I got a leaked copy of Trump's shortlist to replace Mattis, but I need to translate it from Cyrillic first.
— Mig Greengard (@chessninja) December 20, 2018
Eh. I think he either read it & didn’t understand how obvious a rebuke it was, or was hoping he could get ahead of the narrative & sit on the letter. https://t.co/jA4rt28NG1
— Julian Sanchez (@normative) December 21, 2018
Trump "hates" the Mattis resignation letter, I'm told. But he "hates" the coverage of the letter even more as he doesn't like the suggestion that Mattis, as well as other senior members of the admin, exist as a check on his go it alone impulses.
— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) December 21, 2018
Madame Speaker, while praising Secretary Mattis in response to his resignation: "You have great leaders who have left this administration in dismay and others who have left this administration in disgrace". Wow.
— Ragnarok Lobster (@eclecticbrotha) December 20, 2018
Defense officials tell me Mattis went to the White House to discuss Syria & that he was livid after reading reports that Turkey's Defense Minister threatened to kill US-backed Kurds & put them in ditches once the US withdrew. He was incensed at this notion of betrayal of an ally
— Ryan Browne (@rabrowne75) December 21, 2018
“[Mattis] asked aides to print out 50 copies of his resignation letter and distribute them around the building.” https://t.co/7QDIsWdZTp
— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) December 21, 2018
Mattis was the ultimate representative of the marriage of the GOP establishment and Trump. The president may find his ilk annoying and recalcitrant but he’s going to want the establishment with him in the intense, very high-stakes political and legal fights to come
— Rich Lowry (@RichLowry) December 21, 2018
Went out into the internet and found someone I used to respect describing Mattis as an "Obama-friendly cuck" and little more than a "meme" in human form in light of today's news.
It's a shame.
— Jeff B. (@EsotericCD) December 20, 2018
I’ll believe that Trump is growing into the presidency when his staff stops talking about him like a toddler. https://t.co/JICnuBqdEK pic.twitter.com/ByGcl1KFnQ
— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) December 21, 2018
A former high-ranking Pentagon official told me recently that he could sleep at night despite Trump craziness–as long as Mattis was running the Defense Department. Without Mattis, he worried, protection against bad decisions might have to be officers willing to disobey orders
— Scott Stossel (@SStossel) December 20, 2018
A senior U.S. national security official to @JoshNBCNews: “Wheels are coming off.”
— Peter Alexander (@PeterAlexander) December 20, 2018
Everyone's next question should be, "And now?" https://t.co/GzgzCjaMkI
— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) December 21, 2018
Gin & Tonic
In re that first Tweet: Cyrillic is an alphabet, not a language. One does not “translate” from an alphabet, one translates from a language.
/pedant
Bemused senior
@Gin & Tonic: well, if you have a list of names….
poleaxedbyboatwork
Magic 8-Ball sez: Aleksandr Torshin.
Mike J
@Gin & Tonic: Transliterate. Михаи́л to Mikhail.
Ruckus
E mail from my Senator
Gin & Tonic
@Bemused senior: If you have a list of names then you transliterate.
oatler.
@Gin & Tonic: That’s all we need, you and your dative case. (said in Brooklyn accent)
The Lodger
@Gin & Tonic: Also, you don’t translate names. Maybe you transliterate them.
A Ghost To Most
Fuck Rich “Starbursts” Lowry with Elon Musk’s boring machine. Christ, what an asshole.
Platonailedit
Dorothy A. Winsor
I’m still so horrified over events of the last few days that I can’t pull myself together. It’s a good thing I’ll have Christmas stuff to distract me.
I sent out one short story and got it rejected within 24 hours (which is helpful, actually) but at least it was a personalized rejection. I sent it out again and went back to work on a different short story.
Platonailedit
dmsilev
@Ruckus: I got the same email from her. Hopefully the Trump shutdown will be brief.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@A Ghost To Most: Is he on the business end of Elon’s Boring Machine? That’s a good thing.
ETA: Here’s another product from the Boring Company, maybe “Starbursts” could stand in front of it.
dmsilev
America’s Most Trusted News Source:
NotMax
@Gin & Tonic
If you translate from the Quizno, is that transusbstandiation?
