Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

Republicans can’t even be trusted with their own money.

Meanwhile over at truth Social, the former president is busy confessing to crimes.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

People really shouldn’t expect the government to help after they watched the GOP drown it in a bathtub.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

One lie, alone, tears the fabric of reality.

Fundamental belief of white supremacy: white people are presumed innocent, minorities are presumed guilty.

I have other things to bitch about but those will have to wait.

Washington Post’s Catch and Kill, not noticeably better than the Enquirer’s.

Republicans don’t lie to be believed, they lie to be repeated.

Second rate reporter says what?

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

Republican speaker of the house Mike Johnson is the bland and smiling face of evil.

Not all heroes wear capes.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

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

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

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

It’s not hopeless, and we’re not helpless.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

The arc of the moral universe doesn’t bend itself. it’s up to us.

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

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Schadenfreude Open Thread: JO’Keefe & Project Veritas Have Parted Ways

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They can’t fire him, he QUITS!!! The lamentations and threats from all the usual right-wingers on twitter are completely unhinged at this point, although a consensus seems to be emerging that it’s all due to Pfizer, who didn’t like O’Keefe promoting a particularly unhinged anti-vaxx video recently. Officially, “James O’Keefe Resigns From Project Veritas After Employee Complaints”:

… In a video to Project Veritas employees, O’Keefe promised to start a new, rival organization doing similar undercover activist work…

O’Keefe, who became a star on the right by targeting journalists and liberal groups in hidden-camera stings, was placed on paid leave earlier this month amid a dispute with the nonprofit’s board. The board reversed O’Keefe’s firing of two top executives, and received a lengthy memo from unhappy employees detailing O’Keefe’s allegedly “outright cruel” conduct.

A video of O’Keefe announcing his exit was posted to the video website Vimeo. In it, an emotional O’Keefe, standing in front of his desk and a Project Veritas backdrop, claimed he had been pushed out by the board after telling its members to either quit themselves or face his resignation—a gambit that apparently failed. In the 45-minute video, O’Keefe got choked up, quoted Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, and appeared to wipe away tears as he announced his plans for a new Project Veritas-type group…

In a statement posted Monday night responding to O’Keefe’s video, Project Veritas’s board claimed it was legally required to call a board meeting after it discovered O’Keefe committing what it described as “financial malfeasance.”

According to the statement, the board’s list of alleged misspending incurred by the nonprofit at O’Keefe’s direction included a $14,000 charter flight to meet someone who could repair his boat. Other alleged expenses included $150,000 over 18 months on private “black cars”and thousands of dollars on “DJ and other equipment.”

The board also accused O’Keefe of wasting $60,000 on “dance events.” O’Keefe, a former high school musical theater performer, has been accused in the past of spending the nonprofit’s money on his own musical interests. Last year, Project Veritas acknowledged improperly spending more than $20,000 to help O’Keefe star in a performance of the musical Oklahoma!

“Even with all of this public fallout, the Board still wants to speak with James,” the statement reads, adding it wanted to “work things out.” “We did not fire him, nor do we want him to resign.”

[We’re just worried about Mr. O’Keefe’s… welfare. He’s been under so much stress…]

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1moron

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The conservative site “63red” created a safe space app that allows MAGAts to find places where they can wear their red caps without being called names. You know, what they make fun of liberals for doing. Anyway, predictably, the guy who created it (Wallace) fucked it up from bean to cup:

  • Wallace had left his username, email, and a plaintext password in the code—twice.
  • There is no authentication for any of the application programming interface [API] calls, so someone could spoof any user—essentially giving them administrative access to the API.
  • […]By using the “Get user by ID” API call, someone could retrieve the user name, email, ban status, and other details on each user account.
  • Passwords were not in this data, but the entire user database could be retrieved by iterating through all the possible first letters or digits of an account ID.
  • Any user could be blocked using an HTTP Post to the “block” API.

If none of that makes sense, the simple summary is that the app is a security catastrophe full of baby-level errors. Of course, Wallace’s response to the security researcher who found all of these issues was to threaten him, and to lie and say they were fixed when they weren’t.

I’m wondering what “63red” stands for. Is it the Pantone color code for the shade used on the cover of the original edition of Mein Kampf? Maybe someone who speaks more fluent wingnut can help out in the comments.

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Accidentally Like a Martyr

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Some nutcase named Laura Loomer has donned a yellow star and handcuffed herself to Twitter’s New York headquarters because she was banned for accusing Congresswoman-Elect Ilhan Omar of supporting sharia law. Omar was recently elected to Keith Ellison’s old seat in Minnesota.

If you watch the Periscope livestream you’ll see that the police would probably be well within their rights to perform what we New Yorkers call a Mental Hygiene Arrest. But I’m not a professional and it is happy hour, so perhaps we can just enjoy the fact that she only chained herself to one of the two doors and Twitter employees are heading home while she stands there blabbing about Ilhan Omar being a jihadi.

