Which means we use the best eagle gif ever:
That eagle clearly has superior taste.
Open thread!
by Adam L Silverman| 85 Comments
This post is in: America, Open Threads, Sports
Which means we use the best eagle gif ever:
That eagle clearly has superior taste.
Open thread!
This post is in: Open Threads
I made curry and am watching Altered Carbon while checking the score every now and then.
Better Late Than Never- Super Bowl Open ThreadPost + Comments (135)
This post is in: Foreign Affairs, Goddamned Traitors, Open Threads, Republicans in Disarray!, Russiagate, Assholes
Ooo, look, so many Very Serious People using words like “treason”, this time against Republicans, most especially the Repubs who worked on Trump’s 2016 campaign! Could not be happening to a more deserving gang of revanchists and revenants…
Jeff Sessions on Nunes memo: "No department is perfect" https://t.co/yubwzI4D9j
— Axios (@axios) February 2, 2018
Atty Gen Jeff Sessions went off script at human trafficking event this morn to praise Deputy Atty Gen Rod Rosenstein, a reported target of Nunes memo. Noting Rosenstein has 27 yrs at DOJ, Sessions said Rosenstein represents "the kind of quality & leadership that we want" in DOJ.
— Mike Levine (@MLevineReports) February 2, 2018
Embarrassing memo flop forces Jeff Sessions to defend the FBI against Trump’s smears https://t.co/T7VhQdVWB3 via @shareblue
— Tommy Christopher (@tommyxtopher) February 3, 2018
.
There’s TALK…
We know now the FBI was actively investigating both campaigns during the 2016 election but only chose to publicly announce (repeatedly!) their investigation of Clinton while keeping the Trump campaign investigation *completely* secret the entire time.
— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) February 2, 2018
Doesn’t it strike you as a bit odd that no Repub has ever publicly questioned whether Russian help started long before May 2016, and whether their party’s nomination was captured by the Russians via Donald Trump?
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) February 4, 2018
.
Anybody heard from Rudy lately?
Rudy Giuliani warns his Republican Party to “be careful” going to war with the FBI https://t.co/Rv8P0VLTUm
— Philip Rucker (@PhilipRucker) February 3, 2018
— Gideon Resnick (@GideonResnick) February 4, 2018
sounds like Rudy Giuliani doesn’t want anyone looking too hard at how he mysteriously acquired advance knowledge of the October Hillary’s emails announcement https://t.co/gVKH8zNIJ8
— Kilgore Trout (@KT_So_It_Goes) February 3, 2018
.
And what of James Comey, (newly) Brave Truth-Tweeter?…
Imagine going back in time to Comey Letter Day in 2016 and reporting that the Republicans would eventually claim the FBI had been against them all along
— laura olin (@lauraolin) February 1, 2018
One of the great ironies out of many in this current situation is that Comey no doubt released his letter because he assumed Clinton would win and he wanted to set a marker for FBI independence from the executive branch.
— Schooley (@Rschooley) February 2, 2018
The thing about the new Woke James Comey character is that this whole predicament was substantially caused by his own poor judgment and mismanagement of the FBI.
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) February 2, 2018
Well his critical role electing Trump contributed to that predicament too. https://t.co/lsbGdk2Y6P
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) February 2, 2018
Russiagate Open Thread: A Dish Served ColdPost + Comments (231)
This post is in: Sports, Stream of Consciousness, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome
Confession 1: I am a football fan. My father took me to Cal games at Memorial Stadium — one of the most beautiful places to watch more or less anything, tucked there against the slope by Strawberry Canyon, gold-and-green hills behind, the Bay, the Bridge and Mt. Tam to the west. We’d go to one or two games a season, rarely victories (my Golden Bears were valiant, but not that good), and as I lost dad when I was ten, those are memories overlaid with power.
I was aware of the ‘Niners then too, but as an East Bay kid with a full sporran* of high school anomie and safe rebellion, the Raiders were the real deal, all felons and left handed QBs and chain-smoking stick-um slathered Fred Biletnekoff. And yeah, Tatum’s embrace of that hit made me sick, but football, you know?
Then I moved to Boston, four years for college and then, after a few seasons away, for good. I still claimed to be a Raiders fan, (Plunkett!), and as a Bay Area kid, I took more pleasure than previous allegiance entitled me to in the Montana across the bay. But I paid attention to the Patriots. I always thought Grogan was cool, and Hannah was such an archetypal football guy and so on. They usually sucked, but they weren’t (mostly) dull. I’ll pass over the Berry years in silence.