NotMax
@NotMax
Gah. Typo.
transubstandiation
Not enough to make a half-baked pun, had to screw up the spelling. :(
schrodingers_cat
@dmsilev: NYT?
schrodingers_cat
@Gin & Tonic: They can barely keep up with one language and one alphabet, forgive them.
Suzanne
@Platonailedit: Ted Lieu is fantastic.
dmsilev
@schrodingers_cat: The Onion.
Getting harder and harder to tell the difference, isn’t it?
schrodingers_cat
@Dorothy A. Winsor: My breakdown happened after the HRC lost.
Gin & Tonic
@NotMax: Hate when that happens.
schrodingers_cat
@dmsilev: The style seemed a little gossipy for the news section, I thought it was a long magazine article or something.
geg6
@schrodingers_cat:
LOL!
jl
@Platonailedit: ” direct conversations ”
Ted Lieu is a mess, and a loser spreading fake news. Trump is not ‘having conversations’ with Whitker, Trump is yelling at him about why Mueller isn’t shit canned yet.
Baud
@dmsilev: I trust the Onion more.
Adam L Silverman
@jl: Thoughts and prayers!
jl
@dmsilev: Finest News Source.
I like the article about how the US will deal with the Trump ex-staffer refugee crisis.
Adam L Silverman
@schrodingers_cat: The tweeter in question is Gary Kasparov’s executive assistant. I’m pretty sure she speaks Russian as well as English.
pluky
@Bemused senior: one transliterates
Baud
@Suzanne: Agree.
aliasofwestgate
Mostly lurker here, but definite Jackal. My mom’s been sick since october on and off. A total of two weeks in the hospital, and she’s now on her final covered days in the nursing home/rehab center. She’s been there for Physical Therapy for the covered 3 weeks, and now i’m pulling my hair out trying to figure out how to pay. I haven’t been working so i could take care of her. No such thing as the EMLA for me, anymore as i’ve been unemployed for years. *sighs* Her copays starting after bloody well christmas EVE, are more than she has. Also she’s not an american citizen she is a permanent resident, so her chances of medicaid acceptance to me seem pretty low. But that also puts me out of funds until she gets home from the facility. Because they’ll take everything she gets and leave a pittance. Nevermind that she has a daughter taking care of the house as her caretaker otherwise. We have literally nothing in the bank to even make this work without medicaid, and i’m kind of freaking out right now. She isn’t capable of being home right now as fall risk. Not until her therapy is complete, and she was progressing nicely. Then this shit happens. Gods. Sorry to vent. I know i need help and holidays are so close, so not everyone is going to have anything on hand. i do have paypal, and a ko-fi account if you don’t want to go through that. i could set up gofundme, but i need access to anything immediately which freaks me the hell out. Of course, they wait until the weekend before a holday to tell us that. Never mind that i’d have coped better with more than 3 days notice.
schrodingers_cat
@Adam L Silverman: I thought it was some media person, I had never heard of. Even so Gin and Tonic’s point stands.
dmsilev
@Baud: Very sensible of you.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Funnier too!
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Adam L Silverman: If Trump thinks the prosecutors are making him “look bad”, wait until 1/3/2019…there’s the House.
Adam L Silverman
@aliasofwestgate: First off welcome. Secondly, I’m very sorry to read about your mother; we’ll keep good thoughts. Third, I strongly recommend you email Dave Anderson using the contact a front pager tool on the top right of the page. He is the health insurance guru and may have some ideas of how you can tap into resources to get your mother the help she needs.
poleaxedbyboatwork
Prior to meeting the love of our life and living happily ever after, we’ve all experienced a messy break-up with a partner before, right? During the this-is-all-going-to-hell stage but a little before the fuck-it-I’m-out-stage, you know how sometimes people will argue passionately about pointless shit that doesn’t really matter? As a proxy for ignoring what does?
That’s how the agon over “wall” is shaping up, it seems to me. Forget rampant criminality. Forget stealing an election with the help of a foreign power. Forget inheriting an improved economy and (re)fucking it up again in record time since the last Republican president shit the bed.