Open thread.

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Late Night Ugliness Open Thread: Wingnut Wurlitzers & the Pushers’ Dilemma

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As with all junkies, a taste of the good stuff, the pure uncut hatred, leaves the consumers of right-wing media hatefests hungry for more and uglier “bumps” from their local pusher. But in order to stay nominally “legit”, the distributors at the top of the pyramid need to avoid public catastrophes that might expose their various enterprises to undue public scrutiny. Sinclair Media, having recently overstepped badly with a nationwide attempt to shut down honest journalism, did *not* need one of its street-level dealers to lose his shit in public, but…

A conservative commentator at a Sinclair Broadcast Group-owned television station in St. Louis has resigned after a statement he made threatening to sexually assault David Hogg drew harsh criticism and sparked the beginnings of an advertiser boycott.

Jamie Allman, who hosts a nightly news show on KDNL, a Sinclair-owned ABC affiliate in St. Louis, as well as a morning FM radio show, wrote on Twitter that he was “hanging out getting ready,” to sexually assault David Hogg with “a hot poker.”

“Busy working. Preparing,” read the March 26 tweet, which is too vulgar to print here in full, but was published as a screen shot by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, as the remark began to draw more scrutiny in recent days.

Advertisers, including Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse, St. Louis health center Palm Health, and local real estate office The Gellman Team, announced they would stop advertising on Allman’s shows, spurred on by activists who took to social media to highlight the commentator’s remarks, as well as Democratic state lawmaker Stacey Newman and others…

It represented the potential of yet another public relations crisis for Sinclair, which has come under harsh criticism in recent weeks after a video of dozens of its anchors reading the same mandated script about “fake stories” went viral.

Sinclair, the Maryland-based media company, is the largest owner of local television stations in the country, with 173 stations in 81 broadcast markets. It has come under intense scrutiny, as it awaits federal approval for a takeover of another media company, for injecting what many feel is a conservative bias into local news coverage. Its proposed buyout of Tribune Media, for which it needs approval from the FCC and the Department of Justice, would bring its coverage into the homes of as many as 70 percent of American households…

Jamie Allman, gettin’ high on his own(ers’) supply. Even Breitbart’s gonna have trouble finding a warm place for this dude to seek refuge.

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Saturday Evening Cheap Shots Open Thread: Further Adventures of Milo Y, Boy Provocateur

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Well, that was quick — and on a weekend, too. Turns out that Tucker “Walking Proof That the Best Schools Can’t Fix Stupid” Carlson may not have “standards”, as the term is usually recognized, but he’s getting quicker at spotting a publicity disaster in the making:

The Daily Caller has fired its opinion editor amid controversy over the site’s publishing of a column by right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, the editor-in-chief confirmed to a CNN reporter Saturday.

Geoffrey Ingersoll, the right-leaning news site’s top editor, confirmed Saturday to CNN’s Oliver Darcy that opinion editor Rob Mariani was fired. The confirmation came shortly after Yiannopoulos posted about his column ending on Facebook…

.

And here I’d been saving this little amuse-bouche for a late-night larf. Points to ThinkProgress and Mr. Legum…

…In the letter announcing his resignation, Mercer specifically calls out Milo Yiannopoulos, a popular, controversial former Breitbart senior editor, saying he has only caused “pain and divisiveness.”…

Yiannopoulos served as a key intermediary between white nationalists and Breitbart. He published a lengthy feature piece that served as a guide to so-called “alt-right” that he allowed prominent white nationalists to edit before publication, and was caught on video in the company of known white nationalist Richard Spencer as he signals a “Sieg Heil” salute in front of a crowd — both of which were revealed in a recent Buzzfeed expose.

These revelations and Mercer’s disavowal hasn’t hurt Yiannopoulos’ reputation in some circles, however, as he was just given a new weekly column at The Daily Caller, a conservative publication ran by Fox News host Tucker Carlson…

Yiannopoulos resigned from Breitbart in February following outrage over past comments he made regarding pedophilia.

And what was Yiannpoulos’ first column for The Daily Caller? An article titled “A Round Of Applause For Kevin Spacey,” a reference to the recent allegations made by men who claimed Spacey preyed on them sexually when they were minors. In it, Yiannopoulos claims that Spacey’s response to come out as gay rather than take responsibility for his actions is the reason why “identity politics” is bad for the country, which Yiannopoulos frequently blames on the left…

And it gets “better”…

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Desperate Times, Desperate Measures

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I saved a screenshot of this morning’s CNN home page the way my mother once squirreled away newspapers covering events like the Kennedy assassination, the moon landing and the Watergate denouement:

We’re not there yet. But to me, anyway, it feels like something historical is afoot, that I must not only bear witness but maybe save clippings for posterity. (At least my news pack-rattery won’t demand drawer space from my descendants!)

