament to Donald Trump’s strength.”

(Slurp slurp!) The non-entity from North Dakota had similar thoughts: (The Hill)

“The reason why Russia wanted to do the deal now is that they think that President Trump’s gonna win and they don’t want to deal with him,” [Doug] Burgum said in comments.

As every schoolchild knows, it’s weak and pathetic to take credit for someone else’s work. When asked about Trump’s preposterous attempt to steal credit, Biden very sensibly asked, “Why didn’t he do it when he was president?”

Answer, as Biden noted while announcing the deal: the task required the participation of allies. Multinational collaboration is a skillset He Who Does Not Play Well With Others conspicuously lacks. (There’s also the matter of Trump being Putin’s obsequious toady.)

***

Here’s an item that may be of interest to the many ambitious home cooks who comment in this space — a tongue-in-cheek analysis of the stack of cookbooks in Kamala Harris’s kitchen: (Esquire)

Odds & Ends (Open Thread)

Here is a person whose horizons are broad but whose focus is pragmatic. What is immediately clear is that, if these cookbooks are indicators of an overall umwelt, Harris values the restorative powers of cooking—not individually but as part of a community. In other words, she cooks not just for herself but for others. She understands food not simply as caloric intake but as identity.

The best cooks do! Also, it warms my heart to see Louisiana Kitchen in that stack.

Have we ever had a competent cook in charge of the country? I can’t recall one. The article speculates that Biden visits the kitchen only to raid the freezer for ice cream, which seems fair. He’s a good president even without apparent cooking skills, but maybe a candidate’s approach to food — and sharing it — says something meaningful nonetheless.

***

Looking ahead, Harris will announce a VP pick soon, and the DNC is coming up fast. The potential lack of media attention on Trump and the sofa-shagger may cause them to wilt like water-dashed wicked witches.

Or maybe they’ll do or say additional stupid things to attract the media herd. Who knows? Who cares? Trump and Vance are the worst kind of weirdos — stale and boring!

I’m interested in Harris’s VP decision (pick Pete!) but don’t believe any of the candidates being vetted would fundamentally change the race. If she can wring a point or two out of a battleground state with a VP pick, it sounds like she should do so.

That’s all I’ve got. Open thread!

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