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Thursday Morning Open Thread: Graphic Political CriticismPost + Comments (179)
This post is in: Excellent Links, Gun nuts, Hail to the Hairpiece, Open Threads, Popular Culture, All Too Normal
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What’s on the agenda for the day?
Thursday Morning Open Thread: Graphic Political CriticismPost + Comments (179)
by Alain Chamot (1971-2020)| 14 Comments
This post is in: On The Road, Open Threads, Readership Capture
Good Morning All,
This weekday feature is for Juicers who are are on the road, traveling, or just want to share a little bit of their world via stories and pictures. So many of us rise each morning, eager for something beautiful, inspiring, amazing, subtle, of note, and our community delivers – a view into their world, whether they’re far away or close to home – pictures with a story, with context, with meaning, sometimes just beauty. By concentrating travel updates and tips here, it’s easier for all of us to keep up or find them later.
So please, speak up and share some of your adventures and travel news here, and submit your pictures using our speedy, secure form. You can submit up to 7 pictures at a time, with an overall description and one for each picture.
You can, of course, send an email with pictures if the form gives you trouble, or if you are trying to submit something special, like a zipped archive or a movie. If your pictures are already hosted online, then please email the links with your descriptions.
For each picture, it’s best to provide your commenter screenname, description, where it was taken, and date. It’s tough to keep everyone’s email address and screenname straight, so don’t assume that I remember it “from last time”. More and more, the first photo before the fold will be from a commenter, so making it easy to locate the screenname when I’ve found a compelling photo is crucial.
Have a wonderful day, and enjoy the pictures!
Ok, so I prepped this for Wednesday, and didn’t publish. Sorry about that!
Have a great day everyone, I’m heading to the Apple and LL Bean stores today, should be fun, but not cheap!
Today, pictures from valued commenter debbie.
I may be pushing the “On the Road” because the first picture is only a block from my apartment, but I don’t remember seeing snowdrops blooming in February in the more than 10 years I’ve lived in this neighborhood.
This photo confirms their hardiness in mud and torrential puddling rains. I just hope this hardiness outlasts all the rains we’re getting.
This second photo is maybe a half-mile away. It’s a “forest glen” mislocated in the middle of suburbia. Snowdrops rampage across the landscape here, and because it’s a well-tended yard, the drainage provides no threats to these little guys!
Thank you so much debbie, do send us more when you can.
Travel safely everybody, and do share some stories in the comments, even if you’re joining the conversation late. Many folks confide that they go back and read old threads, one reason these are available on the Quick Links menu.
One again, to submit pictures: Use the Form or Send an Email
This post is in: Open Threads, Trump Crime Cartel, Assholes, Ever Get The Feeling You've Been Cheated?, Fools! Overton Window!, Our Failed Media Experiment
What a really nice piece of writing. https://t.co/CMwR5rQWVH
— Matt Bai (@mattbai) March 15, 2018
I respect families that carry these traditions down through the generations https://t.co/1zSHFl9L2M
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) March 15, 2018
‘Quaint Folk Customs Among Neighborhood Banditti’. Feel like I should’ve noticed this sooner. For all its global-paper-of-record pretensions, the NYTimes can be a very parochial rag:
With apologies to Tolstoy, happy families may all be alike, but the Gotti family has long been unhappy in its own particular fashion. For nearly half a century, that has involved the serial ordeal of men in the Mafia clan being sent to federal prison.
On Wednesday, John J. Gotti, the grandson of the infamous Gambino family don who shares his name, was sentenced to five years in prison, following in the footsteps of two of his uncles, two great-uncles and both grandfathers. For three generations, members of the gangland dynasty have been imprisoned for crimes that have included shaking down construction sites, murdering a mob boss at a steakhouse and trying to extort the action-movie hero Steven Seagal.
The crimes that led this latest Gotti scion to be sent away were, according to the government, also entangled in the business that has occupied the family almost since the start of the Civil Rights era. Last June, Mr. Gotti, now 24, pleaded guilty to torching the car of an unwitting motorist who made the mistake of cutting off an aging Bonnano family figure on Cross Bay Boulevard in Howard Beach, Queens. Mr. Gotti also admitted that two weeks after the road-rage episode, he and two associates — presenting a note that said they had a bomb — robbed $6,000 from a bank in Maspeth, Queens.