Twitler was on a tear this morning. Maybe he has that “history in the making” feeling too. It might be wishful thinking, but I could swear I detected a faint whiff of flop sweat and desperation emanating from the pixels below:

Tell me that most recent tweet doesn’t sound like something Greenwald would say. And the fuck of it is, I would normally agree: We don’t want the intel community mucking around in our politics.

It was an outrage when Comey stuck his big, fat, morally upright thumb on the scales in the waning days of the election. So why cheer the intel community on now, hoping they dump enough dirt to bury the Trump admin?

Because this isn’t a normal administration. Trump referred to me and the 65 million other Americans who didn’t vote for him as “enemies” in his New Year “message.” He’s done nothing to reach out to anyone other than his rancid fan base. He’s stocked the government with racists, misogynists and bigoted kooks, and his top advisers are openly fomenting a global white nationalist effort to undermine Western democracies.

The Republicans who control Congress are willing to go along with Trump’s anti-American agenda if doing so will allow them to cut taxes for billionaires and take away people’s access to affordable healthcare. They’ve said so outright, so they can’t be trusted to do their job and keep our government from being controlled by a hostile foreign power.

The judicial branch is the last leg on the wobbly-ass stool of American democracy, but Trump is doing his best to saw that off too and has real power to shape it for the future. Anyone think he’ll ensure its independence?

So, spooks it is. No, I don’t trust them completely. No, I don’t think it’s a good idea for the intel community to manipulate domestic politics (and I wish we’d mind our own business abroad too).

But desperate times call for desperate measures. If it takes leaks to force the Republicans in Congress to work with the Democrats and do their goddamned jobs, then bring on the drip, drip, drip.

PS: The media is unanimously reporting that Dense Pence was in the dark about Flynn’s actions. Are y’all aware of any independent corroboration of that? I haven’t seen it.

It looks like they’re taking the administration’s word on that, and this administration lies constantly and shamelessly. On camera. All the fucking time. We shouldn’t take their word for anything.

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WASF, Part ∞

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If we can’t see it, it won’t happen, climate change edition:

Donald Trump is poised to eliminate all climate change research conducted by Nasa as part of a crackdown on “politicized science”, his senior adviser on issues relating to the space agency has said.

Nasa’s Earth science division is set to be stripped of funding in favor of exploration of deep space.

After all, we can’t have any of that nasty left wing bias that reality imposes:

There is overwhelming and long-established evidence that burning fossil fuels and deforestation causes the release of heat-trapping gases, therefore causing the warming experienced in recent decades.

[Trump campaign advisor Bob] Walker, however, claimed that doubt over the role of human activity in climate change “is a view shared by half the climatologists in the world. We need good science to tell us what the reality is and science could do that if politicians didn’t interfere with it.”

Walker is, as one expects from Trumpistas, simply lying. Half of the world’s climatologists do not doubt the fact of human-driven climate change, unless you include those who got their advanced degrees at the University of Exxon’s Koch School of Science.  Ostriches and sand ain’t in it.

carl_eytel_and_george_wharton_james_in_a_horse-drawn_wagon_on_the_butterfield_stage_road_in_the_colorado_desert_ca-1903_chs-2280

This is a hugely consequential move.  There are two technologies that are essential to modern climate science: large scale numerical modelling made possible by the insane advances in computing power and associated computer science over the last several decades…and remote sensing, the ability to monitor earth systems on a planetary scale.  That’s what NASA — and for the forseeable future, no one else, brings with its earth science programs.  Kill that and we not only lose data going forward, we degrade a capability in an intellectual infrastructure that will take a long time indeed to restore:

Kevin Trenberth, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said as Nasa provides the scientific community with new instruments and techniques, the elimination of Earth sciences would be “a major setback if not devastating”.

“It could put us back into the ‘dark ages’ of almost the pre-satellite era,” he said. “It would be extremely short sighted.

“We live on planet Earth and there is much to discover, and it is essential to track and monitor many things from space. Information on planet Earth and its atmosphere and oceans is essential for our way of life. Space research is a luxury, Earth observations are essential.”

This is a call your representative kind of issue.  It’s going to be difficult, certainly, if Trump really does go down this path, but NASA is enough of a pork barrel, and some GOP senators, at least, are not wholly clueless on this issue, so it might be possible to avoid the worst outcome.  It’s necessary to try.  If and as I hear of organized campaigns on this, I’ll bring the news (and feel free to email me with any info you might gather.)

Feh.

PS: that laser like media focus during the campaign on issues like climate change sure was impressive, wasn’t it?

C. C. Pierce, Carl Eytel and George Wharton James in a horse-drawn wagon on the Butterfield Stage Road in the Colorado Desert, c.1903. (Eytel was a painter associated with the “smoketree school” of artists working on desert subjects; James was a journalist and photographer.)

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