.@DineshDSouza Your life is like if someone said, "What Wouldn't Jesus Do?"
— Kate Forristall (@KateCForristall) March 6, 2015
And a little more bracing vitriol, from Jeb Lund for Rolling Stone. “Go Ahead and Call Bill O’Reilly What He Is“:
A good rule of callout culture is to never target someone for the same things you do. No adulterer is more insufferable, after all, than the fire-and-brimstone minister. But when NBC anchor Brian Williams was exposed for fabricating stories of journalistic heroism, poor Bill O’Reilly just couldn’t help himself. There was Williams, that prick, garnering widespread acclaim for the kind of stories Bill had already been making up for years.
A real American doesn’t tolerate that kind of crap, and Bill O’Reilly is a real American. He has evolved into a post-fact reality, nightly defending a singular nation of fear and confabulation against all enemies foreign and domestic. He is a fiction more palpable than himself, and he can’t stop, because it’s all he has…
This constant churning of preposterous shit runs through O’Reilly’s career like discarded picnic food through geese, a steaming heap of compensatory fantasy meeting defensive wish fulfillment. Media Matters could update daily by debunking The O’Reilly Factor alone. He claimed his tabloid show Inside Edition won two Peabody Awards. He turned a comfortable childhood in the post-war suburban planned community of Levittown (with regular Florida vacations) into an Oliver Twist-tinged struggle, to complete the Horatio Alger arc corporealizing him as the American dream: “You don’t come from any lower than I came from on an economic scale.” Those who would dare wake him from it are met with violence…
The dream subsumes the rest of the world. Fact has been so incorporated into the fictive in O’Reilly’s mind that he genuinely seems incapable of distinguishing between the two. When pressed to defend his Falklands story, he cited Those Who Trespass. “That was the first book that I wrote. Soup to nuts, what happened in Buenos Aires during the Falklands war.”
It’s a novel…
The first unsettling takeaway from the book is that, once laid atop the patterns of O’Reilly’s real life, one is surprised to realize that Bill O’Reilly hasn’t actually murdered anyone yet. The second is this: that the stories Bill tells as fiction are nearly identical to the fictions he tells himself and his viewers. The Nation and Mother Jones might have caught him out on the details, but he was telling us he is a vengeful, unhinged fabulist this entire time…
***********
Apart from a little light pointing & mocking, what’s on the agenda as we start the weekend?
Cacti
My favorite O’Reilly yarn is that his corporate accountant father was a lunchpail working stiff.
BGinCHI
Speaking of the creatures in this post’s title, have you all seen this?
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/mar/06/ferguson-judge-owes-unpaid-taxes-ronald-brockmeyer
This is how things work when there is no accountability.
These fucking people.
Turgidson
Can we get a constitutional amendment passed requiring TBogg to reply to every D’Souza tweet as hilariously as possible?
Mike J
@BGinCHI: I just posted in the previous:
jl
I asked this before, but if Bill is telling the truth about the novel, which of his colleagues did he bump off? That would be news.
Baud
Seems like Al Franken covered this years ago.
BGinCHI
@Mike J: It makes Jim Crow look kind of amateurish.
jl
But I just realized that I do hope Fox News goes ahead and credentials that kind of journalism. Because then I can lecture all you squirts and impudent whippersnappers and things that I have done seen.
I have seen what nuclear weapons can do to a city! And the humans therein! I have seen the aftermath of a charges against massed muskets! The sunken road at… wherever that was. I seen that. I can lecture you all about all what I have seen, dammit.
Jacks mom
mr jacks mom & me are celebrating our 35 year wedded bliss anniversary tomorrow and he has always wanted a black lab. I found some puppies that are ready for their furever home and so I’m going to surprise him with one. I think I’ll suggest we name him Jade since its our 35th. I’m very excited and also terrified. We haven’t had a dog forever and we have two older cats.
Someone out there want to try and talk me out of doing this? We have a huge fenced yard and I’m semi-retired. He works from home but does a lot of day travel.
Gex
@BGinCHI: Sadly, I fear he’d prefer the days where you could just have an extrajudicial hanging now and then instead of having to go through the whole charade of due process.
chopper
@Mike J:
hur de dur de dur, really?
trollhattan
It would be irresponsible not to speculate.
Now, where did I put my loofah?
raven
@Jacks mom: Outside of a book a dog is man’s best, inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.