His sentencing, in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, had the feeling of a familiar family dinner as several Gotti parents, grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles converged on the eighth-floor courtroom, kissing each other’s cheeks and showing their support for the defendant. John A. Gotti, the son of the former boss (who was serving a life sentence for murder when he died in prison in 2002), embraced one of the court sketch artists with genuine affection, telling his younger relatives that the woman had not only covered his trials (plural), but had also covered “grandpa’s…
As long as the Gotti clan aren’t shaking down the NYTimes newsroom, shooting up hot new hipster-Brooklyn dining spots, trying to extort Lena Dunham, or torching the Uber carrying NYTimes employees from the newsroom to the latest chic outboro restaurant, it’s all fun mobster-movie escapades to the Timesmen assigning these stories.
And while Donald Trump was just another mobbed-up Queens arriviste, descending his golden escalator to brag about his vanity candidacy, the NYTimes simply could not take him seriously.
By the time Trump had broken out of his “amusing local gangster” role, either the people running the NYTimes were incapable of noticing the change… or cowed by the possibility that they’d been mistaken all along.
Of course, this puts them in the same position as the entire Republican party, so they’ve got that consolation. For what it’s worth.
This post is in: domestic terrorists, Open Threads, Are these Nazis Walter?, Assholes, Clown Shoes, Schadenfreude
Holy shit — neo-Nazi leader Matthew Heimbach had an affair with his chief spokesman Matt Parrott's wife. Parrott is leaving the movement, possibly in shambles, saying:
“SPLC has won. Matt Parrott is out of the game. Y’all have a nice life.” https://t.co/n0gWbxELB6
— Jack Smith IV (@JackSmithIV) March 14, 2018
Behold, the Master Race. https://t.co/xZLsW9tdws
— Mike Stuchbery ???? (@MikeStuchbery_) March 14, 2018
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Life’s rich tapestry…
Matthew Heimbach, the leader of the Traditionalist Worker Party, is free on bond after being charged with battery in southern Indiana after a bizarre sequence of events involving Heimbach having an affair with his chief spokesman’s wife.
Police in Paoli, Indiana, said Heimbach attacked his wife and TWP spokesman Matt Parrott early Tuesday morning after the two confronted him about the affair with Parrott’s wife.
After the arrest, Parrott announced he was walking away from the group…
Heimbach, 26, posted $1,000 bond and was released Tuesday. He did not answer calls to his cellphone and did not return questions sent by text message from the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The strange incident began just after 1 a.m. Tuesday, when Matt Parrott, 36, called police from a Walmart near his home. He fled to the Walmart with his step-daughter after a violent confrontation with Heimbach.
The step-daughter told police that Heimbach and Parrott’s wife had been having an affair for three months. Heimbach and Parrott’s wife said the fling had ended.
The step-daughter and Parrott’s wife tried to set up Heimbach to see if he would continue the affair after saying it was over, police said in a report.
During the set up at Parrott’s Paoli trailer home, Matthew Parrott and his step-daughter waited outside, standing on a box and watching through a window, police said.
A confrontation ensued between Heimbach and Matt Parrott…
In the report, all four people involved in the incident recorded their occupations as “White Nationalist.”…
The Very Serious True Progressives tell me it’s kreeewell and “counterproductive” to mock these folk, who will now be forced to shun the Democrat Party and cast their precious, precious White Working Class votes to “heighten the contradictions”, but srsly…
Barely a week after brawling with antifascists outside a Richard Spencer speaking event at Michigan State University, Matthew Heimbach, chairman of the neo-Nazi Traditionalist Worker Party, has been charged with domestic battery…
The charges come as Heimbach is engaged in a power struggle with Andrew Anglin, founder of the Daily Stormer, over the strategy and direction of the increasingly fractured alt right. Following Heimbach’s arrest, his father-in-law and TWP co-founder Matt Parrott told the Southern Poverty Law Center that he was stepping away from the organization. “I’m done. I’m out,” Parrott said. “SPLC has won. Matt Parrott is out of the game. Y’all have a nice life.”…
The Traditionalist Worker Party and its allies are to be found in the thick of the fighting wherever militant antifascists and antiracists clash with the far right, the skirmishes in Michigan last week being just the most recent example and the rally in Charlottesville in August being the most deadly…
… these are the people for whom the phrase “rooting for injuries” was invented.
He's burning the records on his way out. pic.twitter.com/G2Cy2AhMMC
— Brutalist ?? McDonalds (@McBrutalist) March 14, 2018
Luzers After Dark Open Thread: TradWorker Heartland Family ValuesPost + Comments (144)
by TaMara| 169 Comments
This post is in: Gun nuts
At Cooper City High School, students and faculty set up 17 desks and podiums in a circle, all meant to honor the 17 victims.