Then, of course, we got that other guy named Bill, soon to be followed by the 199th pick in that draft, a hopelessly unathletic kid, Tommy something. You know the rest: it was easy to root for a hopelessly underdoggy team of Patriots in that 9/11 fall, a season capped by a most improbable playoff run. Been high living ever since.
So I’ve been watching a long time and for many of those years Sunday was a pretty well defined ritual, at least one game, sometimes two, and hanging out with folks I enjoyed. I watch a lot less now. Because the Patriots have stayed good and I’m something of a front-runner, I check in for most of their fourth quarters, but it’s rare indeed that I watch a whole game through any more.
Partly I’ve lost patience with the action to hanging around ratio. Partly I’m more jealous of my time than I was when I thought it came in infinite supply. But yeah: partly, increasingly, I’m seeing myself as an accessory to genuinely awful stuff.
Confession 2: I know that football destroys minds and lives. It’s impossible not to know that now, and if you needed any reminder, there’s a story in today’s New York Times** by the wife of a former NFL player to put a face to life after too much grievous bodily harm.
When we married in 2009, I already knew he was an amazing father. He could play dollhouse with my stepdaughter for hours without a hint of boredom. This continued when we had two children of our own. When our son was born and I was focused on taking care of a baby, he would bathe the girls, brush and blow-dry their (tangled!) hair, then put them to bed. Afterward he would wash the dishes. He brought me coffee in bed each morning. I was spoiled rotten.
But since I had known him, he had trouble sleeping, and he has been prone to mood swings and depression. In 2010, things got worrisome, so I arranged for him to be evaluated by neurologists so that he could apply for disability benefits. …
I was right to be concerned.
Over time, I had started to notice changes. But this was different and, around 2013, things had become much more frightening.
He lost weight. It seemed like one day, out of the blue, he stopped being hungry. And often he would forget to eat. I’d find full bowls of cereal left around the house, on bookshelves or the fireplace mantel. The more friends and family commented on his gaunt frame, the more panicked I became. By 2016, he had shrunk to 157 pounds. That’s right, my 6-foot-2 football-player husband weighed 157 pounds (down from around 200 when he was in the N.F.L.). People were visibly shocked when we told them he had played the game professionally.
This is a gut and heart rending tale, made worse by the increasing pile of evidence that Rob Kelly’s is not an isolated case.
It seems to me that such an outcome is intrinsic to the game, not obviously correctable by changing rules or equipment. Yesterday I procrastinated in the face of some early eighteenth century financial asset analysis that was just a little tricky to tease apart, and pulled up some old Super Bowl videos on Youtube. I landed on a couple of Montana highlights and I was genuinely surprised to see how brutal the game seemed. Those games were before the rule changes came in intended to protect the quarterbacks, and Joe Cool was getting whacked on almost every play, as rushers would take one, two, even three steps after he’d released the ball and slam into him at full speed. There’s a reason top quarterbacks are playing longer than they did then, and one of the big ones is that they don’t get turned into hamburger helper by the third quarter of every game. I’m amazed, frankly, that anyone from that age of football can remember their names, and I confess (another one!) I’d forgotten just how thoroughly physical the game was back then.
I’d still say the risks are higher now though, at least plausibly. Another change from then and now is that players at every position are bigger, stronger, more powerful and faster than they were back then. Some hits may have been legislated out of the game, but those that occur are hugely violent, and in the routine, subconcussive zone, all that slugging that goes on in line play gets done by men who are simply huger than their predecessors, and in ridiculous shape. When I was a kid, a 300 pound lineman on either side of the ball was a giant, almost a freak. Now? Well everyone knew that Vince Wilfork, to speak of one Patriots great, was a very big man. But even at 325 pounds he wasn’t seen as off the charts.
All of which to say is that every time I watch a football game I not only know that I’m seeing fit, impeccably trained, incredibly gifted young men hurt themselves for my entertainment, I find myself watching each tackle and wondering, surprisingly often, if that’s the one that turns that gorgeously talented twenty something guy into the forty year old-to-be who can’t remember where his bowl of cereal went.
That is: I can’t suspend my awareness of how the game works anymore. I used to could, but can’t anymore.