Amir Khalid
@Jacks mom:
How are your two not-young cats going to react to a puppy — boisterous, energetic, noisy, with no sense yet of certain social boundaries?
bemused
@Jacks mom:
Just dive in. The water’s fine.
The moment you bring puppy home, you’ll wonder why you ever hesitated.
Tree With Water
Kate Forristall’s rejoinder to DuhZooza is similar to mine when I first heard a politician sanctimoniously feed the “what would Jesus do?” raw meat silliness to the rubes. I forget exactly who it was I first heard do that- maybe Carter- but my immediate response was, “Forget Jesus. A better question is what would Machiavelli do?”.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Whom is Kate Forristal and howm might one subscribe to her newsletter?
beth
@Jacks mom: I’ve got a 10 year old Lab and in my opinion there’s no finer breed of dog. However if you have mobility issues or don’t think you’ll be able to get the dog the exercise it’s going to need, I’d say go for a different breed. Lab puppies are just like toddlers – you need to wear them out and let them nap or they will take it out on everything in your home. They need lots of walking, playing and supervised running around (which I learned the hard way one afternoon when she dug up nearly the entire sprinkler system in my back yard – not just the sprinkler heads but the pipes running underground too).
SatanicPanic
@BGinCHI: Oh man. It takes a lot to make me angry at the news, but that pissed me off. I want to go punch something now. damn.
trollhattan
Cash and
CarryChristie.Do most Jerseyites understand what he’s doing to them, at their considerable expense? Do they give a fig?
Jacks mom
@Amir Khalid: that has always been one of our main concerns. I’m not sure how they will react so the guy who has the puppies ( there are only two available) is bringing them to our house tomorrow for us to meet them & decide which one we want. I guess we will see what the kitties think at that time too.
Tree With Water
@beth: To think, too, that in her heart she may consider that afternoon to have been the happiest day in her life.
Baud
@Jacks mom:
LOL. Like that’ll happen here.
Congratulations.
trollhattan
@Jacks mom:
Go for it! Labs are super-smart and usually eager to please their humans, but of course smart enough to get into all kinds of trouble, too. I’d have one myself if I could figure out how to keep one out of the fish pond–the swimming urge is ENORMOUS. I don’t think there’s a more lovable pooch than a Lab.
Belafon
@trollhattan: Yeah, but environmentalists are the real polluters.
Jacks mom
@beth: I will keep that in mind. We are fairly active people (for our age ;) it might even help my husband lose that last pesky ten pounds he’s been fighting with
kc
That we know of . . .
kc
@BGinCHI: ‘
Damn, look how young his bride is.
BGinCHI
@trollhattan: His only visible skill is telling people to shut up.
It’s just like Kansas.
Human beings seem perfectly willing to hire someone at great expense to kick the shit out of them. There isn’t even a safe word.
bemused
@Jacks mom:
Arrange play dates if friends have active dogs or visits to dog park if available. They sure sleep well after wild romps with a doggy pal.
BGinCHI
@kc: His V1agra bill is probably setting him back a pretty penny.
PurpleGirl
@Jacks mom: First: Happy Anniversary! May you and Mr. Jack’s Mom have many more. Second: The Lab was a great idea. Hope he likes the doggie. Good luck with the doggie.
askew
I can’t even pretend to care about O’Reilly. If he goes, another hack will show up the next day who is even worse.
Seeing Daily Kos create diary after diary spinning the Hillary email fiasco as no big deal after they’ve spent years dragging GOP politicians through the mud for the same thing. And they are really getting desperate in finding things to cling to discredit the media. They are starting to sound like the Unskewed people from 2012.
kc
@Jacks mom:
I hate to be negative, but since you asked: Friend of mine got a Lab mom and puppy. She had a nice fenced yard, room for them to play. Not only did the mom escape multiple times (chewing through the fence, digging under it, etc), the puppy literally ate the siding off her house. Seriously, all over the exterior of the house, there were large patches of chewed-up or completely missing siding, up to puppy-snout height. Puppy also devoured innumerable shoes, books, magazines, and plants.
On the flip side, she was eventually going to have to replace the siding anyway . . . at some point.
This puppy was just cute as heck and sweet as she could be, but boy, what a handful. I don’t know if all Lab puppies are that . . . high-maintenance, but I would proceed with caution.
