Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

No one could have predicted…

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Nothing worth doing is easy.

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

I’m pretty sure there’s only one Jack Smith.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

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

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

After roe, women are no longer free.

They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

In my day, never was longer.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

This fight is for everything.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

When do the post office & the dmv weigh in on the wuhan virus?

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

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

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Late Night Open Thread: Cosplay Socialist Extinction Burst

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… When Bernie Sanders’ campaign was preparing for a potential win in the first 2020 contest Monday, his aides and allies envisioned him giving a primetime victory speech, raising millions of dollars from small-dollar donors amid their ecstatic high, and savoring proving so many elites wrong at a party at the Holiday Inn.

Instead, Sanders and his senior aides found themselves working to reassure demoralized and shaken staffers and volunteers on Tuesday.

In a last-minute all-staff call around noon, Sanders’ campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, told aides that the Iowa Democratic Party had been incompetent and the delayed results were frustrating. But, he said, it was critical to appreciate what had just happened despite receiving the most negative news coverage of any 2020 campaign…

This was not what the Sanders campaign had expected to happen, to put it mildly. Excitement had been building among his team and its allies for days leading up to the Iowa caucuses. While campaigning throughout the state, Sanders himself appeared in a good mood, smiling and cracking more jokes than usual. He said his wife, Jane, would make a great first lady; Rep. Ilhan Omar, a top surrogate, said at events that they were going to send Sanders to the White House.

Then on Monday, hundreds of Sanders’ supporters — his Iowa precinct whips and captains; Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair Mark Pocan; members of the Sunrise Movement, a group of young climate change activists; campaign co-chair Rep. Ro Khanna — packed into a hotel next to the airport for what felt like it could be an historic night. The New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd milled around, along with reporters from around the world…

In the wee hours of the morning Tuesday, Jeff Weaver, Sanders’ senior adviser, lashed out at Iowa Democratic Party leader Troy Price in a call with the 2020 presidential campaigns, saying “the whole process has been a fraud for 100 years.” He told POLITICO that “there is no doubt” that Nevada, which had been planning until Tuesday to use the same app that failed in Iowa, should “disregard” it. On the flight to New Hampshire, Sanders said he was “disappointed” that Iowa Democrats couldn’t release timely results…

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Another Iowa Caucus Open Thread: Return of the Dreaded NYT Needle(s)

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Note timestamp:

BECAUSE I CAN. Look, this particular brand of social-media response to the ongoing political fustercluck is absolutely catnip for my particular brand of ADD/OCD Short Attention Span Theatre.

Also, as far as I’m concerned, any oxygen stolen from tonight’s TV turn by the Squatter-in-Chief is unequivocally good. I read that AoC has officially bowed out from attending, which is also good, because (NYC represent!) she probably wouldn’t have been able to resist popping off at the bs firehose on camera. It’s better to have the media thumbsuckers focused on the lies from the podium rather than giving them an excuse to clutch their pearls over a You Lie! moment. Even (especially) if President Obama was *not* lying, back in the day, while the current Disgrace will be.

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Pandemic Paranoia Open Thread: Presenting the ‘New’ Wuhan Coronovirus

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To quote every single article I’ve seen so far: And just in time for the mass migration during Lunar New Year, too!

(Mandatory disclosure: Yes, I am preternaturally interested in pandemics, so YMMV.)

CNN, this evening — “First US case of Wuhan coronavirus confirmed by CDC”:

The United States has its first confirmed case of a new virus that appeared in Wuhan, China, last month, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Tuesday. The coronavirus has already sickened hundreds and killed six people in Asia…

The patient, who is not being named, is in isolation at Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, Washington. He is in his 30s and lives in Snohomish County, Washington, just north of Seattle. He had recently returned from Wuhan.

He arrived at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport on January 15, before any health screenings for the Wuhan coronavirus began at US airports. He sought medical care on January 19. The CDC and Washington state are now tracing the people he was in contact with to see if he might have spread the disease to someone else…

The patient became ill four days after arriving in the United States and sought care. Based on the patient’s symptoms and travel history, doctors suspected the novel Wuhan coronavirus and sent specimens to the CDC in Atlanta, where tests Monday confirmed the virus.

The patient is faring well but is still being kept in isolation out of an abundance of caution, health officials said.

Soon, passengers from Wuhan to the United States, whether on direct or indirect flights, will only be allowed to land at one of the five US airports doing health screenings. Screenings include a temperature check and observation for symptoms such as a cough and trouble breathing.

Last weekend, the CDC started health screenings for Wuhan passengers arriving at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, Los Angeles International Airport and San Francisco International Airport. Starting this week, Wuhan passengers will also be screened at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport and Chicago O’Hare International Airport…

This is actually good news — authorities *have* learned from previous scares, and sensible precautions are being slotted into place with due speed.

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Late Night Scary Nature Open Thread: Coyote Lucky

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I say Max, having proved his valor, should now retire with full honors. The Washington Post has a good write-up:

… What the coyotes didn’t know was that Max is a seasoned street life veteran. He survived alone in Long Beach before being adopted by his current family nearly four years ago, Maya Gurrin, his human, told The Washington Post. Max has probably seen and been involved in scuffles for which he has no words — or meows…

Gurrin and her husband, Eliot, saw some tails wagging through a glass door, and decided to go outside to investigate the noise.

