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Marge, god is saying you’re stupid.

Our messy unity will be our strength.

America is going up in flames. The NYTimes fawns over MAGA celebrities. No longer a real newspaper.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

“In this country American means white. everybody else has to hyphenate.”

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

Not all heroes wear capes.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires.

“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.”

Well, whatever it is, it’s better than being a Republican.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

… gradually, and then suddenly.

The republican caucus is covering themselves with something, and it is not glory.

Michigan is a great lesson for Dems everywhere: when you have power…use it!

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

Rupert, come get your orange boy, you petrified old dinosaur turd.

There is no compromise when it comes to body autonomy. You either have it or you do not.

Human rights are not a matter of opinion!

You’re just a puppy masquerading as an old coot.

Cancel the cowardly Times and Post and set up an equivalent monthly donation to ProPublica.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

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Assholes

You are here: Home / Archives for Assholes

Screw Comity (Open Thread)

by Betty Cracker|  June 13, 202511:29 am| 98 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads, Politics, Republican Stupidity, Assholes

Passing Dems call Mike Johnson out as a liar as he’s lying on camera.

ICYMI — “LIE!!”

Dems heckled Speaker Johnson as he tried to put all the blame on Senator Padilla

[image or embed]

— The Tennessee Holler (@thetnholler.bsky.social) June 13, 2025 at 10:00 AM

You love to see it. The ultra-pious Mr. Johnson is a liar, so call him one. On camera even!

Some folks on Bluesky were bitching about the framing Democrats were using after the assault on Senator Padilla, i.e., “if they can treat a U.S. senator like that, imagine what they would do to you.” The complaint was that Noem’s thugs already treat ordinary people like shit.

Okay, fair point. But the framing gets to a larger and accurate point, which is that powerful people get deferential treatment the rest of us don’t, and if Noem’s thugs feel empowered to manhandle a senator, their depredations on ordinary people will escalate too.

Empathy deficits are real, especially among right-wingers, but I think it’s universally true that when an action affects your family member or friend or colleague, it’s less abstract and more personal. If the thug assault on Senator Padilla makes Trump’s fascist actions more vivid for congressional reps and any remaining delusions about bipartisan comity are torn away by the incident, that’s a good thing.

Open thread.

Screw Comity (Open Thread)Post + Comments (98)

Standing Up For Science

by Betty Cracker|  June 9, 20254:00 pm| 131 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads, Republican Stupidity, Science & Technology, Assholes, Clown Shoes, Decline and Fall, General Stupidity

I’m not a scientist, but I’m glad lots of smarter people are because, otherwise, I’d be dead. Millions of us would be. I think most normal people know this and regard activities like finding new cures for diseases and discovering better ways to stay healthy as uncontroversial.

In addition to alleviating suffering, it turns out that funding health-related scientific research also generates prosperity more broadly! Check this out from the Harvard Gazette:

A new report from the nonprofit United for Medical Research (UMR) shows that every dollar of research funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) delivers $2.56 in economic activity, a multiplier effect that extends the agency’s impact as the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world.

But since sociopathic grifters and conspiracy kooks are currently running the country, science is under attack. Trump and lackeys like National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Jay Bhattacharya and the ambulatory catcher’s mitt/disgrace to his family’s legacy whom Trump put in charge of Health & Human Services (HHS) are waging war on science.

Well, science is fighting back. Check out the Bethesda Declaration, which dropped this morning at the Stand Up for Science site.

Scores of NIH scientists go public to declare their dissent from Trump’s deep program cuts and upheaval at their agency.

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— The Associated Press (@apnews.com) June 9, 2025 at 9:30 AM

Here’s an excerpt of the press release accompanying the declaration:

Washington, D.C. — Federal employees at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have stood up for the health and safety of the American people and faithful stewardship of public resources, demanding HHS and NIH leadership uphold the mission of the NIH “to enhance health, lengthen life, and reduce illness and disability.” The Bethesda Declaration, addressed to Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Secretary Kennedy, and members of Congress who oversee the NIH, raises concern over pressure to implement measures that harm the public. The document outlines how recently enacted policies interrupt ongoing clinical trials and patient care, public health monitoring, critical research, and early career scientist training programs.

NIH Staff say that because of termination of essential employees, politicization of research, and funding cuts they are unable to uphold their commitment to the NIH mission, the American people, and their ethical charge as scientists. Despite fears of retaliation, the Bethesda Declaration has been signed by over 300 NIH Staff including 93 staff who signed their full name.