Tree With Water
@Jacks mom: Old cats love new things. Especially puppies. Go for it!
geg6
@trollhattan:
Tell that to my Koda. She avoids any and all water, if possible. And she won’t go anywhere near our koi pond. Because…water. Never met a Lab that didn’t like water before but now I have. But she is super smart and totally eager to please. But she never chews anything but her toys and is good about walking on a leash. Didn’t teach her any of these things, but her first mom, Jenna, must have taught her a lot. By the time we got her at 1 yr. and 3 mo., she was perfect! I only can hope Lovey and Thurston will be half as good.
Belafon
@askew: Can you show me one of those links? I know we’ve gone after Cheney for not releasing any emails.
PurpleGirl
@trollhattan: Over the years, it seems that New Jersey residents have one concern. They are convinced that they pay too much in property taxes and taxes in general. They may not consider what they get for their taxes but they are sure they pay too much. Any politician who promises to reduce taxes is loved and elected. (Doesn’t matter if the state then turns around and has to borrow billions to pay pensions or any thing, they want taxes reduced.)
trollhattan
@geg6:
An exception to every rule, I guess. Koda sounds wonderful.
My concern stems from a woman with a koi pond and a Lab, who was a very, very, very good Lab and never bothered with the pond or the fish. For years. Then one day the woman comes home to discover most of her fish in a neat line alongside the pond, where her very, very, very good Lab had placed them after fetching them from the pond. Must have been a lot of work!
Karen in GA
@Jacks mom: Since you’re doing a preliminary exploratory meeting to test the waters and fly the puppies up a flagpole to see who salutes and throw ’em against the wall to see who sticks etc., etc., I’d say let your decision depend on how that meeting goes.
Then we’ll need pics.
BillinGlendaleCA
@BGinCHI:
I guess they’ve never heard of ‘Green Balloons’.
Germy Shoemangler
I love Kate Forristall’s response to D’Souza (gesundheit!!)
I read more of her tweets and I see she re-tweeted a comment from Elon James White.
WereBear
@Jacks mom: My advice? Get them both.
They can wear each other out. If one understands something, they can tell the other. They won’t be lonely if left in the house. Walks become more fun.
Be a pack. Dogs love that.
BillinGlendaleCA
@PurpleGirl:
I’ll pay you tomorrow for a burger today.
White Trash Liberal
I’m trying to wrap my head around this HRC scandal. She uses a private e-mail that allows her to control her own archive. This is in keeping with prior SoS prior to Kerry and a law change. The 2007 federal records law states that her government e-mail archives (that which is pertinent to her role as SoS). According to her, she has complied. According to the GOP and Benghazitruthers, she has not.
NYT steps in and writes a thinly veiled hit piece that her non-government e-mail allows her to dictate the archival.
The Wurlitzer winds up and the Optics Police come out and accuse HRC of looking bad and engaging in Clintonian crap. John Cole is part of this Wurlitzer.
I’m thinking and thinking and simply cannot see where the scandal is. There is none. This is just SOP against the Clintons that started with Gennifer Flowers and ended with Whitewater.
The only potential scandal is her failure to comply with the 2007 law, not the law that existed after she vacated office. There is zero evidence of failure to comply. In fact, all evidence points to the opposite.
Why am I supposed to be clutching my pearls? That the “appearance” of impropriety, as dictated to us by the very paper of record that helped support EVERY fucking Bush era act, requires that HRC prostrate herself before the public and get ahead of something that doesn’t even exist?
Fuck that.
kc
Back to the original post, I think “call-out culture” is a “progressive” thing. It hardly applies to O’Reilly.
Though if Lund can make it stick, that’s fine, I guess, if it hastens the demise of call-out culture.
Ruckus
@White Trash Liberal:
This.
THIS.
THIS!
And I’m on record here as not being a HRC fan.
David Koch
300,000 jobs created in February.
Obamacare is a job killer!
Howard Beale IV
Speaking of goggies, TSA reminds travelers to double check their bags before closing them up, lest they accidentally pack their Chihuahua!