“We thought it was a raccoon,” she said. “We went out and saw that he was surrounded by them. The coyotes hurried off when we went out there.”

Max walked back inside unfazed and unsullied.

“He wanted to go right back outside like a psycho,” Gurrin said…

Since his brush with death, Max has been inside, but the Gurrins know that they can’t keep him indoors forever, based on experience…

[T]he Gurrins are working out a compromise that would ensure Max’s safety and give him the freedom to smell the outdoors in the form of a catio or cat patio, which is an enclosed outdoor structure for cats still tapped into their wild side.

Max is very intelligent, according to Eliot, who said Max can open doors with horizontal handles.

“He’s a weird mix of friendly, of independent and loud and sensitive,” he said. “He’s a very hard cat to define. He’s super smart.” …

We’ve always done our best to ensure that our cats are indoor-only companions, but it can be difficult to outsmart a street-hardened rescue. We inherited six-pound Maine-Coon-type Kishkan when her previous owners moved to a country with a six-month pet quarantine. She’d come to live with them (despite one partner’s mild ailurophobia) by the simple expedient of waiting at their door & strolling in whenever it was opened. When they finally broke down & accepted their fate, their vet discovered she’d already been spayed, but nobody responded to their flyers. She was at least six years old when she came to live with us, and she lived another eight years before succumbing to kidney disease… despite regularly taking advantage of the dogs’ potty breaks to dart out for a walkabout. And she regularly brought back mice, voles, and baby bunnies to leave on the back stoop, just to show that we were not the boss of her.

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Friday Night Horrorshow Open Thread: Pray for the LSU Team Members

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Even the three big dumb white dudes bro’ing each other are gonna end up with nightmares, remembering this.


I am reminded of a friend who referred to ‘That childhood moment in the car when you realize Daddy cares more about his booze than he does about your safety… ‘

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C.R.E.A.M. Open Thread: sssTHAYER-Mennem!!!

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Can’t speak to the Iowa market, but here in the Greater Boston media market, the only political ads I’m seeing are for Bloomberg and Steyer. So much sssThayer, frequently more than one ad in the same commercial break, each more annoying than the last. About from the bragging self-rightousness, and the term limits crankery, Steyer has a really annoying voice. I’m starting to hate emus, just from not being able to avoid Steyer’s emu-oid mug.

(NB: The only thing I actually watch over the air these days is the news, which may or may not affect ad placement.)

I have the feeling that primary voters will award extra attention to any candidate who shivs Steyer at the upcoming debate. Maybe that’s just me, but…

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Election Year Open Thread: Joe Biden, Quixotic Knight of the Cheerful Countenance

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Political twitter was briefly enthralled by this New York Review of Books essay from Irish columnist Fintan O’Toole. Then the rush of events carried it away, but it’s still (from my perspective as someone who grew up in the same Irish-Catholic milieu, not too many years after Joe) worth reading:

Mourning becomes Joe Biden. “I have found over the years,” he writes in his recent best-selling memoir Promise Me, Dad, “that, although it brought back my own vivid memories of sad times, my presence almost always brought some solace to people who have suffered sudden and unexpected loss…. When I talk to people in mourning, they know I speak from experience.” …

Joe Biden is the most gothic figure in American politics. He is haunted by death, not just by the private tragedies his family has endured, but by a larger and more public sense of loss. Richard Ben Cramer, in his classic account of the 1988 presidential primaries, What It Takes, wrote how even then it was a journalistic cliché to define Biden by the terrible car crash that killed his first wife, Neilia, and their daughter, Naomi (and injured Beau and his brother, Hunter), in 1972, shortly after Biden was elected to the Senate at the age of twenty-nine. Cramer refers to the “type that fell out of the machine every time they used Biden’s name: ‘…whose life was touched by personal tragedy…’ Joe Biden (D-Del., T.B.P.T.).”

Even now, as Hunter Biden’s name is threaded through Donald Trump’s impeachment hearings, there is a ghost behind it: Hunter is Neilia’s maiden name. Trump’s preoccupation with Hunter’s presence on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma hinges on a reality that is certainly worthy of scrutiny: Joe Biden was, as he recounts in some detail in Promise Me, Dad, deeply involved in the Obama administration’s relations with Ukraine, and it seems implausible that Hunter’s position with Burisma was merely coincidental. But the frenzied inflation of this story, like so much that involves the Bidens, is freighted with both dread and grief. The dread is Trump’s (arguably misplaced) fear of Biden as a competitor for the presidency in 2020, an anxiety that became a manic fixation that has led to his impeachment. The grief drives Biden’s fierce need to protect his living son, not just for himself, but for Hunter’s dead mother and brother…

But the indivisible counterpart of this heritage that O’Toole *doesn’t* stress, oddly enough, is the defiant joy we are raised to embrace despite the terrible inevitability of failure and loss. Biden, everyone agrees, is popular because he’s always hung in there, continuing to grin and politic and speechify no matter how often or how deeply he and his party are wounded.

In this election season, the idea that We will go on, because there is no choice, and because we know from experience that we have survived terrible events before… is no small promise.

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