Been on the phone with a client, but I saw this coming up. Getting a late start, but jump to the beginning of Biden for a pretty emotional start.
Open thread
Open Thread: A Few Hours To Go – Biden LivePost + Comments (79)
by TaMara| 79 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads, Politics
Been on the phone with a client, but I saw this coming up. Getting a late start, but jump to the beginning of Biden for a pretty emotional start.
Open thread
Open Thread: A Few Hours To Go – Biden LivePost + Comments (79)
This post is in: Dolt 45, Open Threads, Politics, Trumpery
Here’s a bit of contextually good news:
President Trump’s last-ditch effort to remove civil service protections from tens of thousands of career federal employees appears to have lost steam, facing time constraints and legal hurdles as the administration prepares to leave office, officials said.
This was to have been the finishing blow in Trump’s and the GOP’s long attempted murder of the independent Federal civil service.
Instead, it collapsed in a broad spectrum display of gaffers.
The order gave agencies until Tuesday to review potentially affected jobs. But as of Monday night, no…federal agencies had delivered a list of affected employees to White House officials for review, with the exception of the Office of Personnel Management, which also rushed to reshuffle much of its staff of roughly 3,500 people into the new category.
My guess as to why? An administration whose baseline level of competence was never that high found itself embroiled in weeks of election denialism. Eyes flew off the ball. If Trump had won, this would have all sailed through sometime over the next month or so. Without that luxury of time, and with a fair amount of WH staff distracted or disengaged, and confronting a bureaucracy that had less than zero interest in complying with Trump’s command? Not a chance.
This is a big Biden deal. If the White House had managed to drive this through, and especially if they had then managed to salt the executive branch with the same kind of folks who peopled the Iraq occupation, the damage they’ve already done to functional governance would have been made damn near permanent.
Trump and his cabal have still managed to do plenty of damage in the last two and a half months, of course. But thank Dog for the small mercy that they just aren’t good enough to swing the wrecking ball as far and hard as they want.
by David Anderson| 68 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads, Politics
Under one day.
And almost anything can be slow walked by a request for written instructions and clarification….
by $8 blue check mistermix| 200 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Yep, those pardons are really gonna suck. I wonder how many will be announced and how many they’ll keep secret until Biden takes office.
I’ll bet against a blanket pardon of the insurrectionists and a self-pardon, but honestly it’s like predicting where a fly is going to land, so I don’t put much stock into my or anybody else’s predictions.
Open thread.
This post is in: Biden-Harris 2020, Open Threads, Proud to Be A Democrat
The National Mall lit up with a display of thousands of U.S. flags ahead of the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden pic.twitter.com/9EZq1TIzV7
— Reuters (@Reuters) January 19, 2021
No better start to a grand party than a drumline, unless it includes a brass band and maybe some bagpipes…
Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Prepping for A PartyPost + Comments (210)
This post is in: COVID-19 Coronavirus, Foreign Affairs
Coronavirus deaths are rising in nearly two-thirds of American states as a winter surge pushes the overall toll near 400,000. Health officials warn a new, highly contagious variant is spreading and will likely be the dominant version in the U.S. by March. https://t.co/JOjw6a7yVE
— The Associated Press (@AP) January 18, 2021
COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: Monday/Tuesday, Jan. 18-19Post + Comments (47)
by WaterGirl| 22 Comments
This post is in: On The Road, Photo Blogging
Hiya! I’ve been a clicker of these pages since, as Tim F recently put it, the proprietor was a disgruntled warblogger emerging from the dark shadows of the right. I don’t comment or make myself known much, but we rescued our little one-eyed Sanders in NYC thru this Shabeen (Calendar: July), and I read and love y’all, so here we go.
In 1980 I signed up for high-school photography class, borrowed $200 from an aunt (my first loan! a lesson in capitalism!), and purchased my first big-boy camera: a Canon AE-1 kit with a 50mm lens. It was between that and a Pentax that had a nifty leaf shutter, but felt too small for my hands. This turned out to be ironic in the bad way as the ergonomics of that fucking thing haunted me for 20 years until I got a Nikon. You see, it was an aperture priority camera and they put the aperture ring on the top right in exactly the place I rest my forefinger when I’m carrying the camera (I don’t like neckstraps, and in the days before hand straps, I would wrap a thin leather strap tightly around my hand so that I could use a loose grip as I carry at my side). There is no more heart-sinking feeling as a photographer than pushing the shutter expecting f4.5 and the corresponding quick tick-tick of 125th of a second and hearing instead “Click” … … … “Click” meaning you just lost the shot because you accidentally set the f-stop to 22 while advancing the last frame because the designers felt it important to locate that dial and the optimum finger-leverage spot in exactly the same place. One can page thru my pre-2000 contact sheets and see the dark and overexposed images and go, “yep, I remember that shot I didn’t get. Fuck that camera.”
Anywho. These are photos from the first roll that I have the negatives and thus scans of, my fifth roll overall. The first four rolls were used in class assignments, and all I have from them are some bad, faded prints that I turned in for grades.
On The Road – ChasM – Beginning at the Beginning – Rustic Canyon 1980Post + Comments (22)
Rustic Canyon is a magical garden for children. There are countless hidden routes and secret places that only the those who grow up there know. The creek which runs thru the center was the thoroughfare of fantasies for the kids of the canyon. These shots were taken in the uppermost parts of Rustic, north of the Sunset Tunnel, past the last houses of the horse-and-stable crowd, above the twisty rock section and the formidable waterfall that was no obstacle to the children of the canyon because they had been shown the way by the older ones. Now, these places are overrun with joggers and hikers from the nearby homes and beyond, but back then, only the scouts visiting Camp Josepho and us, the explorer kids from the lower canyon, treaded thru these forgotten places.