Baud
@kc:
So what is it called when conservatives do it? It’s not like they don’t attack people who say things they don’t like.
geg6
@White Trash Liberal:
Exactly. I’m no Hilbot, but this whole thing smells exactly like Whitewater to me. And it’s all the same suspects drumming up the “some say” bullshit. Fuck them. The Times especially. It was the Times that ran a million hit pieces on the Clintons in the 90s and which carried water for W’s minions to lie us into war. They are no better than FOX in my book. Look at the fucking columnists they have. These people call Maureen Dowd a liberal and give her prime real estate to trash actual liberals with unhinged, pre-teen level personal attacks, aiming to emasculate Democratic men and painting Democratic women as angry militant but closeted lesbians. Fuck the Times.
BillinGlendaleCA
@White Trash Liberal: As pointed out in the earlier thread on this(I believe by Gin and Tonic), this should be required reading by any reporter or commentator on this: http://www.zdnet.com/article/clintons-little-email-fuss-beyond-servers-in-the-basement/.
Baud
@BillinGlendaleCA:
Thanks for that. Interesting read. The media sucks.
Cacti
@geg6:
Maureen Dowd won a Pulitzer Prize for “political commentary” for what was essentially a year’s worth of catty remarks about the Clenis.
I have no great love for Hill and Bill, but damn. The NYT has had a giant hate-on for the Clintons for decades. I’m sure they were only too happy to carry Trey Gowdy’s water on this one.
Baud
@David Koch:
To be fair, 240,000 of those were lawyers in the Supreme Court case.
Betty Cracker
@Jacks mom: Congrats! I’ll 2nd WereBear’s suggestion to get both pups! We’ve always found dogs are happier in pairs. Sounds lik y’all are home enough to keep them from serious mischief.
trollhattan
@Howard Beale IV:
Heh! Or themselves.
Baud
@BillinGlendaleCA:
I wonder the Balloon Juice servers are in Cole’s basement. Would explain much.
JPL
@Ruckus: That’s me.
@Jacks mom: Yeah! Puppy pictures.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: The media needs to talk to their IT folk before writing or talking about IT issues. I know the IT folk aren’t pleasant to look at(looks in mirror) and may smell funny(sniffs), but it’s no excuse for shoddy reporting.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: I’m sure they are with a JRT running the whole thing.
Baud
@BillinGlendaleCA:
Correct. The media’s excuse for shoddy reporting is that they lack ethics when it come to reporting on Democrats.
fuckwit
@trollhattan: FALAFEL!!!!
OOH SOAPY BOOBS AND FALAFEL…. UNGGH NOW I NEED A TOWEL.
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/file/oreilly-suit-turns-10
shelley
Beginning of the weekend? I have no idea. Don’t know how to cope with no snow in the forcast and temps getting up into the 50’s next week? What crazy Bizzaro world is this????
Pogonip
I think O’Reilly, and Fox in general, are more full of shit than a Christmas turkey–but ever since that ridiculous gang rape story I’ve felt pretty much the same way about Rolling Stone. Fortunately I don’t need them to tell me what an asshole O’Reilly is, I’ve seen his show. He’s that loud obnoxious guy at the end of the bar who ‘s been everywhere, done everything, and won’t shut up about it.
jl
@BillinGlendaleCA: Thanks. Very useful link.
Mandalay
Bill O’Reilly’s lies were certainly more egregious and blatant than the ones spun by Brian Williams. But I have no idea why Jeb Lund is accusing O’Reilly of targeting Brian Williams. The exact opposite was true – O’Reilly went out of his way to publicly defend Williams:
It looks to me like one liar is falsely accusing another liar of attacking another liar. But given that the source is Rolling Stone, hardly surprising.
JDM
@Cacti:
O’Reilly also seems to be calling his own mother a liar when he claims to have lived in Levittown instead of Westbury, where she said they lived. Then it was claimed that he lived in an “overlapping area” of the two, which according to the map does not exist. Regardless, his statements about being anywhere even approaching poor or lower class is nonsense. My father was in a similar mid-management capacity with a large company, making similar money to O’Reilly’s father, about 60 miles away in Westchester. I could, and do, certainly (and accurately) state that I wasn’t as well off as some of the kids I went to school with (people like Evan Hunter’s kids, for instance) but we were doing fine, as good as most and better than some, and that’s just in the area. That kind of salary was pretty good money back then (O’Reilly’s claim of $35,000/yr. in 1978, if accurate, is approximately $125,000 today). Of course, I didn’t go to a private school like Bill O’Reilly did.
Really, that last: how delusional do you have to be to know full well you went to a private school and still say “You don’t come from any lower than I came from on an economic scale”?
catclub
@trollhattan: Private profits, socialized losses.
