Has to be:
Photo courtesy of my brother, somewhere in California’s Central Valley.
Meanwhile, I’m with Charles Pierce: the FSM does not love me enough to reinsert Mittens into the 2016 campaign.
Have at it: alternate captions in the comments.
This post is in: Clown Shoes
Has to be:
Photo courtesy of my brother, somewhere in California’s Central Valley.
Meanwhile, I’m with Charles Pierce: the FSM does not love me enough to reinsert Mittens into the 2016 campaign.
Have at it: alternate captions in the comments.
Comments are closed.
gogol's wife
Too damn cute to be Repubs.
kindness
Had to click the pic to see what critter that was. Raccoons, eh? Looks like a Modesto Ash tree too. Is that where your brother lives?
MomSense
It looks like they just booby trapped a house and are now waiting outside to see what happens to the humans.
jl
I see only 6 raccoons.
Edit: in CA, raccooons, skunks squirrels and other critters are running all over the place. Looking for water I suppose. I don’t remember seeing so many varmints skittering around city and suburban streets before. But, I haven’t seen a posse of 17 raccoons yet, that would give me pause, as does the GOP presidential field.
Tim F.
The only person who can take down Donald Trump is someone like Al Franken or the late Ann Richards. You need balls, charisma and a good sense of humor to counter a shameless but appealing* clown. The last thing Donald Trump should fear is a stiff, no-charisma jackass the base hates like Mitt Romney. Needless to say Jeb is fucked.
(*) No accounting for taste, obvs, but polls are polls.
TG Chicago
I figured Mitt had given up on the idea of ever running again when he did that charity boxing match.
I mean, I actually don’t think doing a charity boxing match is disqualifying for a presidential candidate, but it’s not terribly dignified.
Rick Taylor
Given Jeb’s mis-steps, I’ve wondered more than once if Mitt could do any worse.
TG Chicago
@jl:
THERE!
ARE!
FOUR!
RACCOONS!
/Picard
beltane
@TG Chicago: If the GOP establishment is looking to take down Trump, they may feel that dignified is not the way to go.
bystander
Which one is Carly Fiorina?
Keith P.
LEPRECHAUN!!!!
jl
@Tim F.: For the general, I think a unwavering focus on issues, and straightforward analysis of how goofy Trumps non-proposals really are will work well with the general voting population. So someone like Sanders would do well, and HRC too, if she can discipline herself. I think you need some really great political talents, like those of Bill Clinton or Obama to try any entertainment or snark response to Trump, and neither Sanders nor HRC has them. So, just stick to issues best for those two.
Ryan
@TG Chicago: Awesome recall!
jl
@TG Chicago: Oh wait, now I see only five. What happened to the other pair of eyes I thought I saw? I don’t like raccoons, ever since I have had to get semi up close and personal, banging a pan and yelling to get the insolent little critters out of my back yard.
OzarkHillbilly
AAAAAAHHHHHHHHGGGGGGGG!!!!!! HILLARY IS COMINNNNNGGGG!!!!
Punchy
The newest in hybrid botany! Trees that grow reflectors! Never drive drunk into your neighbors sapling again!
Patricia Kayden
Cats have too much dignity to be involved in politics, you silly human!!
Patricia Kayden
@jl: Try having a mother raccoon and her infants in your attic. Fun times (and expensive to get them out).
Jeffro
Mitt should wait his turn…he can run again in 2020 or 2024. He’s Mormon, it’s not like his liver or lungs are going to give out on him before he’s 90.
Wait ’em out Mitt…rope-a-dope! Rope-a-dope!
boatboy_srq
@jl: There. Are. Four. Lights.
ETA: DRAT YOU TG Chicago!
RaflW
@Tim F.:
Walker doesn’t seem to be covering himself in glory either.
Amir Khalid
@jl:
Six? I count only five pairs of eyes.
@bystander:
Haven’t you heard? She’s being bumped up to the
grownups’big kids’ table.boatboy_srq
@Tim F.:
I notice that even Dough to Rise has kinda given up on that one.
boatboy_srq
@RaflW: Walker is covering himself with something… but from here it smells like manure.
jl
@Amir Khalid: One of them jumped off in between the first and second time I looked. Get stick and search around your computer. That’s what I’m gonna do.
You probably don’t understand them damn raccoons there in Malaysia, and think they are cute or something. Let me tell you, they combine all the worst characteristics of the Sundra flying lemur, the binturong, and the giant rat of Sumatra(!).
Brachiator
Meanwhile, anti-Obama idiocy moves at the speed of light.
This kind of crap obviously is not the result of any misunderstanding, but deliberate race-bating.
http://jezebel.com/even-snopes-is-exasperated-with-dumb-mt-mckinley-denal-1728087228
TG Chicago
@boatboy_srq: Ha! I wouldn’t have guessed that the picture would inspire someone else to think of that scene.
Paul in KY
@jl: We have a ravine between 2 nice neighborhoods & at night the raccoons emanate up out of there like Morgoth’s hordes leaving Angband.
Maybe not as much, but certainly more than 17.
