My sister’s foster pup, Brooklyn, found a mudhole in the backyard and came inside while Devon was cooking and made herself comfortable on the couch:
She is available for rescue if yo are interested.
by John Cole| 68 Comments
This post is in: Dog Blogging
My sister’s foster pup, Brooklyn, found a mudhole in the backyard and came inside while Devon was cooking and made herself comfortable on the couch:
She is available for rescue if yo are interested.
by TaMara| 37 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
I think that Westminster might be a good central locale based on all the areas everyone said they were coming from – and after talking to friends in that area, they highly recommended this restaurant: Rositas. They had a birthday party there and said it was a good place for a large group and easy to have a conversation (one of the reasons I’ve nixed many of the great brew pubs – conversation is difficult).
Can we pick a date between Oct 16 and Oct 22? Some of you were not going to be around one week or another – let me know and we’ll do our best to work around it – since there was so much interest I’d like to make sure you can all make it.
Ok, give me your best days in the comments and if you have a real complaint about the restaurant, please offer another suggestion in that area. If anyone needs a ride, we’ll see if we can arrange things.
Things to remember – you’re getting this introvert out without Bixby and Bailey to provide a distraction – so don’t be shy. Lurkers are more than welcome. And I’m kind of hoping this will lead to some of us going on group dog walks and/or hikes later on.
This post is in: Books, Hail to the Hairpiece, Open Threads, Trump Crime Cartel
… ‘Almost as cold as the face on that beeyotch in the WH publicity photos’. [Yes, I am a petty, petty person.] Per TPM, Ivana Trump has a book to sell, and presumably a team of ace legal specialists to vet it, because it sounds like Game of Thrones – NYC:
A new book from Donald Trump’s first wife pulls back the curtain on a tumultuous period of the president’s life, including the messy divorce that was splashed across New York’s tabloids for weeks…
“Raising Trump” is set to be released next week. The Associated Press purchased an early copy.
In the book, Ivana writes glowingly about her marriage to Trump and her prominent role at the Trump Organization. But then she unburdens herself about the heartache that Trump’s affair with Maples caused her and the couple’s three children, Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric. Donald Jr. didn’t speak to his father for a year after the split…
‘Don’t blame me if the kid’s totally effed up. I did my best, but given Mr. My-Superior-Genes… ‘
…But she and the president have returned to far warmer terms. She writes that they speak about once a week and that she encourages him to keep using Twitter…
I’ll bet she does. What ex-Trump-partner would not?
She said in a CBS News interview this week that she was offered the post of ambassador to the Czech Republic, her native country, but turned it down because she already has “a perfect life.”…
‘And you, Melanja Knause? Those news photos, your expression is not that of a woman whose life is perfect.’
Much of the book is spent recounting Ivana Trump’s childhood in Europe, her burgeoning modeling career in New York and Trump’s courtship. She writes that, at their first meeting, Trump secured her and friends a table at a hot Manhattan restaurant, paid the check and chauffeured her back to her hotel in a giant Cadillac…
‘So much more romantic than having an aging roue hand me a business card at a ‘party’ so we could dicker over terms the next day. But then, I was a legitimate model. And I had friends.’
“Maybe in fifteen years, she could run for president?” she writes about her daughter, Ivanka, before musing about her own possible title. “First Lady? Holds no appeal for me personally…”
‘Your anchor baby Joffrey, or whatever his ridiculous name, will never be President. He’ll be lucky to reach voting age before the old man either strokes out or goes to jail. At least my kids are old enough to fend for themselves when the whole house of cards collapses…’
Mean Girlz Open Thread: A Dish Served ColdPost + Comments (74)
by DougJ| 106 Comments
This post is in: Green Balloons
I always thought it seemed likely that a document prepared by a respected MI-6 operative would be pretty accurate anyway, but when I heard Bob Woodward describe the Steele dossier as”garbage”, I figured every fucking word of it was probably true.
Nine months after its first appearance, the set of intelligence reports known as the Steele dossier, one of the most explosive documents in modern political history, is still hanging over Washington, casting a shadow over the Trump administration that has only grown darker as time has gone by.
[….]But as every passing month brings more leaks, revelations in the press, and more progress in the investigations, the Steele dossier has generally gained in credibility, rather than lost it.
Nobody ever went bankrupt overestimating the stupidity of Beltway establishment media.