Tree With Water
Catherine Thompson at TPM.com reports:
“…Missouri Republicans this week began to break their silence about the state GOP chairman’s alleged link to state Auditor Tom Schweich’s (R) suicide…….The floodgates opened Tuesday at Schweich’s funeral service, where former U.S. Sen. John Danforth (R-MO) implicitly rejected Missouri Republican Party Chairman John Hancock’s denials about being involved in an anti-Semitic “whisper campaign.” Schweich had told people before his death that Hancock was telling people he was Jewish, when in fact he was Episcopalian..”.
I did not fathom the depths of Missouri’s bigotry. In my ignorance, I had thought this mentality had by and large gone with the wind around the time Gregory Peck starred in Gentlemen’s Agreement.
jl
@Baud: I’m still officially suspending judgement on whether this is a big deal or not. If the emails are still there, and she does not play any games with current Obama people in screening them, then I don’t see how anyone is going to care in a few months.
And I agree that the initial reporting was very shoddy, and that is giving it the benefit of the doubt. I saw some evidence of purposeful equivocation in (purposefully?) sloppy links and references to what were supposedly the regulations in effect at the time, but were not that at all.
People can complain and yell all they want about what HRC should have could have would have done if she were not a jerk. That is fair game. But the stories alleged more than that, they strongly suggested that she violated laws and regulations, and that is still far from clear. IMO, the more I read, the less sure I am that she did, but admit that I so not know for sure.
The link in the @BillinGlendaleCA: comment is very useful.
kc
@Baud:
Not be too flip, but who cares? I’m not saying they don’t ever attack one another (and when they do, I love to point and laugh), but I believe the phrase “call-out culture” is fairly specific to progressive groups, and is oppressively common in some areas. Or “spaces,” or as progressive people might say. Just do a google search.
MomSense
@Jacks mom:
We may have to petition Anne Laurie for a Sarurday morning puppy support open thread. Puppies are a ton of work but when your puppy greets you wiggling her entire little body you can’t imagine life without her.
David Koch
60 consecutive months of job growth
The stimulus failed!
Baud
@jl:
That seems eminently reasonable.
Or we could burn her as a witch before she turns us all into newts.
Reasonable people can disagree.
Jacks mom
@WereBear: I just might think about that. I’ve been worried that we will fall in love with both and be torn to choose one. We have a really great dog park and our vet offers a good obedience school. But two puppies…..I think the cats would REALLY disapprove.
BillinGlendaleCA
@jl: I’m having greater difficulty trusting anything from the media about IT. I’m wondering if all of them require assistance in turning on their Macbooks.
Howard Beale IV
@trollhattan: That’s a good story – have to file that one away.
BillinGlendaleCA
@David Koch: The market was quite unhappy with today’s job numbers, so Obama must be a failure.
Baud
@kc:
I care. By labeling a common human problem as a progressive problem, you make it easy for others to demonize the left. That’s what “political correctness” was all about also.
kc
@Mandalay:
Damn, you’re absolutely right. LOL. Did Jeb Lund not even do a simple Google search?
Poor Rolling Stone just can’t get anything right these days.
Villago Delenda Est
@BGinCHI: It’s shit like this that fuels my calling for tumbrel rides.
Because this shit has GOT to stop.
jl
@BillinGlendaleCA: You don’t have to know much about IT at all be able spot confusion in the initial reports. (Edit: do not people at NYT and CNN have IT people the reporters can talk with, or was their some reason to rush into print whatever confused babble was fed to them by their sources?)
I am not fan of HRC, and really hope she gets at least one strong opponent in the primaries. If she will really be a good candidate, a better one this time than last, such competition will be good for Democrats, as I believe it was in 2008.
But with any Democrat, and especially a Clinton, you just know there are going to be very frequent trolling attempts. I don’t see the point in people losing their shit at every single one. Supposed scandals that first break into public view with crappy news reports should be viewed with special skepticism.
kc
@Baud:
Hypocrisy indeed is a human problem.
“Call-out culture” on the other hand really is a progressive problem, in my opinion, based on my observations. If you can show me that anything similar happens to the same degree and intensity on the right, I’ll be happy to look at your examples, but you’re gonna need to have a whole lot of them.
I believe the very phrase “call-out culture” originated in progressive circles, to describe what goes on in some progressive circles.