Confession 3: I’ll watch the game this evening. I’ve even got a few friends coming over, and we’ll have the Mexican bean dip and some Peruvian chicken thighs (fabulous: I’ll post the recipe soon) and some Dogfish Head IPA and all that. We will root for the Patriots, because d’uh — and y’all hate us ’cause you ain’t us. The rooting thing is real: it’s fun to pick a set of laundry you decide is your flag and cheer for that. The game, played at the highest level, still is amazing to watch — in fact, that’s the dirty secret. Football can be thrilling, a catharsis, and it’s easy to get hooked on the seemingly harmless rush of life-and-death, victory and defeat to be found on the mock-battlefield of a football field. And the social side is real too, hanging with folks on a day when all diets are off and so on. We’ll watch, and we’ll probably have a good time.
But I’m finding it harder and harder to do so. This is how I feel: the right thing to do is obvious, but the long, long habit of not doing it remains hard to break. Eventually, the time comes when that tension turns into a contradiction, and that’s it.
With five decades of reflex to undo, I don’t know if tonight will be the last time I turn on the NFL.
But I hope it is.
*I actually wore a great kilt (with all the trimmings) to my high school in my senior year. Even played badminton in it (not recommended). This guy I’d seen around, kind of intimidating, came up to me at recess or lunch, and asked me what it was. I told him. He just looked at me for a moment, then cracked up and said “you’re brave.” I confess (again): I exhaled.
**Posted 2/2, in print today.
Image: Edmund Blair Leighton, The Gladiator’s Wife, 1884.
I Hear There’s A Sporting Contest TodayPost + Comments (217)
This post is in: Open Threads
Last year, the fruit of many long labors was borne for my wife, and she was awarded a Princeton fellowship to further her scholarly work. By pure coincidence, or so she claims, Paul McCartney was playing in New Jersey the same September week that she had arranged to be there. She’d seen two shows from McCartney’s 2016–17 tour with her father over the past year, and both were almost identical in content. Nonetheless, a week or two before her departure to Princeton, she confessed in an offhanded way that she had gotten tickets to see Macca a third time at one of his two Prudential Center shows in Newark.
“Oh?” I said.
Yes, she’d purchased a twenty-third row ticket, then paid a nominal $5 fee to upgrade to an eighth-row, center-stage ticket which would really put her in the thick of things.
We don’t have one of those marriages where we must obtain permission to spend our discretionary funds, so I was like, hey, if you want to blow your money on the same Paul McCartney concert all over the US, knock yourself out. That’s a level of fandom to which I can only bear witness, despite being a huge Beatles fan and general Paul partisan. She might deny it, but in addition to being a scholar of early modern women’s reading, my wife comes close to having a doctorate in Beatleology too, so encyclopedic is her store of Fab Four knowledge. She’s my go-to for Beatles info—and I’m supposedly the musician in the family. I want to say she, in her early thirties, is The Last Beatlemaniac, though time will tell.
Anyway, the day of the concert arrives, and Sarah hops on a train to Newark after toiling mightily at the Firestone Library all day. I’m at work that night receiving a steady commentary on her journey upstate and then the concert itself. She sends pictures and short videos. She’s super close! She could almost reach out and poke Paul.
During the encore, a truly amazing thing happens: he seems to make eye contact with her and does a little waltz step, referencing the sign she’s been holding up. Sign? Yes, she’s made a different sign for each of the concerts she’s attended. This one says: BALLROOM DANCE WITH A VEGETARIAN LIBRARIAN?
Wow! Acknowledged by a Beatle. Pretty good. Worth the effort. I don’t hear from her for awhile then I get some garbled, semaphoric texts that I can’t make heads or tails of.
Then at 10 p.m. Eastern time, she texts me. “You’re never going to believe it.”
Here I thought that Sarah was going to see the same concert and over when really she was working on her sign game. Third time’s the charm!
But you say you want a revolution? Well, you know, that’s a bit of a tall order. But you could contribute to the fund that’s split between all eventual Democratic nominees in House districts currently held by Republicans.
This post is in: Hail to the Hairpiece, Open Threads, Sports
I wonder if he’ll top his super fun party from last year? pic.twitter.com/Vtifpna9Uu
— Schooley (@Rschooley) February 3, 2018
All Mar a Lago parties have a certain veil of sadness hanging over them. You know, like a Russian novel. pic.twitter.com/VmOJTlZ8wp
— Schooley (@Rschooley) February 3, 2018
From the Washington Post, “Trump is over the NFL (mostly). But the league still is feeling the fallout.”:
On a Friday evening in late September, President Trump and a group of aides gathered in the executive office of Air Force One.