I loved Betty’s title from earlier today, so I stole it. I’ve been confined to the couch all day, under a blanket, arguing with people on twitter and facebook. Not the best use of my time, but these NRA humpers need to know facts are not on their side. Anyway, there was some heartwarming posts on today’s walk outs.
This kid is my new hero:
Wow I’m literally the only one #NationalSchoolWalkout pic.twitter.com/2F95qY2vTI
— Justin Blackman (@JustinIBlackman) March 14, 2018
Miami Palmetto Senior High School @OfficialJoelF @studentswalkout #MSDStrong pic.twitter.com/0bjyqkPBcj
— alexis (@alexis_ayala126) March 14, 2018
Students at a Los Angeles school held a die-in spelling #ENOUGH with their bodies as a gong sounded 17 times, one for each student killed in the Parkland, Florida, school shooting https://t.co/06T5j07Czb pic.twitter.com/OGNcwLJBel
— CNN (@CNN) March 14, 2018
What struck you most about today’s walk out events?
Oh, and I’m sure you’ve already heard that there were two school gun incidents involving teacher/cop and resource officer. But you know, more guns.
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Fables Of The Reconstruction, Free Markets Solve Everything, Fuck The Middle-Class, Fuck The Poor, Glibertarianism, Show Us on the Doll Where the Invisible Hand Touched You, Tax Policy, The Party of Fiscal Responsibility, Ever Get The Feeling You've Been Cheated?
Larry Kudlow is the pure distilled essence of a Trump appointment, the type specimen of the breed, and the perfect expression of the state of Republican “thinking” on not just economics, but any matter in which actual knowledge and a respect for empiricism might help.
Via Wikipedia, we find he is barely educated, at best, in the fields in which he now works:
Kudlow graduated from University of Rochester in Rochester, New York with a degree in history in 1969. Known as “Kuddles” to friends, he was a star on the tennis team and a member of the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society at Rochester.
In 1971, Kudlow attended Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, where he studied politics and economics. He left before completing his master’s degree.
I’ll admit that Kuddles is kinda cute, but an unfinished masters degree in a policy school is not one you’d usually associate with economics acumen.
He went on to a stellar business career, managing to get fired repeatedly for substance abuse on the job, including a claimed $10,000/month cocaine habit that got him canned from Bear Stearns in 1994. (It’s interesting to note that a frantic effort is underway today to diminish such inconvenient truths on Kudlow’s Wikipedia page.)
Fortunately for Kuddles, he cleans up well, dresses nicely, and can tok gud. So he was able to revive his career as a TV gasbag, with a series of appearances and then shows on CNBC, the network that figured out the markets could be covered like sports teams.
Unfortunately — for the rest of us, if not for the ever-failing-up Kudlow — he’s been wrong about almost every key economic call since Methuselah was in diapers. He is a Laffer disciple, a supply-sider whose faith that there is no tax that is too low, no plutocrat whose needs must not be served, is impervious to any test of reality.
In 1993, when Bill Clinton proposed an increase in the top tax rate from 31 percent to 39.6 percent, Kudlow wrote, “There is no question that President Clinton’s across-the-board tax increases … will throw a wet blanket over the recovery and depress the economy’s long-run potential to grow.” This was wrong. Instead, a boom ensued. Rather than question his analysis, Kudlow switched to crediting the results to the great tax-cutter, Ronald Reagan. “The politician most responsible for laying the groundwork for this prosperous era is not Bill Clinton, but Ronald Reagan,” he argued in February, 2000.
Kudlow firmly denied that the United States would enter a recession in 2007, or that it was in the midst of a recession in early to mid-2008. In December 2007, he wrote: “The recession debate is over. It’s not gonna happen. Time to move on. At a bare minimum, we are looking at Goldilocks 2.0. (And that’s a minimum). The Bush boom is alive and well. It’s finishing up its sixth splendid year with many more years to come”. In May 2008 he wrote: “President George W. Bush may turn out to be the top economic forecaster in the country” in his “‘R’ is for ‘Right'”.
And this:
When Obama took office, Kudlow was detecting an “inflationary bubble.” That was wrong. He warned in 2009 that the administration “is waging war on investors. He’s waging war against businesses. He’s waging war against bondholders. These are very bad things.” That was also wrong, and when the recovery proceeded, by 2011, he credited the Bush tax cuts for the recovery. (Kudlow, April 2011: “March unemployment rate drop proof lower taxes work.”) By 2012, Kudlow found new grounds to test out his theories: Kansas, where he advisedRepublican governor Sam Brownback to implement a sweeping tax-cut plan that would produce faster growth. This was wrong. Alas, Brownback’s program has proven a comprehensive failure, falling short of all its promises and leaving the state in fiscal turmoil.