This post is in: Politics, Republican Stupidity, General Stupidity
Interesting piece in the Tampa Bay Times this week about the growing political clout of The Villages, a massive retirement community in Central Florida that, like so many of its ilk, seemed to spring up overnight in local pastures like psilocybin mushrooms on cow patties after a summer rainstorm:
For several consecutive years, The Villages has been the fastest-growing metropolitan area in the United States, drawing retirees to an area northwest of Orlando with endless recreation, relative affordability and an almost jarring level of cleanliness and order. Now more than 124,000 people live in the metro area.
The Villages proper has soared from 8,300 residents in 2000 to more than 66,000 today, with a median age of 67. There are two Republicans for every Democrat…
Overwhelmingly white and Republican, The Villages and surrounding areas have offset the rise in Hispanic residents in Central Florida, part of the vaunted I-4 corridor where elections are decided. In a state with a history of bitterly close elections, small shifts matter greatly and this one played a key role in Donald Trump’s narrow victory.
I’ve complained in this space before about these retirement communities, and like a cranky old aunt who repeats the same story at every family gathering, I’m going to do it again. In a way, I understand the attraction. I don’t particularly enjoy sharing my town with yowling toddlers and skulking teens either.
But walling oneself off like that is avoiding real life. It’s choosing to live a Fox News bubble made manifest, an alternate universe of modular villas where you can drive a golf cart everywhere and rarely encounter someone who doesn’t share your background, skin pigmentation and opinions, let alone a person under age 55 who isn’t paid to serve you.
I don’t think it’s healthy for the people who live there, and I don’t think it’s healthy for the communities they leave behind or even the Florida towns that surround and serve them. All that wisdom and life experience entombed behind stucco walls, where too often it curdles.
But unlike so many of the ills that currently beset us, this will be a self-correcting problem. Even Florida Republicans can see that:
Democrats live here but maintain a lower profile, outnumbered 2-to-1, more so if right-leaning independents are counted. After Clinton’s loss, Democrats nationally bemoaned their sliding grip on the kind of white voters flocking to The Villages.
But the GOP faces its own issues for relying so heavily on white voters in a diversifying country and a state like Florida.
“The Republican Party is becoming an all-white party, unfortunately,” said GOP strategist Mark Zubaly of Tallahassee. “We need to wake up to that,” he added. “Eventually the rush of baby boomers from the north will end.”
Yes, it will end. And ironically, it will be the greed of the corporate parasites who benefit so mightily from The Villagers’ political leanings that kills the Republicans’ golden goose. The vast majority of people born in the 60s or later won’t have the option to retire in Florida with a nice pension and spend their golden years golfing and bitching about Kids Today.
Anyhoo, as a grizzled native, I tell fellow liberal Floridians who complain about retirees blighting our political prospects that previous influxes of folks from “up North” are what made this state not-Alabama. The worm will turn again. Our retirement might be a hobo adventure, but the future, such as it is, is ours.
by John Cole| 81 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
This post is in: Our Failed Media Experiment
Nothing to see here:
The Republican Party has largely abandoned its platform of fiscal restraint, pivoting sharply in a way that could add trillions of dollars in federal debt over the next decade.
Cutting spending to balance the budget was almost religion to the Republican Party for much of the past eight years. But all year long, despite their control of the White House and Congress, Republicans have not taken steps to balance the budget, to overhaul entitlement programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, or to arrest the growth of the country’s $20 trillion in debt.
With the House passing a critical budget resolution this past week, GOP lawmakers are charging forward next week with plans to cut taxes in a way that could add more than $1.5 trillion to the government’s debt over 10 years, with the goal of legislation by early next month. That is on top of an effort to significantly increase military spending. White House officials say their focus is on growing the economy now and dealing with the debt later.
This is nothing new, and not a switch at all. This is the Republican MO, and quite consistent. When they are in power, they spend wildly, enacting irresponsible tax cuts for the rich, blowing up the military budget, and if that doesn’t do the trick, starting a recreational war or two. Then, when they inevitably lose power briefly because of their own hubris, and money is once again tight and the budgets blown out of control from their feckless behavior, they become budget hawks to constrain anything done by liberals.
And the media plays along with it every time, pretending that the GOP and a couple of douchebag bluedogs like Evan Bayh and Harold Ford actually care about the national debt and the deficit. And they fall for it every time. They don’t want to shrink government to the size that they can drown it in the bathtub, they just want to transfer all the money to the Koch and Mercer families bathtubs to roll in it.
And You May Find Yourself, Living in a Shotgun ShackPost + Comments (252)