“Standing up in this way is a risk, but I am much more worried about the risks of not speaking up. If we don’t speak up, we allow continued harm to research participants and public health in America and across the globe. If we don’t speak up, we allow our government to curtail free speech, a fundamental American value.” says Jenna Norton, PhD, MPH, NIDDK Program officer and one of the lead organizers of the Declaration.

Experts say the abrupt changes to the NIH threaten the ecosystem of the biomedical advancement. “The partnership between NIH and the academic community has made huge contributions to the almost every aspect of health of people across the US. Since January, the NIH staff have been forced to focus on issues other than the noble NIH mission. A large group of public servants have found the courage to speak out and say ‘Enough. Let us get back to our important work.’”, says Jeremy M. Berg, PhD, Former Director, National Institute of General Medical Sciences.

“It has been soul destroying to witness the politicization of research resulting in mass termination of grants that are in progress and doing well. It violated my Hippocratic oath,” says one NIH employee who wishes to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation.

Stand Up for Science is hosting the Bethesda Declaration and a letter of support. They are asking the public to join with them in supporting these federal employees by signing their open letter. Current supporters include Nobel Laureates, prominent scientists, politicians, activists, patients, and more.

According to Colette Delawalla, MA, MS, founder and executive director of Stand Up for Science, “These NIH employees have devoted their lives to civil service—they care deeply about the public. This is why they are courageously holding NIH and HHS leadership accountable. We are honored they have trusted us with this act of resistance and welcome any such future collaborations with other groups.”

At this historic moment, Stand Up for Science calls on the members of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee who will be soliciting testimony from NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya Tuesday at 10am to seek his commitment of support for NIH staff members signing the Bethesda Declaration.

Bhattacharya will meet with the Senate Appropriations subcommittee tomorrow. If any of your senators are on that committee, this would be a good day to call them and urge them to explain how duly appropriated funding is supposed to work to the NIH director.

No matter who your senators are, now would also be a good time to express your opposition to the budget proposal Trump and Republicans are trying to ram through Congress. It includes a 40% cut to NIH’s discretionary budget and other measures that would further devastate biomedical research in the U.S. and undermine scientific leadership worldwide.

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Standing Up For SciencePost + Comments (131)

USA! USA! USA!

by Betty Cracker|  June 6, 202511:42 am| 79 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads, Assholes, Clown Shoes, General Stupidity

No need to connect the dots here — it’s pretty obvious.

Interview with Harvard's 2025 valedictorian, a Chinese national, while two American men fight over nothing in the background

[image or embed]

— Bernie Goldsmith 𓅃 (@falconryfinance.bsky.social) June 5, 2025 at 12:18 PM

Good lord, what a stupid time to be alive.

Open thread!

USA! USA! USA!Post + Comments (79)

Space Karen Dissatisfied With Purchase

by Betty Cracker|  June 5, 20252:48 pm| 76 Comments

This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Republican Stupidity, Assholes

WIRED has the latest in the ongoing Trump vs. Musk feud:

Over the last few days, Musk has posted increasingly personal criticisms at Trump and the Republican budget reconciliation package known as the Big Beautiful Bill on X. This came to a head on Thursday, when Trump addressed the relationship during a press conference with German chancellor Friedrich Merz.

“Elon and I had a great relationship. I don’t know if we will anymore,” said Trump, who compared Musk to past aides who have, he said, developed “Trump derangement syndrome” after leaving his administration…

Today’s remarks, though, reveal how fractured that relationship has become. “Without me, Trump would have lost the election,” Musk posted on X shortly after Trump’s comments. “Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate.”

Thanks, John Roberts, you fucking wanker!

Behind the scenes, Trumpworld Republicans tell WIRED, this tension is about more than just a bromance falling apart. If Musk continues to escalate, he may drag down legislation that Trump sees as a key part of his political legacy.

“If [Musk] actually successfully gets any votes switched to tank this bill and kills it,” a senior Trumpworld strategist tells WIRED, “then I think at that point he’s fucking dead to Donald Trump.”

Could these swollen ass-pustules still kiss and make up? It wouldn’t be the first time, but Trump is so vulnerable to narcissistic injury that he can’t admit he lost the 2020 election — even to himself. Now Musk is openly telling everyone HE bought the presidency and Congress for Trump.

Meanwhile, Musk also appears to be spiraling. And he’s saying this shit, presumably with full awareness that Trump is illegally exerting control over the government contracts that are the basis of Musk’s fortune. (Nationalize SpaceX on nat-sec grounds, anyone?)