The reviews are coming in. Via the BBC:
David Stockman, Mr Kudlow’s former boss during the Reagan administration, told the Washington Post in 2016 that Mr Kudlow’s prediction that tax cuts would lead to growth was “dead wrong”. Instead, he said the cuts led to budget deficits.
More recently, he has warned that Mr Kudlow would not be able to rein in the president.
“As much as I love him … Larry’s voice is exactly the wrong voice that Donald Trump ought to be hearing as we go forward,” he told CNBC.
Liberal economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has been sharply critical, noting that Mr Kudlow missed signs of the housing bubble and recession.
“At least he’s reliable — that is, he’s reliably wrong about everything,” Mr Krugman tweeted.
Indeed in December 2007 – just as the recession was beginning – Mr Kudlow wrote in the National Review: “There’s no recession coming. The pessimistas were wrong. It’s not going to happen.”
It is interesting that Kudlow himself doesn’t seem to disagree with his predecessor on the issue that got Cohn out. From a quick take bylined by him, Laffer and Stephen Moore (another stellar, always-wrong econ public intellectual) here he is on Trump’s tariff announcement:
Tariffs are really tax hikes. Since so many of the things American consumers buy today are made of steel or aluminum, a 25 percent tariff on these commodities may get passed on to consumers at the cash register. This is a regressive tax on low-income families.
I wonder how that squares with the new job. ETA: I know how it squares. It’s already been forgotten. We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.
But that’s just SOP in the circles in which Kudlow travels: intellectual rigor doesn’t actually matter. He’s under no obligation to be consistent in any of his pronouncements, and he certainly doesn’t have to be right about anything as long as he provides cover for the true Republican (n.b.: not just Trumpian) policy goal: the transfer of more and more of our society’s wealth to those who are already wealthy — and hence, in the GOP/Rand/Sociopath view of the world, those who are virtuous enough to deserve such riches.
For all of you who’ve wondered why the US can’t be more like Kansas — we may now we get to find out.
Image: Thomas Shields Clarke, A Fool’s Fool, c. 1887.
We Can Always Use Some Bitter, Cynical, Gallows Humor, So Here’s A Kudlow PostPost + Comments (109)
This post is in: Election 2018, Hail to the Hairpiece, Open Threads, Proud to Be A Democrat, Republicans in Disarray!, World's Best Healthcare (If You Can Afford It), All we want is life beyond the thunderdome
Our election night poll in PA-18 found that health care was a defining issue in the race. 52% said it was either the most important issue or very important in their vote, and Conor Lamb won those voters 62-38: https://t.co/1D00GVRY5k
— PublicPolicyPolling (@ppppolls) March 14, 2018
One particularly noteworthy health care poll finding in PA-18…voters there support the Affordable Care Act 44-42. That it’s now supported even in Trump +20 districts really speaks to how much things have shifted on that since GOP repeal efforts: https://t.co/1D00GVRY5k
— PublicPolicyPolling (@ppppolls) March 14, 2018
Of course, the Repubs prefer to blame… well, anything other than the obvious:
GOP Blames ‘Lackluster’ Candidate And His ‘Porn Stache’ For Pennsylvania Setback https://t.co/gE3mi7u66v
— Lydia Polgreen (@lpolgreen) March 14, 2018
It’s definitely a winning move for the GOP reference anything related to porn right now. ?????? https://t.co/yUQxKvP5qW
— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) March 14, 2018
A reminder to Republicans: it’s not just that Trump and his lackeys will drag you down. It’s that then once you’re down they’ll kick you for it.https://t.co/hRMNNwJOtM
— Jacob T. Levy (@jtlevy) March 14, 2018
Trump's personal unpopularity is a big part of it, & prob the biggest part. But it's more than that: it's also his inability/unwillingness to drive a focused positive message for GOP, or to campaign for candidates in a way that isn't just political joyriding for own amusement
— Alex Burns (@alexburnsNYT) March 14, 2018
Say, has anyone pointed out that @realDonaldTrump is now on a three-election losing streak of holding rallies for special elections? Because I am here for that.
— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) March 14, 2018
Trump might think he could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot someone, and not lose any voters, but Republicans just lost an R+11 district at the same time that the economy is growing, unemployment is at a 17 year-low, and there are no major wars.
Chaos matters.
— Matt O'Brien (@ObsoleteDogma) March 14, 2018
PA Open Thread: Sow the Windbag, Reap the FartcloudPost + Comments (45)