Gindy51
Good grief, I don’t have that many raccoons and I live on 22.6 acres in Indiana next to gobs of forest and fallow fields.
beltane
@Brachiator: Geez, I always thought Denali meant “Whitey Sucks” in the African language. I wuz wrong all these years.
jl
‘Denali’ means ‘black power’ in ‘Kenyan’??? What language is ‘Kenyan’?
Nobody is going to beat Trump with that audience. Trump got to them first and dumbsplained the world to them. It’s over. The other GOpers have to fight over the rest of the GOP and hope that is enough.
Paul in KY
@OzarkHillbilly: Saw a pic today (sent by wingnut military ex-comrade) with Hillary’s face morphed on to Trumps rest-of-head. Was an upgrade (for him).
The caption was some stupid joke about a $600 haircut.
Jeffro
@Brachiator: I can’t even fathom someone being dumb enough to think “Denali” has African origins of any kind, much less translating into “black power”
I can, however, picture Obama dryly delivering that line at the next DC Correspondents’ dinner or whatever it’s called…
Amir Khalid
@boatboy_srq:
Right to Rise was arguing in the threads yesterday that Jeb has got some Sekrit Soopa Skandal that he’s going to bring down the Donald with. Everyone had to remind him that it’s been 30-plus years since such a thing was even possible.
schrodinger's cat
@Brachiator: May be they have confused Denali, with Denkali, the home of the ghost who walks.
Mike E
@TG Chicago: WIN
benw
@beltane: I figured Denali was the Koyukon word meaning, “it’s a mountain, stupid white man.” Just like most indigenous names that white settlers adopted are probably a variant of “it’s an X, stupid white man” where X is river, hill, island, etc.
Also, there’s more brain power in that tree than there will be at the next R “debate.”
catclub
@TG Chicago: I thought that the power behind the massive eruption of hate, when Romney said he was considering 2016, was the Jeb Bush clan, but later I learned it was probably Fox news.
Given that, if Fox decides Trump needs to be stopped ( I am not convinced Roger Ailes does think this, yet), they could change the minds of all the people who hated the idea this past January.
sukabi
@Amir Khalid: the other one is driving the getaway truck.
Mike E
Oh, and I called that shit re:Mitt…vultures gotta circle.
jl
@Amir Khalid:
Trumps alleged response to charges that he cheats at golf:
“Ahh, the guys I play with cheat all the time,” Trump allegedly told Mulvoy. “I have to cheat just to keep up with them.”
WaPo Has The Ultimate Trump Expose: He Cheats At Golf … A Lot
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/donald-trump-cheats-golr
Maybe that is Jeb?’s big scandal.
Anoniminous
@jl:
“Kenyan” is the language spoken in Wingnutistan by people too fucking stupid to use Google to wander over to Wikipedia.
Paul in KY
@Jeffro: I’d like to see him come up to podium, look around, smile & raise fist & say ‘Denali, brothers’.
NonyNony
@boatboy_srq:
Naw – he’s still around. He usually picks one Open Thread to politely post his “Jeb! has a plan/Trump has no chance” post along with its follow-ups.
I still think he’s one of the regulars just messing around, but if anyone was actually being paid to troll this website, Right To Rise is the most likely candidate. His posts are so pro forma, and he doesn’t really get angry about the flak he gets from them. He just keeps right on to his talking points without much variation. He really does feel like some poor schlub who doesn’t really believe what he’s writing but for some reason has to post it anyway (which could mean he’s paid, or could mean that he’s just goofing around).
Belafon
@benw: I can’t link to the pages from work, but the Far Side comic where the Lone Ranger finds out what Kemosabe really means fits.
Belafon
@catclub:
You mean like how Megyn Kelly and the rest of Fox was able to get most of the viewers to defend her from Trump?
Fox has lost control of the monster they’ve created.
donnah
Funny story about raccoons: My sister-in-law worked as a building inspector and often had to check some questionable houses. One afternoon, she pulled into the driveway of an abandoned house, and as she got out of the car, she saw the curtains being pulled back.
She was rather terrified when she opened the front door and found a big family of raccoons. They had nested in the furniture and had taken the place over.
I could just imagine the raccoon who peeked out the curtain, calling over its shoulder, “Ma, company’s here! Put some coffee on!”
OzarkHillbilly
@Gindy51: Last year I trapped 7 coons in 8 nights.
Jeffro
@Paul in KY: That’s perfect.
It’s funny how they do it to themselves…just think of all the wingnuts whose Alaskan cruises & tours are now going to be ruined due to their own low-info hater brains. They’ll look at that beautiful mountain and cringe outside (and shrivel just a little bit more inside)
Robert Sneddon
@benw: Pratchett reckoned a lot of mountains and such were actually called “Your Finger, You Fool” in the local dialect.
Myself I reckon “Denali” means “Call that a mountain?” in Hawaiian.
Amir Khalid
@jl:
Yep, that’ll bring the Donald down all right.
Seriously, it won’t work that way. The Trumpish tendency’s takeaway will be that a guy who defends against cheaters by cheating himself — in other words, by giving as good as he gets — is just the man for the presidency.
Peale
As for me, I’ve always wanted to go on a safari to Denali to see the elk and the cheetahs duke it out.