A television was tuned to Fox News, which was replaying and deconstructing a clip from Trump’s rally earlier that day in Huntsville, Ala. Though he had appeared in support of Luther Strange in a primary runoff for the Senate, the footage had nothing to do with Alabama politics.
“Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say: ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now,’ ” Trump had told the crowd in a state he won in 2016 by nearly 30 points. “ ‘He is fired. He’s fired!’ ”…
… Reliving his words during the flight back to Washington, Trump pointed out to staffers that his off-the-cuff remark had been perhaps the biggest applause line of the night.
Four months later, with the NFL approaching the finish line to a turbulent season with Sunday’s Super Bowl, America’s most powerful sports league remains wounded from an ongoing culture war that started almost by accident…
For a president who thrives on conflict, the league served as just another convenient foil — and, perhaps, a particularly satisfying one given Trump’s unsuccessful attempts to buy an NFL franchise. But for the league, which had attempted for years to build a connection to the flag and patriotism as it replaced baseball as America’s pastime, his comments initiated a full-blown crisis, exposing social fault lines that had always been there — but those the league had been reluctant to confront. For months, the league has struggled to figure out how to respond to Trump amid a genuine sense that he had gotten the upper hand. In many ways, as the NFL gathers in Minneapolis this weekend for its glittery showcase, the fallout continues even as the president has mostly moved on.
“It put us in a position where we had to be political, and I don’t think it’s what any of us wanted,” said one NFL team executive, among more than a dozen league sources who requested anonymity so as not to draw Trump’s attention back to the league or any particular franchise.
“It was a terrible year.”…
In a few impromptu minutes in September, the president had — at least among his supporters — pivoted anthem protests away from race relations entirely. Now it was about respect, patriotism and the flag itself. The NFL — despite wrapping itself in the stars and stripes more than any other sports body with almost weekly salutes to service, field-length American flags and military flyovers — had lost its way…
Open Thread: Trump’s Reverse-Midas Touch, Sportsball EditionPost + Comments (69)
This post is in: Fuck The Middle-Class, Fuck The Poor, Republican Venality
*Paul Ryan pulls a quarter out from behind my ear*
ME: “Is that supposed to be a magic trick?”
RYAN: “That’s the magic of your tax cut!”
ME: “That’s fucking it?”
RYAN: “Now, watch me make Medicaid disappear!”— Sam Grittner (@SamGrittner) February 3, 2018
It was another crazy news week, so it’s understandable if you missed a small but important announcement from the Treasury Department: The federal government is on track to borrow nearly $1 trillion this fiscal year — Trump’s first full year in charge of the budget.
That’s almost double what the government borrowed in fiscal year 2017.
Here are the exact figures: The U.S. Treasury expects to borrow $955 billion this fiscal year, according to a documents released Wednesday. It’s the highest amount of borrowing in six years, and a big jump from the $519 billion the federal government borrowed last year.
Treasury mainly attributed the increase to the “fiscal outlook.” The Congressional Budget Office was more blunt. In a report this week, the CBO said tax receipts are going to be lower because of the new tax law.
And we all know what that means- we will suddenly become (and by we, I mean the Republicans and the media) with the debt and deficit, so something will have to be done. That something will not be getting rid of the newly enacted tax cut, the proximate cause of this mess:
Welfare hardly exists anymore in the United States. Yet in his ever-persistent war on the poor, Paul Ryan is pushing a proposal that “could include work requirements for welfare beneficiaries,” as Politico reports. And to do so, Ryan and other Republicans are trying out a shiny new rebrand.
According to Politico, at a GOP retreat, “Ryan urged congressional Republicans to tackle ‘workforce development.’ He messaged the somewhat amorphous phrase as a matter of ‘helping people[.]’” House Republican Study Committee Chairman Mark Walker followed a similar tack, saying, “If you really want someone to get out there and find fulfillment… even though you’ve got to get the framing or the phrasing right, wouldn’t you want to see that person excel?” and that “When we talk about ‘Medicaid reform,’ that’s not a great buzz phrase.”
The exact details of Ryan’s plans are not clear (after all, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the current version of welfare, already imposes strict work requirements), but he has consistently advocated for cuts to programs like Social Security, Medicare, and food stamps. And Donald Trump has already opened the door on tampering with Medicaid, allowing states to impose work requirements for the first time in the program’s 50-year history.
Winning the House and putting a dent in the Senate are national priorities.
Fiscal Conservatism Is Actually Robbing the Poor to Shower the Rich With CashPost + Comments (232)