No, failure to deliver on
TheWall might just be the cardinal excuse and blame vehicle in certain stubborn quarters that substitutes for every other transparent manifold failure of Trumpian misgovernance.An excuse out for GOP pols. A blame out for a rabid base. An emboldening out for a too-oft feckless press.
If that’s what it takes, any port inna storm, I guess. It’s just weird how, only now that loser-stink is starting to reek offa Preznit Deals and failure is his only friend, does this moribund idiotic issue get revived in full-throated measure.
(“Wall” is “lifeboat” for the likes of Ann Coulter, her and gorgons like her’s way a getting shed of Trump’s loserdom w/o taking responsibility for alla that winning!)
imo
Juice Box
@aliasofwestgate: if she’s a permanent resident, she should be eligible for Medicaid, although Medicaid eligibility varies a bit from state to state. The nursing home itself will have at least one employee dedicated to helping you sort that out, it’s their bread and butter. Ask them.
I had a couple of non-citizen, elderly patients on MediCal without Medicare because they had no SS/Medicare eligibility, but I live in the good state.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Adam L Silverman: Dave’s good, but he’s no Dick Mayhew.
Adam L Silverman
@schrodingers_cat: I’m not arguing that he is wrong or that she should have used transliterate instead of translate. For all we know autocorrect changed it. But given who she works for, I’m pretty sure she speaks at least two languages.
Adam L Silverman
@?BillinGlendaleCA: No doubt.
zhena gogolia
@Adam L Silverman:
It’s quite possible to be able to speak English and Russian and yet not know the difference between translation and transliteration.
raven
@zhena gogolia: or care
Ruckus
@dmsilev:
I’m doubting that it will be brief.
Individual 1 is a massively immature lunatic. Right now he’s about at the stomping his little feets and jutting out his lower lip point of a over indulged 4yr old. IOW he’s pouting till he gets what he wants or until someone explains it to him in small enough words/short enough sentences and then sends him to his room without dinner. Unfortunately he’s a 4 yr old in an old mans body and he has far more power than any 4 yr old has ever had, and with no parents.
This was never going to end well. He’s too whatever to make anything work, his political party is as fucking nuts as he is which means they aren’t going to impeach him let alone find him guilty of anything. We are stuck till the whole thing blows up or he dies of natural causes, or the republicans wake the hell up and decide that their president has to go. I’m not holding my breath that anything good can come in the next 2 years. I’m hoping to be way, way, way wrong.
Adam L Silverman
I think the President has finally provided clear guidance to both chambers of Congress about what he thinks they need to do in regard to policy:
raven
@Ruckus: Wait till some of the crack TSA folk start gumming up “business” travel.
hueyplong
I sure hope Trump doesn’t get a royalty every time the words “lashes out” and “rages” appear in headlines.
These things may forever be associated with him.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@raven: This is Balloon Juice, pendants gotta pendant.
Juice Box
I was watching he news from France this afternoon. The did a segment on the Mattis resignation. Sigh.
They also charmed me with a fluff piece at the end about Santa who they billed as “more famous than the Pope, Barack Obama, or the President of the Republic.”
Adam L Silverman
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Very true. It’s a shame when Mayhew moved on. Anderson’s trying real hard, but it’s just not the same.//
Adam L Silverman
@zhena gogolia: As soon as someone both translates and transliterates this for me, I’ll provide an appropriate reply.//
Gin & Tonic
@raven: Different people care about different things.
Schlemazel
went out for ramen for dinner tonight. Coming home we drive through a VERY ritzy neighborhood in Minneapolis
Lake of the Isles.. These are multi million dollar old school mansions.
One of the houses very near the google maps location (I couldn’t get the exact house because of the trees) had very interesting CHristmas lights. It was a simple display in red, white & blue lights with a seasonal message I think we can all agree with:
jl
@Adam L Silverman: Those were the days, when this miserable lefty almost top 10,000 blog had its very own oligarch.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Adam L Silverman: Probably less “hookers and blow”.
Baud
@Schlemazel: He’s the reason for the treason.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Schlemazel: Obviously, these folk think “Happy Holidays” is an appropriate greeting this time of year.