The other villains in this drama, elected Republicans, probably don’t know whether to scratch their watches or wind their asses. They’ve hitched their political futures to Trump, an elderly lame-duck president, and they’re scared shitless of Musk’s money.

Friends, we might just need ALL the popcorn.

Open thread.

Space Karen Dissatisfied With PurchasePost + Comments (76)

Vampires Walk Among Us Open Thread

by Rose Judson|  May 10, 20252:51 pm| 58 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads, Assholes, The Horrors

Ours is an age when very few people in public life seem to have any original ideas. Old grudges, old theories of how society or gender or diseases work. Old grifts are getting re-aired again, too. Exhibit one:

Vampires Walk Among Us Open Thread

Yes. it’s her again. The Theranos lady with the fake deep voice. She’s currently serving an 11-year prison sentence for fraud, having tried to sell the world on a just-one-drop blood-testing machine that turned out to be vaporware. However, her partner, hotel heir Billy Evans, is keeping the dubious-blood-testing-device flame lit. Per the NY Times (archive.is link here with no paywall):

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Vampires Walk Among Us Open ThreadPost + Comments (58)

I’d Prefer the Smoky Back Rooms, Honestly

by Rose Judson|  April 28, 20258:52 am| 170 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads, Politics, Technology, Assholes, The Horrors

Turns out there are more toxic group chats out there than Pete Hesgeth’s. This morning (or last night, depending on your time zone), Semafor reports on the years-long elite group chats that “changed America”. We are all well aware already that our elites long ago left the smoky back rooms where they used to define our fates for the friendlier environs of Davos and the Aspen Ideas Festival and what have you. Since 2020, those discussions are increasingly happening on Signal and WhatsApp. The Semafor article focuses on those which center around the incredible inedible egg, Marc Andreessen. A genuine innovator of tech 30 years ago – he was the inventor of the modern web browser and a co-founder of Netscape – Andreessen now seems to be in the grip of poster’s madness:

Occasionally over the past few years, I’ve had a friend or source tell me in wonder that Andreessen was blowing up their phone. His hunger for information was “astonishing,” one participant in the group chat said. “My impression is Marc spends half his life on 100 of these at the same time,” another correspondent marveled. “This man should be a lot busier than I am and I can barely keep up with his group chat. How does he have the time?”

Andreessen has told friends he finds the medium efficient — a way to keep in touch with three times the people in a third of the time. The fact that he and other billionaires spend so much time writing to group chats prompted participants to joke that the very pinnacle of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is posting.

Along with the tech-centric WhatsApp groups Krishnan had organized out of a16z, Andreessen joined a slew of others, including ones that Torenberg set up for tech founders and for more political discussions. The tech chats tended to be on WhatsApp and the political ones on Signal, which is more fully encrypted, and they had different settings.

It would be one thing if these dudes were just shitposting to each other, but they’re not. They are doing the ideological equivalent of huffing each other’s farts for “up to 20 hours a day (not kidding!)”, as Mark Halperin claims later in the article, to the point where multiple members, but particularly Andreessen, according to Richard Hanania, “radicalised over time”, becoming more and more authoritarian and reactionary.

Yes, that Richard Hanania. The guy who wrote The Origins of Woke, a book described as a “Trojan horse for white supremacy“. He’s alarmed by the radicalisation on display. Part of the article focuses on a large group called “Chatham House” – named for, but not associated with, the influential London-based international relations think tank. No, this group chat is a funhouse-mirror version of that, a nightmare blunt rotation that’s constantly blowing up your phone:

Two of [Chatham House’s] conservative participants said they see the group as a way to shift centrist Trump-curious figures to the Republican side, but its founder said he’d begun it to have “a left-right exchange where we could have real conversations because of filter bubble group chats.”

Chatham House includes high-profile figures like the economist Larry Summers and the historian Niall Ferguson, and more partisan figures like Shapiro and the Democratic analyst David Shor. Andreessen lurks. But several participants described it to me as something like a gladiatorial arena with Cuban most often in the center, sparring with conservatives….

The Group Chat Era depended on part of the American elite feeling shut out from public spaces, and on the formation of a new conservative consensus. Both of those are now fading (though Torenberg has invested in a company called ChatBCC that wants to commercialize the heady experience of sitting in on texts among the power elite).