Frankly, if right wingers went at each other with as much vitriol as progressives do, I’d be tickled pink. But I’m just not seeing that.
Denali
@Jacks mom,
My daughter had a lab – did not learn how to walk on a leash and was stronger than either of the two huskies that she initially had. He was a nice dog, but not easy to control because he was so strong and energetic. So be forewarned.
Mandalay
@BillinGlendaleCA: The author of that link clearly has technical knowledge light years ahead of any journalist in the mainstream media, but the article looked biased in favor of Clinton, especially this part where he glosses over the central issue:
B-B-B-B-But she had turned some records in, and besides both sides do it!!!
FFS, if she had simply used a .gov address there wouldn’t even be a debate over this.
kc
@Baud:
“Others,” if they are smart, will not “demonize” the left based on call-out culture; they’ll point and laugh. There’s really no need to “demonize” the left when left wingers are busy demonizing each other.
BillinGlendaleCA
I’m sure they have an IT department, but those folk aren’t cool and smell funny.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Mandalay: Sure there would, Hatch Act. In addition, she might have had a personal email account(hotmail, gmail, yahoo, etc.), and that MIGHT have had work related stuff. The Hatch Act, as noted in the piece, virtually mandates that politicians have a non-.gov account to conduct political work.
Betty Cracker
@Jacks mom: Integrating puppies into a pack with cats is easier than incorporating grown dogs, we’ve found. The pups are small enough for the cats to put them in their place, and once the pup learns the Fear of Cat, he / or she tends to carry it for life, regardless of final size. The cats can get on surfaces the dogs can’t reach without wings, so apart from mild annoyance, they should be fine. I’m envious: PUPPIES!
jl
@Mandalay: She would have to have used a government account for all of her correspondence and nothing else. Then there would be Hatch Act problems if she had sent or received any emails that might have been interpreted as political.
Complaining about both-side-do-it-ism hypocrisy if fine for people who want to complain about the personal and political flaws of HRC. i agree with a lot of those complaints.
But the issue of whether she broke any laws or regulations, or objectively did anything so far removed from precedent as to raise suspicions that she violated any laws or regulations is different.
Is it too much to ask to separate the two issues. I don’t think mushing them up together will help clarify what happened.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Jacks mom: Or the cats might thank you. two puppies could mean that they would play with each other instead of one puppy continually trying to play with the cats.
jl
@jl: My basic point is that the GOP and places like the NYT will try to smear HRC and scandal monger even if there is no big scandal at all. Why help them out by confusing the two issues?
BillinGlendaleCA
@jl: There’s also the factor(had to get Billo in there somehow) of remote access to the .gov servers for someone who travels extensively. Government IT moves very, very slowly and at great cost. So I wouldn’t expect the state of the art to be present.
I should note that I personally feel that she should have used a .gov account and ALL(including Congresscritters) government employees should use .gov accounts. Yes, that means rewriting the Hatch Act. And no, I’m not holding breath waiting for that to happen.
Cacti
@JDM:
Seems that Mother and Father O’Reilly weren’t real sticklers about the church’s teachings on birth control either.
The children in Bill’s “Irish Catholic” family consisted of him and one younger sister.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Betty Cracker:
The real danger was shown in a video someone posted earlier today of a cat and dog working together to open the kitchen door. Once they start plotting against the stupid hoomans, you are doomed.
satby
@geg6: Biggie didn’t like water either. Not all labs do.
@Jacks mom: Puppies are LOTS of work, and in rescue we get a great many 10 month old dogs where the previous owner just can’t take the stress any more. Just as the poor pup is settling down and realizing how to obey, they get dumped. It’s kind of heartbreaking, because they don’t know what they did, and because many people aren’t consistant in training them, the pups are a mess to retrain, though they usually do and faster by then. And never leave them outside even in a fenced yard completely unsupervised. They can dig pretty fast and run pretty fast too.
All that to say if you aren’t ready to take some destruction and puddles with humor, get an older dog. They’re wonderful.
Mandalay
If someone asked you whether you would condemn the stoning of adulterous women, or whether Jews are descended from pigs, you’d think that coming up with the correct answer would be easy.
Apparently not. Asim Qureshi, the British director of the Muslim rights group Cage, decided that the correct answer to both questions is “I am not a theologian”. A refreshing variation on the Republican mantra “I am not a scientist” I suppose.