(Red, White, and Blue lights…they should be Red and Green.)
dmsilev
@Ruckus: You make a fair point, but I would note that Trump is also a sniveling coward. If the Senate passes a wall-less CR and Paul Ryan sighs and brings it up for a House vote, I doubt Trump will veto it. He’ll find some way to convince himself that he really did win.
If it does grind out through the holidays, the first thing Speaker Pelosi is going to do is move a House version of the clean CR that the Senate passed. I suppose it’s possible that the Senate would vote down its own measure if it came back with Democratic-lady-Speaker cooties attached, but I’m guessing not.
FelonyGovt
@poleaxedbyboatwork: You may be right, but it seems like every time he pushes Republicans to what seems like the brink, they furrow their brows, suck it up and keep on pretending the Emperor is wearing a beautiful outfit. I don’t know what it will take. Maybe they really are terrified about Mattis leaving.
schrodingers_cat
@Adam L Silverman: She probably does, I am not disagreeing.
Adam L Silverman
@raven: The TSA officers are going to feed on air travelers?
dmsilev
@?BillinGlendaleCA: In years and generations to come, Trump Impeachment Day will be celebrated around the world. Happy Holiday!
A Ghost To Most
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
Fishing?
Baud
@dmsilev: Can’t wait for the sales!
satby
@Adam L Silverman: that boy sure knows how to make friends and influence people doesn’t he? More than Mattis are going to be saying “fuck this shit” and leaving.
A Ghost To Most
@jl: And our very own Russian troll.
schrodingers_cat
@aliasofwestgate: GC holders are eligible if they have been permanent residents for 5 years or more. The requirements are less stringent for children and people over 65 IIRC.
ETA: Your state should have a website where you can answer a bunch of questions to figure out whether she is eligible. I am sure there is a number to call as well.
Welcome and good luck! I hope your mom feels better soon.
Adam L Silverman
@jl: Actually that’s Alain. You can tell by the funny first name.//
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Adam L Silverman: Since they’re not being paid, they gotta eat something.
Adam L Silverman
@satby: Yep.
jl
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Being gummed to death by ravenous TSA employees is a ghastly death.
Ruckus
@raven:
How can the TSA fuck up travel any worse?
My favorite story is a the Columbus OH airport, I check my big bag, get in line, bag goes through the X ray and I go through the metal detector. The fucking TooStupidAssholes were having a training session so one of the bright ones sticks a semi auto pistol in the handle of my bag. I started to reach in to pick my bag up and came within about an inch of the gun. I saw it and said “What the Fuck!” and one of the geniuses picks it up and laughs. Oh and by the way walking down the hall, going out of the terminal, so looking directly at me, about 15 feet away are two armed Columbus cops. Had I picked up or touched that gun………..
Yeah TSA and me go way back. Ass munches, every fucking one.
poleaxedbyboatwork
@FelonyGovt: Well, your assessment is certainly correct, and it’s been exasperating waiting for that tipping point. Irrespective of anything I said, think you’ve rung the right bell on Mattis.
Yertle was more’n happy to keep jamming soulless Federalist-society Ayn-Rand-loving objectivist dickheads onto the courts otherwise (and *he* may still be fine with the present sitch). But Mattis leaving and Trump showing daily how bugnuts fucking unstable he is (garishly complementing his laziness and invincible stupidity) mighta woke a coupla sleeping dogs on the gooper porch.
debbie
@Gin & Tonic:
Big words aside, you do need an alphabet to get that language down on paper, no?
Platonailedit
dmsilev
@Baud: Isn’t that typical? The true meaning of Impeachment Day is lost among all the commercial hype.
Baud
@jl:
The Airport
Whatever you do, don’t take off your shoes.
Adam L Silverman
Very stable genius!
I'll be Frank
@Schlemazel: A counter-offensive in the “War on Christmas” has been spotted
dmsilev
@Adam L Silverman: We need to protect the boarder (sic) with an elite Roadrunner Force.
Adam L Silverman
@FelonyGovt: @poleaxedbyboatwork: They are both terrified of Mattis leaving and, at the same time, even more terrified of the President’s tweets.
Ken
Is Drezner keeping a running counter with these?
jl
@Baud: Your plan to get impeached and tossed out of office over too many fart jokes is looking pretty far fetched now. Or, are you planning on running on Dem ticket now?
hilts
@dmsilev:
i’m more interested in Trump Conviction Day.