Since Elon Musk turned X to the right and an alternative media ecosystem emerged on Substack, “a tremendous amount of the verboten conversations can now shift back into public view,” Andreessen told Fridman. “It’s much healthier to live in a society in which people are literally not scared of what they’re saying.”

Tell that to the college students who’ve been snatched by ICE for writing op-eds, you clod. Still, there does seem to be a plus side: the economic turmoil set in motion by Liberation Day is causing fissures in these latter-day salons of the great and good goofy:

I'd Prefer the Smoky Back Rooms, Honestly

Ben Smith (formerly of Buzzfeed and the NYT), whose article this is, notes that these chats (and their e-mail list predecessors, like JournoList) “encourage conformity, and then transform public fora — blogs then, social media now — into pitched battles between well-prepared debate clubs, rather than open conversations.”

Well, no kidding. Elites have always done and are always going to do shit like this – gather in secret, commiserate with one another about how hard it is to run the world, groom biddable journalists into surfacing their ideas, compare yachts – but at least in latter days they couldn’t instantaneously broadcast their ideas to their fellow insiders for 20 hours at a time. Send them back to smoke-filled rooms in the exclusive clubs, I say – at least then there’ll be a non-zero chance that they actually leave to do their jobs once in a while. And that their lungs might rot as fast as their brains are doing.

Anyway, good morning, I guess. Open thread.

I’d Prefer the Smoky Back Rooms, HonestlyPost + Comments (170)

JD Vance Is the Worst Kind of American Tourist

by Rose Judson|  April 26, 20251:42 pm| 286 Comments

This post is in: Foreign Affairs, Open Threads, Assholes

Any decent, well-mannered American who travels abroad probably crosses paths with a Stars-and-Stripes Stereotype now and then: a fellow American on holiday making an ass of themselves. I once saw an American guy shaking with rage at an airport counter in Charles De Gaulle. All our flights had been upended by a transport strike, and he was DEMANDING that he be seated in business class, as per his original ticket. “I am an AMERICAN and we don’t care about your little SOCIALIST COUNTRY,” he said. “I have RIGHTS as a CUSTOMER.”

There are the idiots, like the woman I heard insisting that the place we were both visiting—Conwy Castle, in Wales—was a copy of the original, because there was no way the original would still be standing, as “no buildings last more than 400 years.” There are also the people visiting small towns where English isn’t spoken trying to communicate with locals by speaking English LOUDLY AND SLOWLY. (And in the interest of fairness, I’ll note that I’ve also seen a lot of similar behaviour from Brits in Europe. Must be something about faded empires run by white guys.)

These people are all pikers compared to our heinous douchecanoe of a vice president. Per the Times of London, “JD Vance and His Forty 4x4s Visit the Vatican During Trip to Rome” (that’s an archive.is link; there’s no paywall):

A trip to the Sistine Chapel is near the top of the bucket list for most Americans making their first trip to Rome. Few visitors are able to do so in such grand style as JD Vance, who turned up at the Vatican on Saturday aboard a traffic-clogging motorcade of 40 black 4x4s. . . .

He was accompanied to the Vatican by his wife, Usha, and their three young children. The second family was then given a private tour of the Sistine Chapel.

Later Usha enjoyed an evening visit to the Colosseum — which her husband had also been scheduled to attend before a last-minute change of plan — where she was given a personal tour of the arena, famous for its gladiatorial combats and naval battles, by Alfonsina Russo, the director.

Lesser mortals unlucky enough to have booked their own visit had to make do with a refund — but not all of them had got the message. There were chaotic scenes as some would-be visitors tried to open the gates surrounding the building, while others climbed over the fences, ticket in hand, trying to force their way in. Some chanted “shame” or anti-American slogans when they learnt the reason for the closure, Italian media reported.
Haven’t any of those angry tourists heard that Vance doesn’t care about due process? It is grimly amusing that one of the people cheated of their visit by Vance was a MAGAt. His take is quite a thing to behold:
Among the disappointed was Stephen Fishler, 58, a businessman from New York who arrived with his family in good time for his 6pm slot, but was turned away without explanation. “What does he think he is, special?” complained Fishler, himself a Trump voter. “JD should have waited until the Americans who had tickets had their visit and then gone in.” His wife, Anila, tried to calm him down and blamed the Italians.

Screw tourists from any other country, obviously: the Americans deserved special treatment.

I despair. Open thread, though I hope those of you who have visited or lived abroad will vent about the idiot American tourists you’ve encountered.

JD Vance Is the Worst Kind of American TouristPost + Comments (286)

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