Charities that had previously supported Cage are now putting them on their shit list, and deservedly so.
SiubhanDuinne
@Howard Beale IV:
“Pack your Chihuahua in your old kit bag
And smile, smile, smile….”
SiubhanDuinne
@Pogonip:
I am so not looking forward to next December 25th.
Kropadope
@SiubhanDuinne: At least not at Pogonip’s house
Pogonip
@SiubhanDuinne: Hee Hee Hee Hee Hee.
Pogonip
@Kropadope: Hee Hee etc.
Pogonip
As a veteran of multiple puppies, I agree they keep each other amused, but ours were SMALL puppies and we didn’t have to housebreak them ( at that time the custom was to put them up for sale at 6 weeks; modern breeders seem to keep their puppies much longer). 2 large, rambunctious puppies might be too much for old folks? Maybe an older, housebroken dog who likes cats?
Cervantes
@jl:
Fredericksburg.
shelley
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): I liked the video posted earlier of a lioness in a wilderness park opening up one of the car doors. The people inside squealing ‘I didn’t know they could DO that!!”
Cervantes
@Baud:
And goodness knows, it was all obvious long before that, even.
Jacks mom
Thank you all for the good advice and thoughts on the puppy. I’m not going into this lightly. It is something we’ve discussed for years. We both were full time parents and wage slaves for many years. Now that I have more time at home and my husband is working from home we’ve gotten more serious about adding a pup to the family.
If we get our new little bundle of joy/chewer of things not intended for chewing/wonderful cat toy/pain in the a$$/puppeh, I will learn to post pictures and regal ya’ll with the joy and suffering of being a dogs hooman.
No you haven’t talked me out of it ;)
Mandalay
@jl:
No, it’s not too much to ask, though I haven’t knowingly done that – my apologies if I did. Any violations of laws and regulations is not the major concern to me. Rather it is that Hillary Clinton is in sole control of deciding which of her SoS emails get handed over to the State Department – that’s just not an acceptable situation.
As others here have joked, the only way of really knowing whether she is doing the right thing would be to contact the NSA.
MomSense
Will I ever learn not to eat the pizza when it is too hot?
It was sooo good but the roof of my mouth is not happy.
Pogonip
Has anyone here ever housebroken more than one pup at a time? If so, how’d it go?
Misterpuff
OMG Tweety’s Selma panel is a cluster. Who is this black woman on my screen spewing Rush schtick and making Michelle Bernard look like a liberal? And the white guy was just as offensive with his back handed argument that voting is different than welfare fraud.
Pogonip
@Jacks mom: Maybe you could get a lion. He’ll open his own cat food.
JPL
@Misterpuff: I watched the first segment when female rush said that voter i.d. is not a problem because anyone who receives aid, should have an i.d. I then turned it off.
Corner Stone
@JPL:
That was fucking mind boggling. Why do they keep getting away with saying flying on a plane = constitutionally protected rights.
Why is no one ready for this line of BS?
Corner Stone
Joe Sestak has a good memorized stump speech.
gelfling545
@beth: An acquaintance realized she’d left her lab puppy alone too long when he ate her back porch. She soon remedied that error.
JMT
@Jacks mom:
You might want to read this article as you contemplate having 2 puppies:
I taught dog obedience for 20 years and saw some 2 pup families that did really really well (usually very experienced dog people) and some that had extra problems to deal with (usually first time owners). Then again, I saw the same thing with 1 pup families!
Remember that labs can be slow to mature: my late beloved lab, the best dog in the world, did not grow up mentally until he was six – but then he was perfect!
PurpleGirl
@fuckwit: And I need brain bleach now.
KS in MA
@BGinCHI:
That’s why Sharpton likes to talk about James Crow, Jr., Esquire.
WereBear
@Jacks mom: Actually, two puppies benefit the cats, too. The puppies play with each other instead of vainly trying to play with the cats.
WaterGirl
@WereBear: This is true. My kitty Mr. Bear is infinitely grateful that Tucker no longer pesters him to play now that he has a puppy of his own.
Although it wasn’t entirely a one way street, Mr. Bear would hide behind the curtains and jump out to scare Tucker. One time he actually did it to me, and I jumped and made the “eek!” sound.
Bartkid
>one is surprised to realize that Bill O’Reilly hasn’t actually murdered anyone yet.
No, that’s not true. George Tiller.