Baud
@jl:
No such thing.
Isn’t everybody?
lollipopguild
@jl: President Baud-“The country that farts together stays together.”
Platonailedit
Adam L Silverman
@Ken: He is.
SRW1
@Adam L Silverman:
Trump needs a real experienced fixer for the DoJ. What’s Michael Cohen up to these days?
Adam L Silverman
@SRW1: He is preparing to spend the next three years in Federal prison.
afanasia
@Schlemazel: God bless them, every one.
Ruckus
@dmsilev:
My point is more than just this one thing. It’s one thing after another and it gets worse and worse.
Soapbox out.
We have a not bad country. Or had a couple of years ago. It wasn’t perfect for sure but not all that bad for a lot of people, still not anywhere good enough for too many. But right now? The economy is not yet tanking but it is thinking seriously about it. Think about how long it took GWB to fuck up the economy. We are imprisoning people asking for asylum. We are killing their children. We are pulling out of a war that we started, leaving a lot of people who will end up being killed needlessly. We are on the brink of shutting down the federal government over a moron’s pout about spending a pretty large chunk of money for something that is 1000000% bullshit. We have half of our political infrastructure that is fucking crazy, and almost half the country has been propagandized right into crazy bullshit town. We can’t seem to hold fair elections for all of our citizens. This is the last 50-60 yrs coming to bite us in the ass.
Show me a road that cleans it up before it gets a lot worse. I’d love to see it but I don’t. It’s not that we can’t do it, the process is entirely possible, it’s the timing and the crazy that has control of the timing.
I hate to be a downer here but the reality is that reasonable people are not in a position to actually fix things. Yes we can and I’m sure will do a lot with control of the house, but that’s not really enough to make any substantial changes in the next 2 yrs.
The goal of the republican party for most of my life has been to destroy the government and electing, fairly or not, a massively broken human as the head of government and then supporting him no matter what is a pretty good way to do that.
Platonailedit
It’s now what 3 times that rethugs have done govt shutdown while still having both houses majority? And the fucking media never gave them shit for their thuggery and traitorous deeds.
David Anderson
@aliasofwestgate: what state?
If she is a long term immigrant she may qualify for Medicaid. And Medicaid is the payer of last resort so they will make your mom spend down assets
poleaxedbyboatwork
@Adam L Silverman: Ya.
Much like their shabby shameless governance, their party-over-country cowardice is acute, chronic and disproportionally represented.
Gin & Tonic
@debbie: Yes, you do. But the Cyrillic alphabet (technically alphabets) is used by a pretty large number of languages, all the way from central Europe to east Asia. For some, it is natural development as they came from proto-Slavic roots; for others, the use of that alphabet is the result of Russian imperialism. There are Russian-speakers, even some fairly educated and enlightened ones, who use “Russian” and “Cyrillic” as if they were more or less interchangeable (I don’t know if Mig Greengard is among them.) But they’re not.
So, “big words aside” – a list of names written in the Cyrillic alphabet could be a list of Russians, or it could be a list of Bulgarians or Serbians. Without more context you might not know (a native speaker is more likely to know common name forms, etc. but that’s beside the point) and you wouldn’t translate that list of names, you’d transliterate it.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@jl: This is true jl, this is why they should be paid and the government not be shut down.
lollipopguild
@Ruckus: I do not see much changing until fox news is gone.
Ken
@Adam L Silverman: Thanks. I thought it was an obvious thing to do, but since I don’t twitter and have the site blocked, all I see is the part quoted for Balloon Juice.
Let’s see, this is about Trump’s 710th
eternityday in office – is Drezner’s counter larger than that?Frankensteinbeck
@Platonailedit:
Feature, not bug.
randy khan
@dmsilev:
If they pass the Senate bill unchanged, the Senate doesn’t get to vote again – it gets sent to the President. And if there isn’t a resolution, I can see her sending it and daring him to veto it. (Not out loud, but metaphorically.)
SRW1
@Adam L Silverman:
Shame how ‘Merica wastes a true talent.