TerryC
Sadly, around here – we live in the country – when we see babies in a tree near the house it often means their mother has died or abandoned them, and the young ones are probably doomed. We’ve experienced this more than a dozen times. Generally the babies are a perfect cross spectrum from friendly through tame-ish to curious and terrified.
Calouste
@jl: I must say that one thing I am kind of impressed with by Trump, it that it seems to be impossible to put him on the defense. He just brushes things off (“everyone does it” seems to be one construct he has used a few times), or blasts it right back. He doesn’t show shame about what he has done. Whatever “scandal” Bush3 is going to attack Trump with is not going to have much of an effect.
japa21
My son is based at Fort Leonard Woods (also know as “Fort Lost in the Woods”) in MO and lives off basein a very wooded area. He also raises chickens for the eggs and has built a very large and sturdy coop for them. Nonetheless, he also has live traps set up and seldom a night goes by that he doesn’t trap a racoon or opossum.
He generally takes them far away and releases, although that may change during hunting season when the winter coats come in and the pelts get to have some value.
Brachiator
@Calouste:
True. The other GOP blockheads keep trying to treat Trump like a politician, thinking that stuff that would hurt a traditional candidate will make him back off and back down.
I’m sure that Trump has a weakness. He is too thin skinned and too arrogant not to have a vulnerability. But it sure is fun watching the GOP fall all over themselves struggling to find a way to neutralize him.
jl
@Robert Sneddon: Hey, wait a minute, Denali is still the tallest mountain from base to peak on land, I think 20,000 feet rise you can look at with your eyes. Which is a stupendous sight.
But usually clouded up, so teabaggers won’t have a chance to see it and have Obama wreck their Alaskan vacations.
Roger Moore
@jl:
How carefully have you been looking? I’ve been out in the pre-dawn regularly for years, and I haven’t seen a big increase in the number of varmints. There may be a few more deer and coyotes, but I haven’t seen an obvious uptick in raccoons, possums, skunks, squirrels, rabbits, or any other smaller varmints.
jl
@Amir Khalid: @Calouste: Trump will just say, in a cruder way, that the resentment of pathetic losers (LOSERS!!) is a sad spectacle to witness.
jl
@Roger Moore: I guess depends on where you live. I see them all the time after dusk running around the street of San Francisco, much more than before the drought.
Edit: and varmint roadkill in the morning is much more common sight now.
Paul in KY
@Jeffro: Couldn’t happen to a nicer group of people!
Paul in KY
@TerryC: They love catfood! Some of the hordes will drop by around 2330 & the cats just sit back & let em go at it. Usually I have put catfood back in, but I forgets sometime.
benw
@Belafon: Figures I’d lift a joke from Larsen.
@Robert Sneddon: Dammit, and Pratchett, too!
Oh well, steal from the best.
Paul in KY
@Calouste: They are known for making shit up, so they are feverishly brainstorming the most outlandish/repulsive stuff they can think of:
‘OK, OK, how about…he fathered a kid with his illegal alien maid & then he had her abort the kid & got mad at her & had her unknowingly eat the dead fetus…’
Crazy shit like that.
Brachiator
@schrodinger’s cat:
Hah. The weird thing, according to Snopes, is that Obama just confirmed (or inflamed) what was a long standing state issue. Apparently the state of Alaska had been using the name Denali for the mountain since 1975.
And I had to think about it for a bit, but I believe you make a cool reference to The Phantom.
Robert Sneddon
@jl: Yes, but is Mt. Denali on fire? Nope. Real mountains erupt, spit out lava and generally do stuff. Rocks just sit there. It’s a rock. Meh.
Cckids
@Amir Khalid:
This. Trump defended his bankruptcies by blaming the banksters and “predatory lending”. As though he was subject to the same shit that thousands of lower income homeowners got during the Great Bubble.
The sheer gall of the arse is never ending.
Tom Levenson
@kindness: Nah. Close to Sacto.
daverave
I live right in Sactown and the racoons are completely out of control. They come up from the rivers at night through the sewers (combined sewer and stormwater, yuck!) and terrorize pets while searching out food and clean water for some reason. I’ve had to cover my birdbath with chicken wire at night. Also, too, they decided several years ago that the area behind my garage would be their permanent latrine. I tried all of the standard repellents for many months until I finally covered the ground with two layers of heavy duty chicken wire which they apparently do not like to walk on. Still it took many months to drive them off while they still occasionally crapped on the wire.
Note that dried racoon shit carries some nasty bacteria that can cause a painful respiratory disease (and possibly death?) so it’s pretty imperative to get them off your property if they’ve gotten comfortable around your house.
JCJ
@OzarkHillbilly:
Wait, seven different raccoons, or the same one over and over?
low-tech cyclist
Tom, you disappoint me!
Couldn’t you have found a good still-life of a box of rocks?
Geoduck
Despite his utterly lackluster and foot-in-mouth performance so far, I’d still bet on Jeb! finally being the GOP nominee anyway.
hope
My sister in law dealt with a mother and kits by removing the kits and then peeing on a couple boards/shingles and placing them about. Done and dusted