Ken
@randy khan: I think the Senate CR, and any other unpassed legislation, ceases to exist when this Congress ends. Even if the new House passes the exact text of the Senate CR now on the table, the Senate will have to vote again.
Gin & Tonic
@Ken: No. He’s “only” up to 591 as of about 10 minutes ago.
Adam L Silverman
@Ken: I don’t know how he’s doing it. I think it is more a running tally every time he does one of those tweets. I don’t pay that much attention to him.
Adam L Silverman
@randy khan: If they don’t pass anything before the new Congress is sworn in at the beginning of January, the Senate bill that was passed on Wednesday is dead. Both chambers will have to start all over. On the House side this will be easy. Pelosi will have a clean CR ready to go as soon as she’s handed the gavel. The Senate is what will be the problem.
Mary G
@Platonailedit: They also didn’t renew the tax on coal companies that pays for the black lung treatment that can cost up to $22,000 a month, so miners are in danger of dying.
SRW1
@Ken:
I think that is correct. However Pelosi getting the bill passed in the House would force the Senate to vote done a bill they only a few weeks ago passed with a large majority. Would be hilarious if it weren’t so seriously effed up.
Ruckus
@lollipopguild:
That’s one of the issues of course but even with faux we can actually have a decent country. CA isn’t all that bad and it has issues and we have faux. Every place has issues, unless it doesn’t have humans. Hell even the penguin hangouts have issues and there are no humans there. Yes faux is part of the reason we are where we are now but they are only a part of it and the republicans started down this road long before faux existed. What is a big problem is that there is no big news org doing anything really different, it’s almost all just he said/he said, we tell you something, it’s for you to decide if it’s true or not. Saw a tweet that said something like this, “If one person says it raining and another says it isn’t, it’s not your job to present both of them, it’s your job to look out the window and see if water is falling out of the sky.”
Yarrow
@aliasofwestgate: So sorry to hear of all your challenges. Is there a way you could take care of your mom at home for the next week until January 1? Health benefits should start over again in the new calendar year and she might have more coverage then. Home health may also be able to help cover for the interim or possibly a caregiver. Sending you good thoughts. I know how very difficult it is.
Gravenstone
@?BillinGlendaleCA: You just hadda go the full Corner Stone, didn’t you?
FRANK MCCORMICK
@Gin & Tonic:
OK. Transliterate then.
VOR
@Ruckus: Couple years ago I was going through the Columbus airport. They had a kiosk for mailing home anything which wouldn’t pass through TSA. But the kiosk was AFTER the TSA checkpoint, not before, making it completely useless.
Ken
@Gin & Tonic: Well, I suppose we have to allow for golf vacations and other days where he’s getting his way so doesn’t throw a tantrum.
Ruckus
@VOR:
I don’t think that is unique to Columbus.
I once watched a Marine in dress uniform at LAX have to continue to be told to take something off, go through, take something off, go through…….. as he got more and more pissed off. That was the day I had a small Swiss army knife in my bag that I had forgotten to take out. Sailed right on through, Marine still taking off medals, belt….. I wondered if they got him down to his shorts before they let him through.
J R in WV
@hilts:
Yea, TWO new holidays, Impeachment Day and Conviction Day !!!
J R in WV
@Mary G:
This is true, but it’s also worse than that. Now underground coal mines are mining thinner seams, and so the machinery hits silica-rich sandstone more often, so the dust now includes powder that causes silicosis along with black lung causing coal dust.
So doctors working for the coal companies are able to fraudulently diagnose coal miners with lung diseases other than black lung, so they aren’t eligible for payment from the black lung fund without costly and time consuming legal fights.
And if the miner dies from his black lung before his benefits award happens, that’s a feature, not a bug!!!
We’ve known for a century about high-silica dust causing death by silicosis, look up the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel Disaster, they don’t even know how many were killed in that project because the company made them turn off the water spray on the drills because drilling went faster without that spray, which was intended to wash the poisonous dust from the air.
Many of the miners working on the tunnel were black guys, and no one cared enough to even write their names down as they died and were buried in the fill. Union Carbide and it’s hired minions of that day. The purpose of the tunnel was a hydroelectric power plant for a smelter down the river.